The Crooked Mirror l Louise Steinman’s Blog
Journeys within and beyond
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"Happiness is Bullshit" Celebration of the Life of Judge Harry Pregerson
When asked once what guided his decisions, Judge Pregerson explained: “My conscience is a product of the Ten Commandments, the Bill of Rights, the Boy Scout Oath and the Marine Corps Hymn. If I had to follow my conscience or the law, I would follow my conscience.”
A psycho-geographic walk in Warsaw
My first stop was just a few blocks from my apartment, on the banks of the Vistula. The sun was bright and children were soaking up the last days of summer, splashing themselves in the fountain at the base of the Syrene of Warsaw, the mythical symbol of that grand city's defiance, who rears up on bronze waves on her Piscene tail, holding her sword aloft. A mermaid as a symbol of a city? I thought about the value of hybrids, what it means to be part human and animal, how hybrid forms are for non-conformists, for breaking norms that we've outgrown. And most of all, the siren must be heard.
July 4th 2017
A second visit to the Kerry James Marshall show at MOCA, the last weekend before it closes, is a stirring reminder of what an artist can do to deepen our understanding of our country’s tortured race history and as well, its resilience. He does so by including those who have been excluded from the shared narrative, by painting them back into the national story,putting them center-stage into the American storybook, into small towns, into the backyard barbeques in Culver City,CA in the 50’s of my childhood, barbecues in parks to which no African-Americans were invited. To the neat streets-on-a-grid post-war stucco one-story houses in the city where I grew up-- where African-American families were not allowed to buy a home, not allowed to live. It was called a covenant. it was silent.
Ceremony of Forgiveness/ Night before the Electoral College
Reeling from the latest barrage of globally catastrophic images—my mind gravitates to that startling and necessary image—beamed to us from Standing Rock.It is the image of a U.S. veteran named Wesley Clark, Jr kneeling down, with veterans of various American combat units standing behind him—offering his formal apology to Lakota Medicine Man Leonard Crow Dog. Who ever thought we would see this in our life time?
Elegantly Wrapped Dung: Or, a Polish Journalist's Posthumous Victory
Maciej fought against the erasure of the town’s murdered Jewish citizenry, and published over 60 articles about Radomsko’s Jewish history. He welcomed uncomfortable discussions and mentored young journalists. He was a storyteller, a scrapper, a gadfly. He did not abide bullshit.
Which was why, in 2004, he wrote a scathing article criticizing a hair-brained government scheme to use “quail farming to solve local unemployment.” He titled his editorial “Elegantly Wrapped Dung” (“Łajno – elegancko opakowane”).
A Return (Chatham Cemetery, August 2016)
Usually when we walk, we’re the only ones there. A few days ago, we encountered a rare invasion: pick-ups parked along the gravel drive; young men with weed whackers cleaning around graves. What had summoned so many volunteers on a hot afternoon? A friendly matron collecting litter filled us in: a WW2 soldier was soon to return home. She pointed to a grave bedecked with small American flags where the remains of PFC George Traver, a Marine born in Chatham in 1918, will soon be re-interred from a mass grass on Tarawa, a coral atoll in the Pacific. Travers died there in November 1943, along with a thousand other Marines and some 4500 Japanese (most of whom fought to their dea
A Peaceful Return
Those flags with their bright red disks on white silk were just like the one I found with my father's possessions, after he died, in an envelope with one of his letters home from combat in Luzon and wrote about in my memoir, The Souvenir. These flags on display in the darkened gallery are the centerpiece of an unusual exhibition called “A Peaceful Return: The Story of the Yosegaki Hinomaru” at the Columbia River Maritime Museum in Astoria, Oregon.
Among the Righteous, on the passing of Marian Bereska
I can’t let 2015 fade into the night without making mention of a remarkable man who passed away in a little town in central Poland on December 20, the day before the winter solstice.I had the privilege of meeting Marian Bereska first in 2009, when he finally was willing to tell his story of how he and is mother Janina together hid five Jews from the Radomsko ghetto in their little house.
