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arthursmid.bsky.social
Life in Common
@arthursmid.bsky.social
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Community, story, strategy: arthursmid.com

Arthur Smid - Portland, Oregon
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arthursmid.bsky.social
PORTLAND, OREGON
Sunday, Nov 16
Doors 6:30pm
TOMORROW THEATER

Readings by:
Jon Raymond
Lisa Wells
Leni Zumas

Then the 2025 Belinale Golden Bear Award winning film DREAMS (Sex Love), by Norwegian writer and director Dag Johan Haugerud: tomorrowtheater.org/movies/jon-r...
Movie poster for a film called DREAMS, part three in the "Sex Dreams Love" trilogy
November 16, 2025 at 2:50 AM
arthursmid.bsky.social
PORTLAND, OREGON: "Those who love to draw are invited to come draw with us on our Sketchcrawls around the Portland metro area."

10am to noon Saturday Nov. 15 at the PSU Farmers Market
urbansketchers-portland.blogspot.com

@lastwater.net please repost this for Portlanders who want to draw outside.
Let's go back to PSU in November. The farmers' market will be there, and there's likely to be fall color. And a variety of architecture. If the weather is nasty, we can stay inside Fariborz Maseeh Hall, which is kept open for non-students, or you can get a day-pass at the library.
November 14, 2025 at 4:38 PM
arthursmid.bsky.social
@postcardsbybecky.bsky.social you probably already know about Urban Sketchers: "Those who love to draw are invited to come draw with us on our Sketchcrawls around the Portland metro area."
urbansketchers-portland.blogspot.com
Let's go back to PSU in November. The farmers' market will be there, and there's likely to be fall color. And a variety of architecture. If the weather is nasty, we can stay inside Fariborz Maseeh Hall, which is kept open for non-students, or you can get a day-pass at the library.
November 14, 2025 at 4:33 PM
arthursmid.bsky.social
"Committed to maintaining the physical and creative ecology of the site, supporting artists, writers, and creative thinkers, and sustaining the radical curiosity that first animated it more than half a century ago."

KESEY FARM PROJECT

Pleasant Hill, Oregon

www.keseyfarm.com
For decades Kesey Farm was not only the home of Ken and his family, but served as headquarters and ground zero for his work as writer, artist, playwright, impresario, prankster, and activist. It was also a lively, productive hub and test site for an extensive network of creators and thinkers.
November 10, 2025 at 1:43 AM
arthursmid.bsky.social
Ted Chiang will talk with ARRIVAL screenwriter Eric Heisserer about his debut novel:

7pm Friday, November 14th
The Elliott Bay Book Company
1521 10th Avenue, Seattle, Washington

www.eventbrite.com/e/eric-heiss...
October 24, 2025 at 7:45 PM
arthursmid.bsky.social
PORTLAND, OREGON - Gather: a happy hour for social good

Thursday, November 6, 2025

5:00 PM - 7:00 PM

600 E Burnside Street

Rontoms

share.hsforms.com/1M93ione9QWK...
October 24, 2025 at 6:58 PM
arthursmid.bsky.social
Illustrating Nature

illustratingnature.com
Student works from the science illustration program, California State University Monterey Bay
October 21, 2025 at 7:10 PM
arthursmid.bsky.social
"No one yet knows how to engineer systems that provide humans with the life-supporting services that natural ecosystems produce for free."

Julia Nordblad @julianordblad.bsky.social reviews two books examining consequences of the planetary perspective for politics: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Governing the Miracle Review products Blake Jonathan S. and Gilman Nils, Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024) Battistoni Alyssa, Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025) Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 October 2025 Julia Nordblad
October 16, 2025 at 8:57 PM
arthursmid.bsky.social
"Unlike most conferences, you'll see kids and kids at heart learning digital literacy, activists huddling over creative campaigns, and a community questioning the direction tech is going (and what we're going to do about it)."

MozFest in Barcelona: us19.campaign-archive.com?u=cdb853c484...
MozFest November 7-9, 2025 Barcelona, Spain Register now, and let's get festive in Barcelona!
September 19, 2025 at 5:04 PM
arthursmid.bsky.social
Pictures tell the Story: Political Cartooning in Portland

"Meet local heroes, mingle with other comic artists, and browse/buy some of the work by panelists, and other local artists and publishers."

Free event, 6pm October 9 at Pacific Northwest College of Art www.eventbrite.com/e/pictures-t...
September 18, 2025 at 7:07 PM
arthursmid.bsky.social
"Why religion and politics are perpetually entangled in our supposedly secular age; and how the power to call someone divine has been used and abused by both oppressors and the oppressed."

ACCIDENTAL GODS annadellasubin.com/accidental-g...

By Anna Della Subin @annadella.bsky.social
Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine A book by Anna Della Subin
September 7, 2025 at 6:41 PM
arthursmid.bsky.social
Cardner and Alex Babakitis (co-owner of Cloud Cap Games) are making games as Odd Candy: www.instagram.com/oddcandygames/

They designed an addition for Catan that turns it into an 18xx game, players can buy shares in any of the colors and ports and even the Robber: boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/45...
IMAGE of Eye Candy Tagline: A Weird Little Treat Odd Candy is a micro-publisher of card and board games in Portland, Oregon.
September 7, 2025 at 5:10 AM
arthursmid.bsky.social
"We've been working with Dave Elliott and Atomeka Press to bring back two of the UK’s most influential underground comics, A1 and DEADLINE, now reborn as one powerhouse magazine: A1DEADLINE."

www.instagram.com/p/DLjhJfPOg-u/
A1 DEADLINE Covers of various old issues of A1 and Deadline
September 7, 2025 at 5:06 AM
arthursmid.bsky.social
Interview with Adam Curtis: www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM9h...
Adam Curtis on the BBC, Politics & AI
September 3, 2025 at 4:52 PM
arthursmid.bsky.social
Democratic Multiplicity:

Perceiving, Enacting and Integrating
Democratic Diversity

Open access PDF of the book: www.cambridge.org/core/service...
DEMOCRATIC MULTIPLICITY Perceiving, Enacting and Integrating Democratic Diversity Edited by James Tully, Keith Cherry, Fonna Forman, Jeanne Morefield, Joshua Nichols, Pablo Ouziel, David Owen and Oliver Schmidtke
September 1, 2025 at 4:48 PM
arthursmid.bsky.social
On fire and making fortunes in the early United States, Daniel Immerwahr includes many examples of how fiction captured the age.

"Bellamy’s writing unleashed a torrent of speculative fiction, a surprisingly large part of which discussed fire."

faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/daniel-immer...
DANIEL IMMERWAHR All That is Solid Bursts into Flame: Capitalism and Fire in the Nineteenth-Century United States Forthcoming, Past and Present, Nov. 2024 IN HINDSIGHT, yes, the walls of the whale tank should have been thicker. That was regrettable. So was the construction of the snake cage, which, when the fire started, broke apart and sent its inhabitants slithering down the museum stairs and onto Broadway. The effigy of Jefferson Davis dressed in petticoats flying out the window was, luckily, more distracting than dangerous. Certainly, it was nothing compared to the orangutan at large, the rampaging elephant or the dirty salt water from the burst whale tank flooding the saloon. And the whales? The whales, reported the New York Times, ‘were, of course, burned alive’.1 It would be easy to dismiss the 1865 fire that destroyed P. T. Barnum’s American Museum as a freak occurrence—accidents happen, sometimes even to whales. But that wouldn’t explain just how often they happened to Barnum. In his memoirs, the impresario listed five times when his home, museum or circus burned down entirely. And he wasn’t counting near misses, like a blaze that brought his home ‘as near destruction as it well could’ or the failed 1864 attempt by Confederate agents to firebomb his museum. Barnum took perverse glee in the ‘dash & fire which attend my way of living’ and boasted of his readiness to bounce back from disaster.2 ‘I have been burned out so often’, he reflected, that ‘I am like the singer who was hissed on the stage. “Hiss away”, said he, “I am used to it”’.3 Barnum wasn’t the only one used to it.
August 23, 2025 at 3:39 PM
arthursmid.bsky.social
"... justify the use of violence against anyone that we label a threat to the existing order. And it makes people defer to authority. This is not like, I think, intrinsic to the idea of superheroes in and of itself. Anti-egalitarianism, that probably is intrinsic to the idea of superheroes."
Those are not things you want to preserve. But that’s what superheroes always do. They’re always trying to keep things the way they are. And superheroes stories, they like to sort of present the world as being under a constant threat of attack. If they weren’t there, the world would fall into chaos. And this is actually kind of the same tactic used by TV shows like “24.” It’s a way to sort of implicitly justify the use of violence against anyone that we label a threat to the existing order. And it makes people defer to authority. This is not like, I think, intrinsic to the idea of superheroes in and of itself. Anti-egalitarianism, that probably is intrinsic to the idea of superheroes. But the idea of reinforcing the status quo, that is not. You could tell superhero stories where superheroes are constantly fighting the power. They’re constantly tearing down the status quo. But we very rarely see that.
August 22, 2025 at 4:34 PM
arthursmid.bsky.social
"The existing status quo involves things like vast wealth inequality and systemic racism and police brutality. And if you are really committed to justice, those are probably not things that you want to reinforce. Those are not things you want to preserve. But that’s what superheroes always do."
I understand the appeal of superhero stories, but I think they are problematic on a couple of levels. One is that they are fundamentally anti-egalitarian because they are always about this class of people who stand above everyone else. They have special powers. And even if they have special responsibilities, they are special. They are different. So that anti-egalitarianism, I think, yeah, that is definitely an issue. But another aspect in which they can be problematic is, how is it that these special individuals are using their power? Because one of the things that I’m always interested in, when thinking about stories, is, is a story about reinforcing the status quo, or is it about overturning the status quo? And most of the most popular superhero stories, they are always about maintaining the status quo. Superheroes, they supposedly stand for justice. They further the cause of justice. But they always stick to your very limited idea of what constitutes a crime, basically the government idea of what constitutes a crime. Superheroes pretty much never do anything about injustices perpetrated by the state. And in the developed world, certainly, you can, I think, make a good case that injustices committed by the state are far more serious than those caused by crime, by conventional criminality. The existing status quo involves things like vast wealth inequality and systemic racism and police brutality. And if you are really committed to justice, those are probably not things that you want to reinforce. Those are not things you want to preserve. But that’s what superheroes always do. They’re always trying to keep things the way they are. And superheroes stories, they like to sort of present the world as being under a constant threat of attack. If they weren’t there, the world would fall into chaos. And this is actually kind of the same tactic used by TV shows like “24.” It’s a way to sort of implicitly justify the use of violence against anyone that we label a threat to …
August 22, 2025 at 4:25 PM
arthursmid.bsky.social
Portland, Oregon - Community Budgeting for All

Intended Election Date: November 3, 2026

www.portland.gov/auditor/elec... cc @peoplepowered.org @pbp-org.bsky.social
CAPTION Amends Charter: Portland residents decide 2% of city’s annual discretionary budget. QUESTION Should Portland create participatory budgeting program allowing residents to make binding spending decisions for 2% of city’s discretionary budget? SUMMARY Currently, the City Administrator develops the proposed budget under the Direction of the Mayor. The budget is then considered, amended as needed, and adopted by Council following public hearings and testimony. If approved, this measure amends the City Charter to establish a “Participatory Budgeting” program that is: ● Dedicated to increasing public engagement in city spending ● Open to all Portland residents, whose decisions to allocate funds to City bureaus and programs are binding ● Operational by July 2027 ● Funded annually by amount equivalent to at least 2% of General Fund discretionary ongoing resources, with City Council authorized to identify funding sources from entire City budget to meet obligation o Approximately $15,814,000 million in FY 2026-27 o Approximately $16,434,000 million in FY 2028-29 ● Compliant with Oregon Local Budget Law
August 18, 2025 at 2:56 PM
arthursmid.bsky.social
A new game store in Portland, Oregon:

Giant Space Hamster Games
5933 N Greeley Ave.

www.giantspacehamstergames.com
Giant Space Hamster Games
August 4, 2025 at 9:37 PM
arthursmid.bsky.social
"Boorman decided to make the film after his abortive attempt at dramatising The Lord of the Rings. ... It was shot entirely in County Wicklow in the east of Ireland."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zardoz
Sean Connery and Charlotte Rampling in John Boorman's Zardoz
August 2, 2025 at 3:08 PM
arthursmid.bsky.social
Portland, Oregon

City of Bridges: An Anthology of Community

Tether Books: www.tetherbooks.com/books
City of Bridges: An Anthology of Community Edited by Jessie Carver & Justin Rigamonti (June 2025) Emerging from a moment when connection is more vital than ever, this anthology weaves together a timely collection of poems, short prose, and comics that reflect an honest depiction of the ways 60 writers, journalists, and cartoonists grapple with connectedness, community, and coexistence in the United States at the quarter mark of the twenty-first century. Note: Profits from this anthology will be donated to Street Books, a street library that provides community, free books, resources, and advocacy for people living outside or at the margins in Portland, Oregon.
July 31, 2025 at 8:45 PM
arthursmid.bsky.social
At 50:45 in the video Wisenfeld mentions a graphic novel he's working on—an image from the book is also on his website: aronwiesenfeld.com/news
July 21, 2025 at 9:10 PM
arthursmid.bsky.social
Portland-based screenwriter and novelist Jon Raymond has a new book, God and Sex, out in August. www.criterion.com/current/top-...
Jon Raymond is an author and screenwriter living in Portland. His books include The Half-Life, Livability, Rain Dragon, Freebird, Denial, and God and Sex. He has also published a collection of art writing called The Community: Writings About Art in and Around Portland, 1997–2016. His screenwriting credits include Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, Night Moves, First Cow, Showing Up, and the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce.
July 18, 2025 at 6:47 PM
arthursmid.bsky.social
Alexandra Finkeldey, a freelance artist based in Kingston, Canada: artbyscatterbee.com/personal-copy
July 14, 2025 at 6:11 PM