Programming Note / A Very Portland Protest

Programming Note

As I’ve been working on the “#NeverForget” episode of the Touched with Fire Podcast, it’s become clear to me that my previous ideas about how often the show would come out were . . . overly ambitious. I was able to slap together the pilot in a few days because it doesn’t use any archive tape or interviewing — most of what was involved in that was writing, foley, and then troubleshooting. (Look up “phase cancellation” if you want an extremely dull lesson in what can go wrong if you treat your mic cables poorly.) This second episode has been considerably more work. I spent most of this afternoon listening to the Morning Edition and Talk of the Nation broadcasts from 9/11, broadcasts I listened to largely live. It’s been a harrowing experience — to hear Bob Edwards shaken and, in his own words, “vulnerable”, inspires a particular form of vertigo in me I hope never to feel again — and it’s time consuming. And I have hours of CNN to pore over, and a bunch of Fresh Air interviews to listen to. It’s gonna take the bulk of the next few days just to log the tape I need to log.

The upshot is that “#NeverForget” will not be ready for tomorrow, and I think it’s wise to basically say that the show is going to come out every two weeks. I sort of anticipated this, as you may recall from the first entry I wrote about the show. So there you have it: rather than turn out bullshit, I’m going to give myself an extra week for every story. This also means that season one will probably stretch until sometime next spring, as I still intend to put out 10-12 episodes before regrouping.

I anticipate that “#NeverForget” is a project I’m going to revisit for the next year or so. I anticipate an episode that is a mix of archive tape and narration and runs about twenty minutes, which is probably toward the long end of what you’ll ever get from Touched with Fire. But I’m going to spend the next year doing interviews, in anticipation of expanding it to an hour-long special that will contain less autobiography, to be released on the 15th anniversary of 9/11.

I’ve avoided the subject of 9/11 in my writing for a long time, because the day and its aftershocks leave me so heartsick to even think about. If I try really hard, I can get back in my own head on 9/12/02, the day so close to the first anniversary when the Bush Administration made absolutely clear its intention to start a war that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda, and to sell it with advertisements that were smeared with the blood of those who died on 9/11. It is . . . unpleasant. I remember it as a sort of waking nightmare that seemed like it would never end. I’m not 100% sure it actually has. I just got used to it.

A Very Portland Protest

I was listening to these tapes this afternoon on my iPhone, as I walked around my neighborhood, when I found this.

I’d noticed it before. It’s a spot where a house, probably kinda derelict, was bought and knocked over by a construction company. My neighborhood has a lot of houses in it that were kind of allowed to go to pot back in the 70s, when a lot of people thought they would be claimed through imminent domain for a freeway, and have since ended up in very bad shape indeed. A lot of these houses could probably be refurbished into really cool places — some of them have — but it’s probably just cheaper to knock them down and build new things. You see the new ones studded through the neighborhood. They all have a similar sort of slanted-roof design that doesn’t really fit in very well among the 100-year-old bungalows that make up the bulk of the neighborhood, but that’s to be expected, I suppose.

This draws some protest, sometimes, in the form of people who wish to “save Portland homes”, a tag you see grafitti’ed on construction signs around my neighborhood sometimes. I have to say, I don’t feel a lot of sympathy for the “save Portland homes” people. Old houses are not in any danger of going extinct in Portland.* Most often, you see this grafitti on signs along Division Street or Belmont Street, where old houses are being knocked down in favor of condos and shops. In this case, I find it almost entirely misguided. I think that one of the many lessons of history — especially of 20th century American history — is that cities change, or they die. The change may be weird and frightening, but it’s better than the alternative. I have no desire for Portland to turn into Cleveland or Detroit. Some of how you prevent that is to knock down the derelict and replace it with the new. A city by its nature must be a palimpsest.

*I realize that in some degree this is about gentrification, about which I have mixed feelings. Gentrification does in fact atomize communities, usually consisting largely of people of color. Portland’s historically-black neighborhoods up north have undergone an almost literal whitewashing, as young, white people have filtered in and made the rents too expensive, and the house sale prices too tempting, for people whose families have lived there for generations. But painting “save Portland homes” in a sign isn’t a program to change gentrification, so that neighborhoods can simultaneously become healthier and remain diverse. It’s just another bullshit Portland quasi-protest.

Anyway, I have more sympathy for this protest than the others, because this isn’t about houses — it’s about trees. A signal feature of Portland’s east side neighborhoods is that they’re heavily foliated, both with towering firs, and with fat swishing elms and oaks. A house is a house — it’s mutable, the people inside it matter more than the building itself. But a tree is a tree. Trees take decades to grow. They live longer than any human. And they give Portland something it otherwise wouldn’t possess: grandeur.

Portland is, in most ways, a small, cloistered, homey place. It lacks the rampant vitality of New York or Los Angeles. It lacks the history of Memphis or New Orleans. There are some hills in the west, there’s a mountain in the east, but in many ways, it could be a place that’s no different to any other big-ish city in America. It’s got almost exactly the same population, in the city proper, as Las Vegas. Do we want it to be Las Vegas?

So I think it’s important that Portland keeps its trees. Far more important than that it keeps its houses. I’m kinda with these people. What kinda shitass outfit buys some property and immediately starts cutting down 100-year-old Douglas firs? This isn’t a timber company. This is a housing company. Build a goddamned house around the goddamned trees, dicks.