The Crooked Mirror l Louise Steinman’s Blog
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![Welcome the Stranger: An urban installation for social engagement [Lublin, Poland]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63f5338a0fb0342f12db2636/1679860080727-LHZ35ZJH1TNJ5TD0OBUV/image-asset.jpeg)
Welcome the Stranger: An urban installation for social engagement [Lublin, Poland]
It's been an intense and magical week in Lublin, Poland. A Kabbalistic text appears over the archway of the Brama Grodzka; a flamingo is invited to perch in a storks nest high in a poplar tree; the words of Polish veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq are projected on the walls of the cultural center, reminding us of the hospitality that veterans need after the trauma of war. In the passageway of one the crooked streets of the Old Town, the voice of the local poet Jozef Czechowicz— killed in the German bombardment of September, 1939— fills the air... just near the vinyl record shop where they're playing Talking Heads and Miles Davis. And at the Old Well in what is now the bus depot— and was once the Jewish quarter of Lublin— a voice sings forth on the hour with the words of asylum seekers, some from Guatemala, some from Eritrea, Iraq. "I don't even know where this ship is taking me." "I'm sorry cousin, I could not save you."
Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child
What does July 4 feel like to a child in a cage in Clint, TX? To a Salvadoran mother wearing an ankle monitoring device afraid of being deported? How can one celebrate the 4th of July in America? The Statue of Liberty is weeping.
as I take care of the pupil of my eye
I have been corresponding with inmates at Otay Mesa Detention Center, where asylum seekers to the US are being detained. There are detainees from Mexico, Yemen, Iran, Tajikistan, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Eritrea, Columbia, and many more countries-- fleeing persecution, rape, gangs, torture, police, threats to family and livelihood. One young man from Congo, has been detained for two YEARS and 28 days. As ICE ratchets up new raids and threatens deportations, please think about these people kept behind bars in a country (once upon a time) predicated on the idea of offering safe harbor to those fleeing persecution.
Time Regained: Reading Józef Czapski in Billings, MT (about Marcel Proust, the Gulag, and reading as salvation)
He carried with him to Moscow letters of introduction from General Anders to the most influential people in Stalin’s inner circle. After waiting for many days at the Hotel Metropole, he was finally summoned to a waiting room at the notorious Lubyanka building, the headquarters of the Soviet secret police, where he was met by a “well-fed official” in a gray lambskin hat and collar who “looked a bit like Chichikov from Gogol’s Dead Souls.”
Resister in Sanctuary: We Won't Go
But what sends my memory into overdrive is RESISTER IN SANCTUARY, in bold black letters across a legal size flyer. It’s a manifesto written by Gregory Nelson, then nineteen years old and briefly my high school sweetheart. Greg had openly refused to register a year earlier, as required by law, when he turned eighteen. In the fall of 1968, he asked the minister and congregation of Grace Episcopal Church in South Los Angeles to grant him sanctuary, a medieval tradition, for an act of conscience.
"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?