Walk with me. That way we can talk and I don’t have to yell “Oyez, oyez, oyez!” like the town criers of yore, to get your attention for today’s public announcements. Oyez means “hear me,” (still used in French, originally Anglo-Norman.)I have always wondered if the German expression Oh Je – oh no! – is a derivative, since the news were mostly bad and the expression is one of concern, regret, or surprise….but I digress.
Let’s walk the just re-opened Oak Island Loop, at its most glorious colors this time of year, on a sunny and warm day, too warm for April, really. Trudge across the large meadows and turn a corner into the oak woods – unclear who was more startled, the calves hanging out in the shade or this hiker. But guess who ran!
Vultures hovering close, ever hopeful. Not this day, my friends, not yet!
Golden sheen wherever you look. The unfurling oak leaves green-gold, the poplar leaves not yet covered with dust reflecting sunlight like golden dots, the buttercups not far behind.
Colors in general more on the pastel side, soft pink hawthorne, nettles, the blues of the camassia everywhere, and white, tinged occasionally with pink in the fruit blossoms and emerging white hawthorne.
I had been thinking about colors, having wasted 90 minutes of my precious life time on an inane movie with nothing to show for but admiration for the colorist who designed costumes and backgrounds to sheer perfection. The Room Next Door was on my list for the mere fact that I am a sucker for Tilda Swinton and director Pedro Almodóvar‘s work. I don’t know what they were thinking here. Stilted dialogue, a plot too hard to believe, a display of photogenic suicide with nary a bit of pain in sight.
Narcissistic woman who has managed to drive everyone from her life, is now facing cancer death in loneliness. Neither estranged daughter nor distant friends answer her request not to die alone when taking her own life. Forgotten friend from long ago, who makes a living writing about her fear of death, inexplicably yields to the request for companionship even though both know it endangers her for criminal aiding and abetting. Rent a mansion in upstate NY (costing enough to cover the price of a first class flight to Switzerland, where assisted suicide for any reason is legal, is my bet.) Patient takes her own life, friend barely escapes legal trouble, daughter (also played by Swinton in a ridiculous wig) reappears to find no real answers.
In any case, the ethics of suicide are never discussed, the pragmatics not based in reality, and the question of succumbing to requests that are entirely selfish, not once tackled. Political questions are reduced to the plight of personal trainers not allowed to touch clients any longer, or whiney ex-lovers hinting at their disgust for climate change. Almodóvar, what has got into you? In any case, not recommended, but for the colors which rule in setting up space and personalities.
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Back to the public proclamations of your personal town crier. On Wednesday, the members of Portland City Council Community and Public Safety committees voted on passing a resolution about the fate of Portland Street Response‘s future to the full City Council. Part of Portland’s Public Safety area, the program is a successful tool in assisting people experiencing mental health and behavioral health crises, rather than calling the police on the frequently unhoused people in distress. The new resolution seeks to strengthen this program, among other things, by fully realizing Portland Street Response as a 24-7 co-equal branch of the first responder system. Here is the resolution in full.
Water is ominously low already. St. Helens in the background.
Two of the committee’s members, Loretta Smith (District 1) and Eric Zimmerman (my istrict 4) voted against bringing the resolution to the full council – really trying to throw a wrench into the gears of progress in dealing with our homelessness crisis. They ignore the positive example of many other cities (Seattle, Albuquerque, and Durham, NC, among them) that have shown that independence – not reporting to either police or fire department, in other words being co-equal – has improved service capabilities. Luckily, Steve Novick cast the decisive vote to bring the resolution forwards.
Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Adams and Mt. Hood in full view.
The meeting for the full council is in early May. If you cannot attend – a lot of presence always helps – I encourage everyone here in Portland to consider writing to their respective council members what you think should be voted for (or against.) Seven ayes will be needed to pass the resolution. (I have already written to Mitch Green, who is the District 4 member to vote next. And to Zimmerman to protest.) Here is the link where you can choose to write to your counselor. There is a spot where you can pick the name of your representative to be alerted.
Back to private proclamations: the woods were full of birdsong, the warblers picking up the golden dot theme,
For obvious reasons called butter butt…
the mourning doves, the red-winged blackbirds, the robins, song sparrows and swallows joining the chorus. Baldies shrieking, Heuer happy.
Instead of music today we’ll have the splendid sound scape of a day’s recording – dawn to dusk – of nature sounds on the Knepp Estates, one of Englands pioneers in rewilding. The album was released 4 days ago and is revelatory. From the producers:
The recordings were made by Alice Eldridge of the University of Sussex, who explained the idea behind the wilding.radio project that inspired this release: “I have come to believe that nature sounds are not only ‘calming’, but offer a powerful, visceral means to remind us that we are a part of the wider tapestry of life. This simple listening experience has been received with extraordinary enthusiasm and gratitude. Britain is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. This reduction in biodiversity has serious consequences for the future of life on this planet. It also radically depletes our sensory connection to wider nature. And if we don’t feel our connection to the rest of life on this planet, we are less likely to care for and take positive environmental action in the future.”
Today I want us to think through the connection between hobbies and Pope Francis. “What on earth,” you mutter, wondering if I have lost my marbles, or at least the relevant respect for the recently deceased. Neither, I assure you, just give me a minute.
The number of obituaries for the Pope matched those of articles contemplating what will come next, just as the differing political leanings were obvious in both kinds of publications: reverence for what he represented and had accomplished, or hopes for a return to less progressive eras.
“Some popes perfectly complement the age in which they live. A few were reformers—agents of positive change. Others railed against modernity and the diminishing power of the Roman Catholic Church. Some accomplished great things, some horrific.”
“It was a pope who, parleying with Attila the Hun, persuaded the great conqueror not to invade Italy; a pope who, in what remains the greatest psy-op of all time, riled up disgruntled Normans and sent them to Jerusalem to repulse the Seljuk Turks; a pope whose legate, after indiscriminately slaughtering the entire population of Béziers because a gnostic sect was based there, replied, when asked how to tell the heretics from the faithful, “Kill them all and let God sort them out”; a pope who divvied up lands in the New World between Portugal and Spain; a pope whose Papal Bull was used to justify slavery in the Americas; a pope who excommunicated Henry VIII, indirectly establishing the Church of England; a pope whose corrupt and venal policies prompted Martin Luther to nail his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Wittenberg church, jumpstarting the Reformation; and so on.”
This from the most insightful – and funny – essay on the power of the papacy in general that I read yesterday.
What stuck we me, however, regarding Pope Francis, was a paragraph in the NYT obituary about his personal focus:
“Francis …called for “Synodality”, the word given to the ancient church habit of assembling, discussing, discerning and deciding. Francis adapted the ancient practice of synods and councils in a radically inclusive way that invites all the faithful to be involved. The cardinals may conclude that right now, this is the greatest sign of hope the church can offer the world.
This “culture of encounter,” as Francis called it, may seem a puny thing to the powers that be. But it starts from the idea that those in thrall to the will to power cannot understand: the innate dignity of all, the need to listen to everyone, including those on the margins, and the importance of patiently waiting for consensus. These things are all crucial to the repair of a torn civic fabric.“
And here, of course, we have our bridge to hobbies: the culture of encounter.
New reports on the effects of the devastating consequences of this administration’s economic kamikaze include the fact that many people are priced out of their hobbies, with cost increases put on consumers’ backs. Now, for usually more solitary passions like mine, knitting, the horrendous prices for wool might register in decreased sanity – after all, it is my form of therapy, and absent those hours spent with my needles, neuroticism might visibly increase – beware, dear reader. Might lose my marbles after all.
Can you guys what my current project is?
But many hobbies are activities where you meet other people, or engage with them, often providing exposure to very different types from different walks of life, who would usually not be encountered. You meet people fishing, bowling, hunting, or in bike clubs – you get the idea. Usually, the Meso-world, as sociologists call it, the tiny publics you find in groups that come together to act on the local level, consist of people who already have much in common. Your unions, your prayer circle, your book club or who you go to demonstrations with are all comprised of somewhat like-minded compatriots.
Hobbies, on the other hand, really draw participants from different worlds. And if they now exclude the segments that simply can no longer afford them, you have lost an opportunity for civic encounter in small collectives. That means losing the dialogues that can lead to cooperation, or to conflict – both drive civic commitment that can provide a metaphorical hinge between individuals and societies. (Informative reading here: Gary Alan Fine The Hinge: Civil Society, Group Cultures, and the Power of Local Commitments.)
One way to counteract the price surges and foster local engagement at the same time, are lending libraries – not for books, but for tools or other items needed for activities once easily shared. These are, of course, not new inventions. I remember driving my teenager, who had a new expensive hobby every 5 minutes, to a tool shop where you could rent space and time with existing wood working tools that would have cost a fortune, even then, to acquire. He met quite a few people who would mentor or share his interests. These days, these shops take on a different kind of urgency.
These non-profits have, of course, their challenges. Who does the tool maintenance? How do you recoup the tools that wander off… who pays for liability insurance and how do you raise funds, if you don’t charge membership dues or other fees? But on net, they are a marvelous way to create community, connecting people around them and supporting other communal efforts of small collectives. After all, community-based volunteer programs around the country, from tree plantings to building renovations, from picking up trash to community garden projects, all depend on borrowing massive numbers of tools when they call for action.
As for crafts? There are certainly ways to find or found local craft groups, or, if your health or transportation issues preclude in-person meetings, there are zoom encounters with like-minded knitters. For folks in Portland, there is a wonderful offer by the Multnomah Library system, to be taught and to meet with others in their A good yarn project for knitting and crocheting, all levels of experience welcome. And of course there is always the BUY NOTHING possibility for scoring some tools and wool that generous people donate.
The civic fabric might be torn, but we still have ways to mend it. Don’t let inertia be the enemy.
And since we are talking politics and craft/ tools, it has to be Hans Sachs today, singing about the madness of the world… Wagner’s Meistersänger is endless (4:29 hours, although in Herman Prey’s company it might fly by…), but I figured we could stomach this short aria.
As per usual, one thing led to another while I was wandering among the Victorian houses of Eureka, CA on my most recent jaunt. Struck me as sort of a ghost town (more on that in a minute).
The Louvre Cafe has clearly seen better times…
Associative jump to Victorian ghost stories, and, inevitably, Montague Rhodes James (1882 – 1936). He was a British medievalist scholar, widely respected as provost of King’s College, Cambridge and of Eton College, as well as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. He also authored numerous volumes of ghost stories which had a large impact on the horror genre, partly due to their juxtaposition of humor and the supernatural.
One of his most famous stories, Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad (1904), can be found in a collection called A Warning to the Curious. It is a clever and funny tale named after a poem by Robert Burns, filled with often ironic allusions to world literature, Shakespeare and Coleridge as well as the bible. It is about a stodgy, slightly off Professor enamored with his own rationality, who spends a week’s vacation at the sea coast, pocketing a bronze whistle he finds in an abandoned Knights Templar cemetery along the beach. Soon he feels as if he is being followed. When he inspects the whistle in his room, with weird inscriptions seeming to reference the bible, strange noises begin startling him during the night. In short order things get sketchy and the Prof will never be the same again, as you will be able to see for yourself, when watching this remarkable, brilliant short film made for the BBC in 1968, and starring Michael Hordern. Watch it for the character acting alone. Such a difference from today’s horror flics. It’ll make your day! Well, it did mine.
Although my day was already pretty good, having listened to a new music album by Paul Roland, the expert on turning Victorian murders, supernatural experiences or horror stories into the most pleasant songs. He transformed James’ stories into ballads, sung with the voice of a bard found in your nearest corner pub, publishing this enchanting collection just last week. Here is his version of Whistle and I’ll Come to You. How can you not like a song that starts with the lines “Professor Parkins was a man of few words, but all of them were long, oh so long…” or a songwriter, who manages to get the essence of a story crammed in verse form into a ballad without losing any of the essential narrative and wit.
A warning to the curious could also be found on the walking path along the bay in Eureka. The path, lined with encampments of houseless people, runs behind the large mall and a strip of motels where I stayed.
This small town has seen its share of horrors, both on the extending and the receiving end. It is a harbor town in Northern California in Humboldt County, which derived its name from the Greek motto εὕρηκα (heúrēka), which means “I have found it!” It was missed by the European explorers for the longest time, due to a combination of geographic features and weather conditions which concealed the narrow bay entrance from view, and so was settled relatively late, around 1850. It did not take that long – but 10 years, in 1860 – for settlers and gold seekers to massacre the native population, the Wiyot people, mostly women and children, at a time when the adult males were away for an annual ceremony. The remaining populations sought shelter at Fort Humboldt, but over half died of starvation, with the army withholding proper care.
Not done yet. In 1890, with recent economic downturns and a growing sinophobia and violent acts against Chinese immigrants, a group of 600 White vigilantes forcibly and permanently evicted all 480 Chinese residents of Eureka’s Chinatown.
Photographs of Victorian beauties in Eureka from the city website.
The city thrived on the lumber trade, extracting what they could from the surrounding Red Woods, as well as fishing, and these days tourist trade. The timber economy of Eureka rises and falls with boom-and-bust economic times, certainly declined after the Second World War and even more so after the 1962 Columbus Day storm that felled so many trees that there was a glut in the market. The region is also site to large earthquakes and in danger of tsunamis. After 1990, regulatory, economic, and climate change-related events led to a contraction of the local commercial fishing fleet as well. The city these days is struggling, and it is visible in many closed or for sale properties when you walk around.
It is also quite evident that people are suffering – California is currently the state with the largest number of houseless people, and Humboldt County is having an above average share of them. There are opposing forces, as we, of course, see all around the country, that differ in ways how to approach this difficult situation. There are those who want to pursue actions that criminalize the people living in tents and cars for lack of available alternatives. They are bent on preserving public space for parking lots rather than low income housing for poor people, with the general idea that their presence impedes on commercial interests in town, always regressing to the long disproven claim that the presence of the poor will attract more crime.
But not all is a horror story! The good people of Eureka soundly defeated a measure meant to exclude houseless populations from housing availability in the city center in favor of parking lots during the last election. Despite a millionaire and his buddies investing $1.6 or so million in a campaign to maintain exclusion, ballot measure F passed in favor of the vulnerable population.
The story now unfolds around efforts to increase penalties for those living outside. City Council meetings have become land wars between the factions who want to criminalize homelessness and those who want to go about the problem by other means. Emotions run high, but there is clearly a movement that tries to protect those who cannot protect themselves.
The center of the city has a lot of spiffy stores for tourists, an opera house and a terrific bookstore, Bookleggers.
Mostly, you find interesting stuff a bit further away or in the back alleys, just like in San Francisco – lots of creative murals,
and a clear proclivity for cats…
Maybe we need to turn to witch stories next….
And as this day’s news of the Pope’ death demands some acknowledgment – he prayed daily with and for the Gazans and repeatedly rebuked the Trump administration over its stance on migrants and the marginalized – here is Mozart’s Lacrima. I got the musical idea from a different source – one of my steady readers has a cool website from which I derive news about rock and metal music. They had a Lacrima of a different sort today, by a band named Ghost no less…. thank you, Fox Reviews Rock!
“I like maps, because they lie. Because they give no access to the vicious truth. Because great-heartedly, good-naturedly they spread before me a world not of this world.” – Wisława Szymborska
This stanza from Szymborska’s poem Map, the last one she wrote before she died, loomed large in my head when I drove home after a conversation with a local artist who had invited me for a studio visit to explore the project she is currently working on.
Kristie Strasen is a renowned colorist and textile designer, with numerous awards under her belt, and, more importantly, decades of experience in creating pattern and color schemes for high end textiles where execution matches her original visualization. In the decade or so since she relocated from New York City to the Columbia Gorge, she has infused her creativity, her skill set(s) and her curiosity about the history of her new home into ever more ambitious projects at the loom.
Her current endeavor can be described as a work of cartography, in the widest sense. The weavings model reality in the most abstract ways, combining scientific inquiry, aesthetics and technique, as all map making does that tries to capture reality in spatial form.
River Stories will depict the entire course of the Columbia River from the Canadian headwaters to the mouth where it enters the Pacific Ocean, some of the tributaries, like the Klickitat and the White Salmon river, and several sections of the Columbia Gorge Scenic Area.
It is technically a complex endeavor. Strasen enlarged maps that show the geographic features of the river course, bends and all, partitioned the sections into grids and then traced the river course, eventually with dots under the warp of her loom.
With free hand weaving she delineated an exact depiction of how the river runs, through six sections, with background colors reflecting the tone of the respective landscapes, the forests, the cliffs, and the eventual softness at the confluence. The color choices required more than just her perfect eye – because the wool in the requisite colors was of different weight, the straight edges, pride of accomplished weavers like Strasen, had a tendency to be less than perfectly straight, once off the loom. Probably only detectable for experts, but something the weaver had to grapple with given her high standards.
All I can say: The tapestries are a beautiful, but I equally marvel at the way Strasen transforms her curiosity about the world into a specific work of art that shares some of her insights with the viewer.
Curiosity about the world: in addition to a longstanding fascination with maps, the artist devoured the literature about the history of the Gorge, the consequences of Western expansionism, and the effects of human intervention on nature, once she had arrived in White Salmon, WA and made it her home. She felt called to draw our attention to both, the consequences of our meddling with nature, as well as the preservation of it, the latter largely due to early efforts of individuals like Nancy Neighbor Russell, who was instrumental in rescuing the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon and Washington, threatened by commercial interests. Russell founded Friends of the Columbia Gorge in 1980, working to protect the Gorge from development and secure it for federal protection, th Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1986.
***
Maps express particular viewpoints in support of specific interests.They can shape our view of the world and our place in it by selectively presenting information. This can be bad when the purpose of persuasion is manipulation. I had written about this some years ago in the context of another map making and art project:
“The goal of suggestive mapping was to achieve political objectives (while avoiding lies, which could be easily exposed) by appealing to emotions and rigorously excluding anything that didn’t support the desired message. Its maps were intended specifically to engage support from the general population, and they were often “shamelessly explicit. Cornell University has a wonderful introduction and collection of maps all sharing the purpose of persuasion. The topics range from religion, imperial geopolitics (think colonialism), slavery, British international politics, social and protest movements to, of course, war. The goal was made explicit in the 1920s (and later taken on in force by the Nazis) when in reaction to the shameful defeat in WW I German cartographers decided to go for the “Suggestive Map,” cartographic propaganda which they thought had given the British a strategic advantage.”
But the way information is presented can also have the positive impact of a warning or an invitation to think things through critically. A selective tool used by Strasen is the color she chose to mark the various dams blocking the natural flow of the river. In my interpretation, bright red bars signify the danger, the concept of halting, the possibility of destruction and the ongoing heat of the discussion around the justification (or absence thereof) of dam removal. These visual magnets emphasize obstructions that we now know had ongoing disastrous consequences for fish populations, never mind the trauma of displacement for the Native American tribes affected by the dam construction. They remind us how much the lifeblood of the Pacific Northwest, this river and all who it serves, are endangered by efforts towards relentless extraction, a view shared with the Columbia River Keeperswho are passionately engaged in its protection.
***
Maps in art have been around for some time (for a short history of this intersection, go here.)
Art, like maps, can be a tool of persuasion, doubling the force of that intention when utilizing maps’ suggestive power, which can be done in a number of ways.
Mona Hatoum, born in Lebanon to Palestinian parents and living in England, for example, took copies of the flight route maps you find in airplanes, and added hand-drawn designs in ink and gouache. Rather than focussing on geographic borders, she delineated the movement across the globe, leaving to us the decision if that movement was voluntary or not. She herself describes the paths she drew to be “routes for the rootless.”
Mona Hatoum Routes II (2002) Photo Credit: MOMA
Later work employs sculpture, with red neon outlining the continents, representing a globe riddled by hot spots, places of military or civil unrest, a world aflame.
Mona Hatoum Hot Spot III (2009) Photo Credit Agostino Osio.
Closer to home, artist Mark Bradford has made his mark with his large-scale mixed-media works that combine representations of geography and the ruinous fate of residents of depicted areas. The artist models the streets and buildings of specific neighborhoods with string or caulk, layering scavenged paper on top and cutting and peeling away layers to both conceal and expose the geography. Some of his map paintings refer to areas in L.A. shaken by violence in the 1992 riots. Others refer to scorched earth, referencing the Tulsa Race Massacres of 1921 which wiped out Oklahoma’s Black Wall Street.
Mark Bradford Black Venus (2005)
Mark Bradford Black Wall Street (2006)
Mark Bradford Scorched Earth (2006)
Not all art is, of course, explicitly political. Some, like Juan Downey‘s Map of America, draws swirls of color to stimulate the imagination.
Juan Downey Map of America (1975)
Then there is Maya Lin’s Pin River project – sculptures depicting river courses with pins or marbles, up to 20.000 in this rendering of the Hudson river watershed. She also uses installations created from more than 200 bamboo reeds in the form of a 3D drawing of the Hudson River basin,
Maya Lin Folding the Hudson (2018)
Maya Lin Pin River—Hudson Watershed (2018) detail.
Maya Lin Map of Memory, Hudson River (2018)
All of these works, in their own way, demonstrate that maps can be used for more than an efficient way to communicate spatial information.
This is also the case for Strasen’s tapestries, which are surely more than a tool to help us think about our physical surroundings. Her unapologetically reductive maps offer less context and more of a sense of wonder for a particular place, a particular beauty and history. A world not of this world, and yet.
The blue band of the river, set against an immense backdrop of diffuse landscape coded only in color, gives us a figure/ground constellation that tells a story emphasized by this degree of abstraction: the centrality of a river shaped by forces larger than us, defining a region, essential to its – and our own – survival.
The work will be completed in June when it will be inaugurated during a solo show at the Columbia Gorge Museum.
I cannot wait to see it hung!
Columbia Gorge Museum E.D. Lou Palermo, inspecting a finished section of the tapestry.
You have to walk without me today, since I am busy tackling the jungle of weeds that pretends to be my garden. But my very happy dog will keep you company on your sojourn along the beaches and coast of the Pacific around the Southern border of Oregon and Northern parts of California.
The coast never fails to impress with its reminders of the power of nature – the swells, the dangerous rocks,
the provision of food if you know where to find it (and who to share it with.)
Vulture and gulls working on a big fish….
Nor does it hesitate to impress with its beauty – the colorization alone of rocks and oceans, scotch broom in bloom on the surrounding hills, the shades of water at different depths.
People, as always, can’t help but leave signs of their existence.
Geese, on the other hand, are forever on the lookout for the existence of others – thus their role as guardians of the gates during the Roman empire.
One lonely goose on top….
Which brings me to today’s poem that I had linked to in an overly optimistic blog not so long ago. For today, the association between the Barbarians at the gates and the guardian geese prompted me to offer it again, in its full sarcastic splendor. How it currently applies to all of us, needs, I fear, no further elaboration.
Waiting for the Barbarians
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn’t anything going on in the senate? Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today. What’s the point of senators making laws now? Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early, and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate, in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader. He’s even got a scroll to give him, loaded with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas? Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts, rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds? Why are they carrying elegant canes beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion? (How serious people’s faces have become.) Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly, everyone going home lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come. And some of our men just in from the border say there are no barbarians any longer.
Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.
Yesterday, Robert Reich’s Sunday Thoughts landed in my inbox. He describes the most recent evidence of the “Trump regime’s abject cruelty, viciousness, heartlessness, brutality,” and asks, “How does a moral person live with this? How do we not become complicit?”
We have been asking ourselves these very questions during this year’s Passover, a Jewish holiday focussed on the experience of abject cruelty, viciousness, heartlessness, brutality, (against ALL, by the way) and on teaching our children and grandchildren how you should forestall a repetition of oppression or how you can overcome it. Except that in this very year 2025 the “Never again!” rings hollow.
I had absconded to the Northern California Redwoods to get away from the news, and get together with family. The beauty of those woods is unique, but even there you are reminded of human interference for profit, the harvesting and subsequent charring of century old trees. (The big stumps are the ones logged about 100 years ago, the surrounding forest is secondary growth.)
The secondary growth is still awe inspiring, as is the light that pushes its way through the dense tree crowns, forming intensely contrasting scenery.
The meadows adjacent to the forests are filled with wildflowers at this time of year, and the emerging elk look as if a fairy tale world existed that they freely move in and out of, safe from predators.
Safe from predators: no longer a given in a nation that decides it can disappear people without due process, with no redress once removed from American soil, and put into gulags extracting slave labor until the day you die. It can happen to anyone, Jews no exception, particularly with this administration’s anti-Semitism in plain sight. “What?” you ask? Are they not devoted to fight anti-Semitism?
Is leaving copies of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” in the military libraries the Naval Academy, while removing books teaching the history of the Holocaust, fighting anti-Semitism? When the superintendent of a school district in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas agrees within minutes to a conservative group’s demands to remove seminal texts about the Holocaust and antisemitism, including Maus and Anne Frank’s Diary? Florida’s state Education Department rejected two new Holocaust-focused textbooks for high school classroom use. “Modern Genocides,” and a course titled “History of the Holocaust.” Is that fighting anti-Semitism? Is using the Hitler salute by an administration “advisor” fighting anti-Semitism?
Is Trump’s election campaign use of featuring ads of Hillary Clinton against a background of hundred-dollar bills and a Star of David, and another promising protection against global special interests and featuring the portraits of three Jewish financiers, Janet Yellen, George Soros, and Lloyd Blankfein fighting anti-Semitism? Both ads are typical renditions of the classic antisemitic smear of Jewish money and Jewish financiers as the sources of power behind an opponent.
Is calling demonstrators marching with swastika and Confederate flags in a Nazi-style torchlit parade, chanting the Nazi slogans “Blood and Soil” and “Jews will not replace us” at a rally in 2017, ““fine people” on “both sides” fighting anti-Semitism?
Trump declared the protesters wearing sweatshirts that said “CAMP AUSCHWITZ,” or those seen elsewhere wearing what seems to be the Proud Boy version, “6MWE” (6 Million Weren’t Enough) during the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, “political hostages” and “patriots.” He regularly dines with anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers like Kanye West and Nick Fuentes. And in the run-up to the 2024 election, he proclaimed that if he lost, it would be because too many American Jews had failed to vote for him—once again a classic antisemitic tactic: if things go wrong, blame the Jews. Is this fighting anti-Semitism?
Is not calling out the arson of a Jewish governor’s home with his family sleeping inside on the first night of Passover fighting anti-Semitism? There was, of course, no official response whatsoever from our President.
In the spirit of Passover, let me recite what I see in the context of our history. So far, the concept of anti-Semitism has been used to stifle dissent, targeting pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel sentiments. It has been abused to stifle freedom of expression at our Institutions of Higher Learning in general. (For detailed and smart discussions of this listen to Timothy Snyder here, or read Elad Nehorai here.)
Polls already taken in 2021 reported that more than a quarter of all American Jews believe that Israel is an apartheid state, while 45% assert the Palestinians suffer from systematic racisms. These numbers are likely to be much higher now. Definitionally, according to the Antidefamation League, these American Jews are anti-Semitic. If the current administration would deport them for their beliefs, and Israel ensures not to allow them to live there (see the new conditions touted by BEHAR), the two countries will render fellow Jews stateless. Again.
Can’t be deported for your beliefs? May I introduce you to Mahmoud Khalil. Can’t be deported (and tortured or left to rot) as a U.S citizen? May I encourage you to listen to your President’s suggestion that he can and will do so? Here is the game plan. Can’t be deported as a declared enemy of the state for criticism of the President? Here is a legal analysis that suggests former Trump cyber security officer, Christopher Krebs, now investigated for treason for asserting that Trump lost the 2020 election, might get ready to leave the country before he ends up unretrievable in El Salvador.
Can’t be retrieved, after admittedly erroneous deportation, even if the Supreme Court demands it (or pretends to do so…)? Indeed, says the administration, oops. When the single proposed safety mechanism against wrongful deportation, Habeas Corpus, is made moot by trickery and lawlessness, we are all endangered. From purported criminals they HAVE rights to due process) to dissidents to personal retribution targets to religious classes – none will be spared.
As we recount the history around the seder table – all of this is not new. But apparently more than 60 million voters in this country were willing to install exactly that kind of ideology. It was not hidden. 6 million dead Jews made no difference. Nor does the attempted erasure of an entire other people, the Palestinians, apparently.
How do we not become complicit? Educate yourself on the issues and speak out! Understand that the core freedoms of our constitution are under attack, regardless of who you are or what you believe. Protect those who are less privileged than we still are. Defy apathy or wishful thinking that it will all work out. This is not just chaos, or economic turmoil, or a multi-pronged attack against science and humanities. This is about sending people to their death in prison camps, ordered by those with immoral inclinations and through lawless means.
To brighten the day after some dark musings (Yes, I’m back, true to form… ) here is a remarkable collaboration between a French and a British musician.
and this from my inbox: Reversible Barnes & Noble display in Georgetown this weekend. (Courtesy of Chris Geidner.)
The images will speak for themselves – I have run out of words for this week….
Political cartoon ca. 1908
For counter balance one piece of uplifting news from this week (other than the Wisconsin SC election outcome, the general election trends across the country, the court wins so far: Senator Booker’s bravura performance teaches us all:
And here is music from Australia closest to the Heard Islands that are home to the penguins… you can hear them sliding on the ice with a bit of imagination.
In 1995, Umberto Eco (author of The Name of the Rose, among others) published an essay in the New York Review of Books called: Ur-Fascism with a sub-title Freedom and Liberation are an unending task. He had grown up under Mussolini’s regime and he was trying to assess in this essay when or under what circumstances it is legitimate to call something fascism.
He insisted “There was only one Nazism,” but “The fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.” He then went on to outline 14 “typical” features that make up the qualities of what he calls “Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism.”
“These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”
I am copying them here (Ref.) and add some annotations posted by German analyst Marc Raschke on IG, put into my own words.
1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.” Let’s go back to a (presumed) golden past : Make America Great again!
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.” Climate change? What climate change? Science? Vaccinations? Infectious or chronic disease research?
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.” Tariffs yes! Tariffs no! Let’s break organizations before we re-build them (if we rebuild them…)
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.” Media? Critics? Scientists? Universities? Enemies of the People!More executive orders like “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.” Diversity? Let’s get rid of or demote anyone not fitting the norms set by white men… deport! deport! deport!
6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.” Frustrated? Status challenged? – It’s the fault of minorities, migrants, the elites or trans people!Remember the Great Replacement idea.
7. The obsession with a plot. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.” Obsessed with conspiracies? Too many to count here….
8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.” The Deep State is all powerful! The Deep state is ineffective and corrupt!
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.” Let’s have a war against the invading foreigners or the Deep State or the Law firms or whoever comes to mind this moment. What about Greenland? Canada? Panama Canal?
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.” The weak need to be eliminated! Only the strong should rule! Let’s get rid of meals-on-wheels! Let cancer patients die, who needs research. FEMA is a waste. Scratch the financial support for heating and cooling.
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.” We are a heroic mass movement with the biggest popular support (ignore the election statistics…) and our martyrs shall be heroes – like Ashli Babbit on January 6th…
12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.” Men rule, women serve – they will be protected (and fertilized… ) whether they like it or not. Let’s have a household vote only from male head of household. Let’s eliminate choice and control of one’s own body. Let’s do away with marriage equality.Project 2025 spells it out in detail.
13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.” PBS be gone! Billionaire-owned media rule.
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.” Newspeak? Fake News, Woke Mind Virus, Deep State anyone?
1995 – 2025. You can draw your own conclusions.
Music today by Luciano Berio who was a close friend of Eco’s, and at times collaborating on projects that combined semiotics and music. (I chose one of his more traditional compositions.)
Graffiti with tongue-in-cheek suggestions for an antidote to fascism, from Vienna, during my last visit. The Italian one I photographed in Trieste, in 2018.
“The potter, in his concepts, must possess such a sheer love of truth as will carry him past the dangers of revivalism on the one hand and of futurism on the others.” – Bernard Leach, A Potter’s Outlook, Handworker’s Pamphlet #3, 1928.
I should have known then, when I was barely able to find parking. But who would have thought that in the middle of the day on a weekday, half of Portland’s population and every other tourist in town would flock to the garden? I had made a spontaneous decision to visit without checking the website which I later learned announced peak bloom for the cherry trees. Of course the trees were spectacular. So was the weather’s control over people’s movements. Like one, we ripped out our cameras when the sun appeared, lasting for about five minutes, like one we scurried seeking cover when the torrential rains came down, again for the shortest amount of time. Proverbial April weather on steroids in March.
Once again, the garden offered some surprises. I really have difficulties thinking of a place that so regularly, reliably, offers food for thought at the same time that it gifts us with natural beauty. This time my eye was caught by the visual contrast between nature’s opulence, and that offered by Earthen Elegance: The Ceramic Art of Bizen inside the Pavilion Gallery. My brain, on the other hand, was occupied the minute I saw some antique stencils in the hallway near the Tanabe Gallery (in conjunction with an exhibition by artist Karen Illman Miller, Natural Patterns: Katazome Stencil Dyeing, that would open the next day and will be visited at some later point.)
***
Imagine clouds of pink and white cherry blossom from the weeping cherry at the flat garden, or the old tree near the Café, or the white cherry tree hill – soft, gossamer, delicate and impermanent, all of them, a study in fragility.
Contrast that with the dark hues of the Bizen ceramics, the toughness and resilience of pottery wood-kiln fired at extremely high temperatures for weeks on end. Earthen(ware), down-to-earth, earth-derived and earthbound in its utility, a study in sturdiness.
Manabu Suehiro Yunomi Cup (ca. 2000)
The name Bizen pottery originates with an ancient Japanese kiln from the Kamakura period (1185-1333.) The Chugoku region in the West of Japan is known for its special hiyose clay dug from the rice fields and red pines that are used to fire the kilns to this day, a lasting artisan trade. The vessels are fired in either Noboigama/climbing kilns or Anagama/tunnel kilns, and some of the artisanal skill lies in adjusting distances to the heat source, and changing the amount of heat, up or down, during the weeks of firing, with temperatures as high as 1,200 degrees Celsius.
Depending how much ash adheres to the pottery, the surface layers will appear rough, and depending how close or distant from the core heat, the colors will vary for these traditional storage containers.
There are no glazes or final painting of the vessels, no decorative motifs in the tradition. Sometimes the artist will wrap straw around the containers, which creates a unique pattern through the chemical reaction of the Potassium component contained in the straw with the iron oxide component contained in the clay. None of the beautiful red streaks look alike in this Hidasuki method.
Another variation of Bizen ceramic is Goma, with characteristics on the ceramic surface resembling special grainy sesame seeds. The ash of pine wood sticks to the vessels during the burning period, creating these floating seeds or even droplets.
Takashi Mezawa Vase (ca. 1998)
Works on loan from the Collection of David Sneider and Naomi Pollock feature contemporary artists who luckily inherited the processing skills and techniques accumulated across generations. I lack the expertise to pinpoint where they exactly deviate from or improve on the Bizen tradition, but the aesthetics speak to me, however much the past and the present co-mingle. Put differently, the vessels do create an emotional reaction, one that includes being drawn to the ultimate function of earthenware, a desire to use it. There is an earthiness to these containers, the way surfaces are rough, the forms vigorous and for the most part unpretentious, that spoke to me. I would have no qualms sticking some cherry blossom twigs or a magnolia branch into some of them, and reveling in the contrast between the light and the dark, the temporary and the timeless.
Masahiro Miyao Vase (ca. 2005)
***
“Japonisme is no longer a fashion, it’s infatuation, it’s insanity.” – Ernest Chesneau, French art critic, late 1800s.
Eventually, escaping the next deluge, I found myself in the corridor of the Japanese Arts Learning Center. Good thing I was double-masked. Really chanced onto an inconspicuously hung display of antique Katagami paper stencils from the collection of artist Karen Illman Miller, their creators unknown. Perusing these beauties set off a chain reaction of thinking about what I know and what I don’t know, followed later by some serious reading to brush up on the deficiencies. A wild ride, as it turned out. If the curator’s minimum intent was to teach but one person about some intricacies of Japanese cultural productions: mission accomplished.
So what is Katagami? The original stencils were created by making a paper pulp from the bark of mulberry trees, which was then made waterproof by applying a mixture of oil and the fermented juice of unripe persimmons. Next you pile up the sheets and create a pattern with knives and hole punchers all the way down. The top sheet is discarded, and the rest are often paired, with a mesh of human hair or silk threads to prevent tearing.
Left to Right: Antique Katagami Stencil Silk Making Process – (Artisanunknown)- Antique Katagami Stencil Diptych (Artisanunknown) – Antique Katagami Stencil Maple Leaves in Stream (Artisanunknown).
In parallel, you prepare the fabrics that are supposed to receive dye patterns with the help of these stencils, a process called Katazome. Once the fabric is ready, you put the stencil on top and then push something called a resist paste through the holes of the template. The traditional paste consisted of a mix of glutinous rice, rice powder and bran powder, salt, slaked lime (calcium hydroxide), and water. You take the stencil away, let the thing dry, and then color the surrounding fabric with dye or paint by hand, outside of the lines of the resist paste. Once the dye has dried you wash the paste off, traditionally in flowing water at small streams, and you got your kimono pattern in full beauty.
That art is partially the result of class divisions. The Japanese nobility of the 17th century enacted exclusionary laws that prohibited the wearing of silk garments by the increasingly prosperous merchant class. As a result cotton fabrics became more elaborate in design and complexity, with the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603 ~ 1868) encouraging and supporting artisans in their production of katagami stencils. Traveling traders bought bunches of them and then re-sold them to textile craftsmen throughout Japan, including remote rural regions, eventually enabling peasants to create beautiful garments at least for festive occasions.
Antique Katagami Stencil Tryptich and Floating Flowers (Artisan unknown)
Fast forward to 1854. After 250 years of isolation, Japan was forced open to Western colonial and trade forces. The nation reacted with prompt modernization, including a shift in national power structures, with the Samurai no longer being a force to be reckoned with – including their purchasing power. The search for replacement consumers turned westwards: enormous quantities of artisan wares, wood cuts, Katami stencils, ceramics and porcelain works were exported to Europe which soon landed in the grip of Japonisme: a sensitivity to Japanese culture that had an enormous impact on changes in Western art, shifting expression bound to the past to one open to future developments.
Designers (think William Morris, or the decorative artisans of the Wiener Werkstätten and Art Nouveau) were influenced by Japanese patterns.
William Morris, Green Leaves – Felix Vallotton Laziness (1896)
Painters also adopted new perspectives derived from Japanese prints, perspectives that included flattened spaces, new viewpoints, often from above, or providing a radically subjective positioning of the viewer, cropping of subjects, a tolerance for empty space and last but not least color choices that were no longer descriptive, but expressive instead. (Some examples of paintings and their (in)direct models can be found here.)
Hiroshige Plum Park in Kameido —- Vincent van Gogh Flowering Plum Orchard, after Utagawa Hiroshige 1887
Back to our Katagami stencils for textile printing. In 2015, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden held a phenomenal exhibition of 140 Katagami stencils, Die Logik des Regens, all devoted to the subject of rain, at the Japanese Palais at Dresden, Germany. The curator, visual theorist Wolfgang Scheppe, had found a treasure trove of some 16.000 (!) of them at the Museum of Decorative Arts at Dresden’s Pillnitz Palace, largely unknown. They were held in ninety-two cassettes for more than 125 years.
How did they get there? We know that a purchase was made in 1889 at the height of Japonisme, the seller one Hermann Pächter, the owner of a Berlin art dealership that specialized in East Asian art. The Jewish business was destroyed during Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, the surviving proprietor, Pächter’s wife, later murdered by the Nazis in Theresienstadt. So no real provenance from that end. The papers at the museum got lost or burnt during the allied bombings of Dresden. So no provenance there, either.
However, it is speculated that the art dealer bought the entire collection from the translator, diplomat and art collector Alexander von Siebold who at the time lived in Japan. He is another entry, together with his father, Phillip Franz von Siebold, into my Department of interesting People” ledger… the latter a traveler and a highly respected German naturalist and physician in 19th century Nagasaki whose daughter with a Japanese partner became the first female physician in Japan, the former one of his European children who served Japan throughout his life with distinction. If he sold 16.000 stencils, how many did he actually own?
In any case, the 2015 Katagami exhibition was beautifully arranged, hung at eye-level with indirect backlighting enabling the patterns to be seen in all their minimalist glory, details after detail flowing into abstraction. As the exhibition text noted: “140 different ways to graphically represent the falling of tiny drops in a rhythmic pattern.”
A handbook with more than 200 illustrations of these stencils will be published by the curator this August, 2025. I don’t know if and when there will be an English translation. But just seeing the art would be a treat.
The Dresden Katagami exhibition was accompanied by a sound installation of randomised computer modulations of the sound of falling rain, developed in collaboration with the Italian electronic musician Renato Rinaldi. Here in Portland, all you had to do was step out onto the Cultural Plaza and listen intently while getting soaked. Thinking about the flow of cultural practices and ideas across time, or across continents. About how minds open when they appreciate something new, or admire something from centuries ago. About artistic cross-fertilization, and always, always, individuals who blaze a path, approaching novel parts of the world, returning with knowledge, or providing us with art that we would otherwise not easily come in contact with.
The garden, exhibitions and nature alike, once again, an interdependent source of inspiration. A benevolently reappearing sun agreed.
Portland Japanese Garden
Earthen Elegance – The Ceramic Art of Bizen
FEBRUARY 8 – JUNE 9, 2025
Karen Illman Miller – Natural Patterns: Katazome Stencil Dyeing
Remember the Ruckus Clause in the Constitution – the one that says if you create a ruckus in this country while legally visiting from another country, your permit will be revoked and you will be sent back? Ruckus, mind you, defined as voicing an opinion that is opposed to administration think, not a crime, a riot, a participation in illegal activities – simply making use of free speech? Free speech guaranties that apparently no longer apply to green card holders or other legal foreign residents?
Well, I don’t remember it either, but here is Marco Rubio on the specifics of PhD candidate Rumeysa Ozturk:
“We revoked her visa … once you’ve lost your visa, you’re no longer legally in the United States … if you come into the US as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don’t want it. We don’t want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country.”
This is, of course, was the Tufts woman who was snatched by plain clothed, masked goons pushing her into a car and abducting her to an unknown site, unable to speak to her lawyer for 24+ hours and not until after she was in Louisiana — despite a court order that she not be moved from MA. For having voiced an opinion in a student news paper as one of four co-authors, a year ago no less, about Israeli attacks on Gaza and university divestment from funding warfare in the Middle East, with no evidence produced that she did anything unlawful. Rubio claims that they are doing it every day, having revoked around 300 visas so far on the basis of disliked speech, not criminal action.
Then there is the Russian dissident, a scientist from Harvard medical School, who was arrested yesterday upon re-entry at our borders, returning from a research trip to France and having some undeclared items due to messed up papers in her luggage. If she is deported to Russia she will likely not survive as a known, outspoken critic of Putin and the invasion of Ukraine. some claim we are now helping to squash dissent as demanded by our newest ally.
Never mind all the tourists who have been detained, some under torture-like conditions, eventually needing medical attention.
I am trying to get the point across that many people shrug when “Venezuelan gang members” are shipped off to a gulag abroad without due process. That some people are more concerned when they are coming for foreign academics or simple tourists from western countries. That WE ALL should be frightened, however, for one and all, once the normalization of abduction, neglect of Habeus Corpus, and absence of any recourse that due process would allow, has taken place. Every single person can be snatched and disappeared, just as 1930s Germany or contemporary Russia model, with claims that the officials know what they are doing and punishing criminals – how can you prove that you are not, when sitting in a cell with 80 other women, unable to speak the language (some tourists) and no access to lawyers in Louisiana, if you are lucky, or El Salvador, if you are not?
Is it surprising that many countries in the world have now posted official travel warnings against visiting the United States? Or, more nightmarish to me, that prominent scholars of fascism have chosen to leave this country and teach abroad (historian Timothy Snyder and philosopher Jason Stanley of Yale among them?)Not counting the brain drain of our best scientists leaving for countries where their work is revered and can continue in contrast to here with all the department closures?
I was thinking about all this while watching how various wildlife traverse our garden, how freely they move, with no borders to stop them and certainly no ICE or Customs personal snatching them into custody, moving them to unknown locations or sending them back to places where there is existential threat waiting for them.
The deer come and go.
The coyotes come and go, blissfully ignoring my wildly barking dog.
The squirrel has claimed the owl house.
The owl has claimed the redwood where the crows nest. (That is a crow behind the owl, unsuccessfully yelling at the owl.)
The finches and sparrows and various other birds freely come and go, ready to snatch nesting materials.
One of the people detained upon entry to the US last week was composer Andrew Balfour, on his way to perform with the Amabile Choirs at Carnegie Hall, conducting selections from his work Tapwe: Songs of Truth. There was some mistake in his papers, and he was held for hours in isolation, phone and luggage taken from him, until he was given a choice: he could wait (for days) for an immigration judge to decide his detention, or he could take a flight back home to Toronto, to which he was then escorted by armed guards. He was lucky – some have been kept in detention for 2 weeks, completely clueless about what the accusations consisted of.
Anyhow, Balfour is a singular musician in the sense that he has two things that matter for his creative focus: his love for sacred music by Renaissance composers, particularly British ones, and his identity as a Cree, infusing indigenous spirituality into the music he creates. The music I am linking to today takes scores from Byrd and Tallis, and arranges them around Cree and Ojibway words. The project, called Nagamo , which means “sing” in Cree, is not a translation of the old texts, but an infusion of indigenous perspective. It’s quite something.
If you are interested in the whole composition, go here.
Below are some parts that I picked, demonstrating diversity of melodic and rhythmic approaches.
And at the very end you can watch a short video that introduces the composers and his biography.
Let the music fill you with a sense of resolve – people have overcome injustice and trauma for centuries.
