Category: Uncategorized

“The pardons don’t just forgive, they endorse, transforming accountability into proof of persecution. Without our work, this chapter, too, will be lacquered in sepia and sold as heritage.”

January 21, 2025. The celebration carries on. For more than nine hundred days, supporters have kept vigil outside this jail, waiting for the release of those they call “J6 Patriots.” Now they greet them as heroes. My partner, the photojournalist Carrie Schreck, and I duck into a neighborhood pub to thaw. She’s rattled—I see it in her shoulders, the way she grips her glass. We didn’t know each other on January 6, but she was there, too—navigating a crush of flesh and fury, praying that if she went down, her body would at least shield her camera’s memory card from being crushed. Unlike our press-corps peers in Kevlar and gas masks, we had only N95s—hers obscured by a red, white, and blue bandanna. Now, at the bar, she’s sharp but bleary-eyed, her frustration spilling over. A Proud Boy sidles up, trying to charm, trying to bait. Inexplicably, she doesn’t brush him off, but instead leans in, ready to spar. Soon, they’re locked in a lively debate.

Ronald Sandlin appears, beaming like an old friend as he grips my hand. His once-public record—assaulting officers, storming the Senate—is in the process of being deleted from the DOJ website. He offers to buy a round, laughing a little too hard as he recalls a hundred and thirteen days in solitary at the so-called “DC Gulag,” where suffocating heat met him at the door, a dead roach his only companion. Desperate, he prayed, but God didn’t answer—only a voice through a vent: “Shut up. You’re in hell, motherfucker.” Before long, he’s inviting us to a steakhouse dinner, a victory feast in honor of another freshly freed J6er named Jake Lang. The invitation isn’t just hospitality—it’s a show of power.

Read the full article here.

Filmed in fall of 2023 in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, this debut horror short from director Kat DaVila explores trauma, escape and rebirth. Coming soon.

A metaphysical, multilingual POC best friend comedy for a bleak era! Highlights that comedy is a necessary form of activism. This short film concept is currently in development as a feature film.

“A crafty casino security officer is swallowed up by the seedy underworld of her small town as she searches for the man who allegedly raped and killed her teenage daughter.”

Filmed in the Pacific Northwest in 2019, starring Kelly Sullivan (General Hospital), William Shockley (Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman), Konstantin Melikov (Narcos) and James Grixoni (Twin Peaks).

Streaming options.

A deep dive into the American public education system with high school principal Keith Gledhill and high school vice principal Kate Howard-Bender.

Technically I am an American, but I wasn’t born here. I’ve always felt like an outsider, skeptical of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a nation. I didn’t like school — I could sit still and be quiet, but for the most part I couldn’t buy into the curriculum. I just wasn’t interested in the perspective being offered. American schools lost me at Manifest Destiny, I was 12.

I finished high school and felt free for the first time I could remember. I skipped my graduation ceremony, slept through it actually — I was tired out from the decade and a half of trying to fit in and remember things I didn’t care about. I’ve spent most of my adult life on the fringes of society: bartending, freelancing, teaching ESL to refugees at small nonprofits. I don’t think I’ve ever used my high school diploma, but, I’m grateful I did this thing that nearly every American has done  — I feel alien enough as it is.

In a strange twist of fate, I’ve become good friends with two high school administrators. They’re passionate about education, about equal access, about learning and about kids. Talking to them about school has given me perspective I didn’t have when I was in it. I wish I’d approached school for myself rather than as a hoop to jump through for everybody else. 

I don’t have kids. I won’t be going back to school myself. And, better late than never, I’ve starting caring a lot about public schools and what they do. About what the system stands for, about why it’s important. In the face of huge changes to our public education system, Kate and Keith and I are making a podcast because we don’t know what else to do to get people to care, too.

Listen to episode one: Save our Schools

Listen to episode two: A Nation at Risk

“On and on, life moves quickly. Scenes blur and become echoes. The transitory nature of graffiti and homelessness exemplify this phenomenon.

This is a book of landscape photography and cultural translation that reflects Seattle’s struggle for civic control in 2023 and 2024. The nation is aging. It’s wrestling with that, with its identity, with its appearance.

Brandon Bye’s photographs of the streets are layered, lonely, disquietingly familiar. He moves across physical and psychological spaces, attending to the shadows. In Bye’s pictures, you feel the tension of the times, a historic time when the number of people living on the streets spiked and became a potent political issue driving elections, a time when graffiti laws were loosened and then tightened. It’s all relatively chaotic, and the invisible forces that move this type of chaos are convoluted, to say the least. Solutions: slippery.

This work highlights the simple importance of slowing down and looking around, observing our surroundings in stillness, not in motion. Our environment is speaking to us. Are we listening?

Although public opinion varies on the topics presented here, the seesaw teeters on one unanimous, if temporary, agreement — More Paint.”

Author: Johnnie Joy Blue
Photos by: Max Shaw

I distinctly remember the first and only time I asked a trans guy his dead name. There was an audible gasp and the dressing room of drag queens fell silent. “Lisa, you can never ask someone their dead name.” At the time, I didn’t know any better. I only knew a handful of trans people and none of them were close friends. I apologized profusely and the room moved on to another topic. I was embarrassed but also grateful to be educated. I’ve always considered myself lucky to be in proximity to queer communities – I learn a lot from hearing their experiences of the world, of people, of themselves. This important book was deeply meaningful to edit and I am appreciative of Johnnie as an author for being brave, self aware, for letting me in, and for helping me understand his journey. This book gave me a better understanding of the trans experience and a better understanding of myself. You can download the full book here.

Editor’s Note

I know what it’s like to hate my body. I have a lower back injury and a crooked spine. I don’t usually like how I look in pictures. Most of the time the physical sensation of my anatomy doesn’t feel good. I have chronic pain. And yet, there is a lot of privilege in this flesh prison of mine: my gender isn’t a reason for my discomfort. I’m cis.

It’s been hard to internalize and recognize my own physical limitations and it’s even harder to tell anyone else about them. Every time I disclose my pain to someone and am met with a diminishing “you’re too young to have back problems,” it makes me want to retreat. Keep myself to myself. 

We exist in a society that prioritizes the ability to disconnect, from ourselves, from our biology, from each other. Self exploration is hard. And yet, the cost of not looking within is high. If we don’t know ourselves, we can’t truly accept ourselves, or anyone else. 

Nobody knows me better than I do and I extend that logic to every single person on this planet. When people are brave enough to tell us about their experience of themselves I think we should listen.

Johnnie wrote this book for his community, but it’s an important resource for anybody who doesn’t understand trans people — how they even know they are trans, why they should receive access to life-saving gender affirming care, should be allowed to be themselves. The world will be a better place for your understanding.

“Oma, it’s me.” I catch her off guard. There’s no recognition in her expression even though we made plans on the phone less than an hour ago. My heart sinks and rather than be sad that she’s losing her memory and her sense of self, I grieve my own perceived distortions: I’ve gained weight and my hair is dyed blonde to cover the grays that have been popping up for years. Oma doesn’t remember me and I internalize my personal failure to stay the same. Oma doesn’t recognize me and it hurts because I don’t recognize myself these days.

She lets me in anyway. She sees the takeout boxes I’m carrying and insists that they already brought dinner – she’s in the middle of eating right now. There’s food on her shirt and her face, something that would bother her a lot if she noticed. I get a plate and sit down at her tiny table. I ask her if she wants any and she refuses – she’s stuffed. But a couple minutes later she serves herself a huge plate and eats it all. I know she forgot she already ate and I wonder if she forgets to eat too – nobody is here to remind her.

When I’m home visiting from Texas, I tell Oma that I want to move back to Seattle and take care of her. She skoffs and tells me it’s a waste of time before she considers my offer seriously, but she doesn’t respond. She’s 86, living alone, and losing her independence is intolerable and inevitable. I feel like I don’t know her and I want to, before it’s too late. A year later I slowly transition to staying over most days and nights. I do laundry, I cook, I paint her nails. My partner fixes her car and teaches her how to use email every other night. We get a dog who covers Oma in slobbery kisses and does tricks for treats. And, Oma tells us about her life. She talks about the grandfather that I never met, about the war, and the camps, tells me about her mother, her brother, her childhood dog. She’s not an easy person to get to know, but most things that are worthwhile take work – I know this.

As Oma’s memory and her abilities decline, her three story house becomes a prison. I do the shopping, I invite her neighbors over, I bring her coffee. She can’t go upstairs or down to the basement, can’t really even go into the yard. My uncle decides its time for her to move into a retirement community. I hate it, it’s not what she would have wanted, but it’s not up to me. It’s not up to her either.

Years earlier, on a walk with Oma, I’m crying about my dog Ewok that I had to put to sleep. I’m embarrassed. It feels wrong to be this sad for a dog in front of a woman who lost her entire family in the Holocaust, watched countless people be murdered in front of her, lost her husband. Oma doesn’t console me but says simply “they don’t do that for humans” and I realize she’s jealous of Ewok, resentful of the dignified death he gets. She’s scared to get old, she’s never watched anyone else do it. After months of isolation and a horrible vaccination reaction, Oma refuses food for the first time in her life. She passes away days later. I’m relieved and I’m sad and I miss her and I hate that she left this world the way she did.