Since I would dissolve into a blubbering mess of rage and tears if I wrote about politics this week I will turn to one of the more distracting things I can think of.

I used to have a file folder named Found by the Wayside. I’d stash odds and ends in it, images I captured while doing what I like best: being a flâneuse with camera in hand. It now has an additional section: pictures of random encounters when being out and about in the world. Emphasis on random: the stories stored here are not about people I set out to interview or to photograph. I just happened to meet them while doing something else.

Here is a good example. Last Friday, while trying to glimpse the first flocks of migrating birds on Sauvie Island to distract myself, among other things, from the Yom Kippur murders by a Neo-Nazi in Germany and the war and betrayal brought onto the Kurds, I chanced upon a man and his friendly companion who were painting the landscape at the end of a dirt road.

I don’t even know how the casual conversation of “Lovely day, seen any interesting birds?” morphed into an (hour-long) window into hearing about someone’s unusual life. A Vietnam Veteran, Dan Florea, by his own reports, shares his time between Israel, Equador and The Pacific NW, with plenty of travel with kayaks thrown in. In Israel he used to be a guardian of the border to Syria at night and paint during the day. iPhone documentation of the service gun was promptly produced; it has, now that he is in his seventies, been retrieved by the Israeli authorities. He wants to be buried with a view of the Columbia Gorge cliffs across from The Dalles because they remind him of the Golan Heights.

In Equador he teaches art. iPhone again, with colorful representations of flower market paintings, then scrolling to his portrait of a Portland Rabbi who looked like Ariel Stone to me, then scrolling to a photograph of his daughter in DC standing next to, I gather, someone who could be Madeline Albright.

He is the head of an art school that is tuition free, covers multiple disciplines and locations, and claims to be the first of its kind: an international pop-up art school. Teachers are volunteers who must have been successful as artists not teachers. I guess anyone can sign up to be a student. I cannot vouch for the quality of the education, but I guarantee it entails hearing a lot of colorful stories.

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Maybe not an international one, but we certainly do have another pop-up, free art school in PDX, the home school. Founded by Victoria Anne Reis and manuel arturo abreu it is now in its 4th year, with the artists currently in residence at the Yale Union. An interview in Willamette Week last year made it clear that these artists have a goal of subverting the traditional art market – a lofty goal when you consider the grant support they receive from RACC, YU, a Precipice Fund grant, funds from the Calligram Foundation / Allie Furlotti, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and a Rhizome Net Art Microgrant. They describe themselves: “We provide welcoming contexts for critical engagement with contemporary art and its issues with a curriculum featuring artist talks, exhibitions, monthly classes, poetry readings, and more.”

There are clearly sources of access to art that are outside the familiar institutions of Pdx’s art scene. Last year Chuck Dillard, who is both assistant professor of collaborative piano and opera program music director at Portland State University, founded the Queer Opera Experience, a way to give queer students an inclusive platform to perform. It strives to rewrite antiquated, heterosexual, man-dominant narratives in ways that include diverse queer experiences.  

Then there is Confrontation Theatre, a company that produces plays by and about the African diaspora. As you can see in the link, last season’s production line-up was impressive. I could not quite figure out what they are doing this fall.

In any case, here I was, thinking about all the art offerings available in town if you dig a little deeper beyond mainstream. A reprieve from thinking about the state of our world. Against a background chorus of honking geese and trilling sand hill cranes who filled the skies, I felt ok for a little while.

Music today by Bob Marley whose album Confrontation gave rise to the name for the Theatre Company…