#oregon humanities

One of the things that I love about where I live is the widespread culture of intentional place-making paired with creative sense-making about place: the many artists and writers shaping how we relate to where we are, past, present, and future. 

Just to provide a small sampling, here in Portland one finds groups like City Repairbuilding neighborhood visual identity through street murals, or hyperlocal publications like Buckman Journal. Around the state are any number of projects such as Pine Meadow Ranch, deliberately connecting art, agriculture, and ecology. And of course you have OPB, prolifically producing not just news but podcasts and videosthat keep an eye on history, culture, and natural science all at once, along with their regular coverage of all our other artists and place-makers.

And you can throw into that mix Oregon Humanities, a group dedicated not just to cultural programming around the state but to fostering dialogue and discussion as well. They also produce a seasonal magazine, focused on a theme; the theme for Winter 2023 is “Underground,” with writers exploring “things hidden or buried, for better or worse: subcultures and political currents and stories and plants and pollutants.”

I have a short piece in the "reader post" section of the newest issue of the Oregon Humanities magazine. Copied below, or find the whole issue at: http://oregonhumanities.org/rll/magazine/underground-winter-2023/

OH does themed issues, and this is more or less what came out immediately upon reading their prompt for this season's "underground" theme.

Candlesticks

We left them buried in the basement of the old house. Me, I would've taken them along, but D. made his disapproval of my grimy street rubbish very clear. It was one thing to have them sitting on top of the landlord’s pile of old paint cans and another to pack them away in boxes with our coats and linens.

Candlesticks are what you call those white plastic tubes that are screwed into the street to mark a perimeter, such as a separated bike lane. They are not particularly durable, as evidenced by the ease with which drivers routinely busted through them in our neighborhood. Sometimes the wreckage felt intentional, like motorists were playing a game of knocking down bowling pins.

Collecting them happened by impulse. Walking one day, I noticed two of them blocking a lane they had helped buffer just earlier that morning. Once in my hands, setting them back down felt like littering, while trashing them felt like complicity in destroying city property. So they came home with me.

But once I’d taken those, I began to see more, and once I saw them, I couldn’t leave them alone. As the collection grew, I began scheming. Maybe we could stealthily build a lane on a street in need of one. Maybe I would amass so many we could do a kind of art project: a pile of bollards like a pile of bones, representing all the injuries they failed to prevent. But before my little infrastructure graveyard could grow that large, we moved. Our landlord was of the more negligent variety; my guess is that they still live there in the basement.

I had almost wound up in a graveyard myself once, despite all the white paint on the crosswalk and a helmet on my head and the red light telling the driver to wait their turn. What my candlestick collection did, first, was to remind me that I was not alone, by sheer evidence of all the other “near misses” out there. But then, as someone who had often advocated for more bike lanes in cities, it began to do something else. The candlestick pile asked a question: Is this really what we want to build? Bowling pins for SUVs?

Presented like this, the answer seems like an obvious “no.” Who wants to scrap for a tiny piece of public space in which to exist, only to be threatened with death each day nonetheless? No one. But likewise no one, yet, seems to have quite the right answer for changing the public culture of how we live and move together on our streets—how we make room for everyone.

Still the need and desire for new and better answers is there, buried in that old basement.

#3 Portrait from This Land project. The interviewees discuss their hopes of gaining citizenship, owning property and having the ability move freely without fear of deportation. 

Opportunities and ethics in the age of Internet music streaming.

The first part of a three part series on social and environmental documentaries began tonight at nw documentary. A relaxed and interactive dialogue between audience and speakers followed presentations by Kate McMahon, Frontline PBS, and Ed Jahn, OPB's Field Guide. Each speaker showed dynamic pieces of documentaries they produced illustrating points on the development of storytelling and the effects documentaries can have on public debate and legislative progress. 

It was encouraging to hear of the governing and policy changes that have manifested in reaction to both speakers' work. Ed Jahn's idea for the film "The Silent Invasion" developed slowly as he noticed the increasing conversation about invading species during other projects.  He found an engaging way to illuminate the problems of these migrating "bugs & weeds."  His documentary engaged over ten percent of the Oregon population.  And without trying to be an activist rally point his advocacy film changed our attitudes in Oregon from the street to the legislative halls. 

Kate McMahon discussed the progression from local events to national consequences with the documentary The Meth Epidemic.  As addiction spread from the west coast to the dance halls of NYC, her film team followed the progression back to it's cause, or "the power."  Giving both sides of the campaign to restrict access to cold medication the documentary allowed the viewer to have their own voice in the debate and come to their own conclusions.