Portlandorusnow is 15. Its interest in the arts in Portland goes back about 10 years before. We are still having fun! Our intent has always been to note events in advance of their happening, sometimes shortly, to a day, to a few days. We aren't interested in theory, criticism or history; we are interested in our own immediate experience; sometimes the work or the artist's relationship to our experience. We don't want more readers, we want reader to reader relationships. We list work we like and think well of. We list work in genres we are uninterested in, but think is good within its context. We list events to meet other creatives for conversation. We list unusual events that might be below your radar.
We are going to make just about our only political post ever. June 4 is also 30 in relation to the Tiananmen coda to the Chinese Democracy Movement of 1978-1989. Americans process June 4, 1989 Tiananmen in the American Christian absolutist and judgmental framework. I think the crushed aspiration of two generations and the lost discussion of democracy in China is the greater loss. The real source material is democracy wall posters. In that era, and early 1990's, the discussion within China was whether the Northern values of the Revolution or the Southern values of business at at any dishonest cost would prevail.
What would China be today if local and provincial democracy had headed off corruption? On need only look at artist Ai Wei Wei's art works around the Sichuan earthquake. This year is a good time to revisit the film Gate of Heavenly Peace, contemporaneous to the 1989 democracy movement. Readers may disagree, but a slight compromise by the students and the government could have created a better outcome. The government should have given the students the responsibility to organize an advisory shadow young persons' NPC. The topic is of interest to me, I was scheduled to travel to China that exact time to study Tai Chi.
American democracy is in trouble, so we can focus here, rather than afar. We have a broken mediasphere, a broken social mediasphere, education falling behind, a lack of interest, and more. Only we can fix American democracy.
