The Iskra Journal

art | politics | community | connection

  • The Real and the Unreal of Today’s Media War on Empathy

    Two Afghan refugees, who returned from Pakistan, take a moment to be children, playing outside the building in Kabul, the capital, where they live. The building was destroyed during the civil war in 1992. – The Post Intelligencer, Tuesday, September 2, 2003

    In March, after I saw the aerial photograph of mass graves at the Iranian girls’ school burial site, I could not stop thinking about another photograph I had seen in 2003. At that time we were a year into the war in Afghanistan, in what was optimistically dubbed “Operation Enduring Freedom.” After a brief two months scuffle in which the Taliban was “defeated” the war went on to last for another 20 years. I still read a paper newspaper in 2003. This was long before AI, and when I turned to page 4 of The Post Intelligencer I did not have to ask if what it showed me was “fake.” I cut the photograph out and kept it on my bulletin board for weeks, during which its power only grew. These two children hand in hand, the smallness of their bodies against the ruins, their ragged shadows whirling across sunlit rubble, and behind them the easy-to-miss but telling placement of drapes across each gaping bombed out doorway— the photograph closed the distance between the far away and nearby like nothing else I had seen.

    I contacted the newspaper and purchased a print, which I tucked away in my flat files and promptly forgot about while I kept the newspaper clipping on my wall. The real and visceral experience was the newsprint itself. The smell of it. The ink. The warmth of the paper and the image, soft and grainy. The official photograph, shiny and cold and bluish black, was divorced from emotion— and said nothing of sunlight. Here on the screen, with its strong black and white contrast, it may feel compelling; but as an object, badly printed quickly in a newsroom on glossy paper, it said nothing of the human immediacy of war.

    (more…)

  • When the Personal Becomes Political

    Fragility Study No. 1, © Iskra Johnson

    . . . and the political becomes personal.

    It has been over a year since I launched this blog, and after several months of absence, I have been reflecting on the changes since then. In an early post I told the story of sitting at a Starbucks on Highway 99, where I met a woman wearing a map of Moldavia printed on her shirt. She was reading a book, an act of rare distinction in the age of phones. The tilt of a head over a phone creates an inviolate cone of absorption that warns away interruption. Although our phones are subject to surveillance — and the entire world lives in the device, its intrusions ever ready to fracture our thoughts — the phone still somehow manages to signify a private room. In contrast, a book, and the act of turning the pages in public, invites curiosity. What are you reading? is historically an acceptable question for one reader to ask another, a social gambit offered under the assumption that a book signifies membership in a friendly tribe. Looking back, I feel like this woman’s answer portended everything that has followed in the year since. You must read it, she said: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.

    The escalation of authoritarianism and the collapse of democratic norms since that moment has been breathtaking. My April post about “The New Chautauqua” seems quaint. If you can remember that far back, some of us were upset then at something called DOGE, the dismantling of government agencies from Health, Education, Agriculture and FEMA to the IRS and Social Security, and the executive branch’s withholding of funds already appropriated by Congress. We know now where that money has been reallocated. At $29 billion, the annual budget for ICE exceeds the entire defense budgets of Israel and Italy. Instead of protecting Americans from weather catastrophes, flooding and fires, disease or the next pandemic, our government is obsessively focused on protecting us from immigrants, and from those who would object to the massive deportation program, which aims to remove one million people per year. It is the treatment of the objectors that finally broke through to the American public and began to waken them to the authoritarian project.

    (more…)

  • American Women Finally Get Their Own Crash Test Dummy

    ©Iskra Johnson

    In today’s health news it is increasingly rare to hear something positive. But this week my ears pricked up at reports of what may be an upside to the Trump administration’s obsessive interest in women’s bodies: the new crash test dummy designed for real women. For 40 years, a female crash test dummy has been “in process“ and somehow never got beyond the curiously miniaturist “Hybrid III” made of duct tape and cake flour, weighing in at 4’11” and 108 pounds. 

    In those four decades the top forty progressed from “Like a Virgin” to “Die With A Smile.” Generations of children aged out of college and into jobs at Amazon warehouses, husbands aged out of interest in age appropriate wives, and as the realization dawned that staying home to clean house and wait on husbands and children had accrued zero Social Security, women hit the road selling Mary Kay, Longaberger Baskets, candles and teddies, and for those existential moments between pyramid schemes, they worked the night shift, stocking the shelves at Walmart. They also got a bit larger, averaging 5’3” and 170 pounds.

    As they went from pushing baby buggies to cruising the highway, 17% more women than men died in car accidents, and 73% more suffered serious injuries. Many of these female casualties were no doubt driving, as I was last night, while listening to the radio, under the misguided notion that in an accident their air bag would hug them appropriately and save their life. I recently gave up my 1988 Toyota Corolla, and now drive a 2006 Subaru. I am petrified of being obliterated by its airbag, and now I know why: it’s designed to kill me.

    (more…)

  • Poetry: The First Mindfulness App

    Friday I came across a compelling reel by a professor of anthropology unceremoniously fired, along with every humanities professor, at a university in Holland— their departments elbowed out in favor of computing and business. It initially hit me with despair. I remembered a conversation at a cafe fifteen years ago with a woman who had just left the classics department at her university. Seventy-five assistant professors shared one small storage room for office hours; their pay was meager and the hours demanded exorbitant. Rumor was that the department itself faced the chopping block, as the last lawns on campus were commandeered for engineering, and new buildings bearing the names of the country’s largest tech moguls. Through tears of frustration, the professor stared down her laptop and typed out a new business venture, based on clowning and humor.

    (more…)

  • When 9.11 is your birthday. . .

    The Heron, © Iskra Fine Art

    Today is my birthday. Every September 11 since the “original” September 11, I metaphorically hide under the bed, hoping something bad does not happen. Something terrible happened yesterday, which has seeped into today with profound effect. In spite of my best intentions to avoid the news cycle, this morning I spent an hour and a half drowning in what feels like an insolvable momentum towards societal breakdown. No matter how much violence is reported daily in the United States, the assassination of a public figure carries a unique and deeply disturbing shock.

    (more…)

  • August | Reflections on the Turning of the Season

    August Lawn, with toys

    August, more than anything, is defined by the color of grass. City lawns have turned ochre, weedy, crewcut, no longer “lawn” so much as a prickly protectorate embedded with the swords of dandelions, across which no one dare walk barefoot. It is a landscape of exhaustion, where play is reduced to dereliction and the toys lie down with the drought-stricken shrubs in surrender.

    Walks with Blanche

    On Whidbey Island the yellow grass lies down in intricate whorls the size of deer. If you are walking an Australian Shepherd every breeze whispers something worth chasing, even if it is invisible, though on rare occasions it takes shape as fleeting hooves and antlers’ candelabra. It is good to have days when there is no excitement but this, the only other task being to observe the mountains, which I did each night and morning during five days in late August. Here, on retreat at the studio compound of artist friends, I rose before 6 to catch the sunrise, and sat each evening in the Adirondack chairs positioned solely for the purpose of watching the sky pulse and fade.

    (more…)

  • A Week Away with Words: Port Townsend Writers Conference 2025

    The Bench at the Bluff: Fort Worden

    Fort Worden: A Sense of Place

    Over the years I have been fortunate to attend numerous retreats and gatherings at Fort Worden, and I always look forward to return. Whether I am planning to paint or write or simply immerse myself in the company of others, time spent here is more than anything an experience of place, and this is where I will begin, before I unpack my bags, on the bluff. Here, with feet planted in dry grass and silt precipice, I can see out to the distance, across the strait and island to the sky beyond, sensing the edge of it, the vastness, the North West. It is easy in the city to forget that this part of the world is at the farthest edge of the country. This land, partially severed by water from the mass, has its own sense of being afloat, on a dome curving north, and reaching so far to the west it becomes east if you just close your eyes for a few hours and wait. It’s a vantage that feels infinitely hopeful, and one I carry with me long after I leave.

    I have usually stayed here, on the bluff, in the farthest of the white barracks, always angling for a room at the top of the stairs. I have been fortunate to have a room with a view.

    A room of one’s own.
    Waking Up: The Tree in the Morning

    Perhaps my favorite moment of the day is a walk through the grounds as evening light falls on the barracks. The silence of their peeling paint and doors to nowhere, their austerity and restraint, make the bluff with its wild grasses and wind feel all the more wild. The deer wander at all hours, and if one is brooding over the predicament of a verb, or about meaning, or one’s own place in the sentence, their gaze is a welcome benediction.

    (more…)

  • The 4th of July, Looking for Blue

    Lacecap in Lapis

    Lacecap in Lapis © Iskra Fine Art

    Yesterday was The Fourth of July. Fireworks had started the night before, keeping me up until 2. I woke groggy and leaden, and sat on the deck under a sunless sky, fitfully checking and not-checking my phone for news. In summer drought the lawn, now mostly moss, had begun to tarnish to a murky beige, and the only bright color came from a lace-cap hydrangea, its petals offering me the miraculous blue-violet my nervous system craves.

    In May I began scouting the nurseries for everything blue or violet, looking to gather a certain shade seen most sublimely, if only briefly, in the hyacinth. It is true what the mystics and the musicians say about colors. They have the power to heal and to walk us instinctually into rooms of memory and repair. Blue is the color of the Vishuddha Chakra, the throat chakra. I have felt powerless to do anything about The World, powerless to say anything of consequence, and powerless not to watch – choked, you could say – and my nervous system has been run ragged. In the morning I step outside to water the flowers by the door and let the color of African daisies and bell flowers and cranesbill and a particular violet petunia sink into my senses until all thought stops.

    (more…)

  • No Kings Day Chiaroscuro

    No Kings Day Seattle

    No Kings Day, Seattle Washington

    June 14th was a remarkable day. I began the morning in political protest in the company of 70,000 other people, and ended with poetry, taquitos, a carnival, and an unexpected detour into my past. At midnight I drifted to sleep watching coverage of the 7-million-strong No Kings marches across the country, flipping back and forth between peaceful protest and the gray slow-motion cavalcade of tanks commandeered for Donald Trump’s birthday. In Seattle, Cal Anderson Park, which had been a political battle zone in 2020, resurrected in a joyful amphitheater of harmony, purpose and patriotism. Clowns and giant puppets danced through the crowd as speeches celebrating the nation’s history and the struggle for justice echoed from the stage. Thousands of American flags fluttered from hand-held sticks, amid dozens of larger flags on staffs, their finials topped with cardboard crowns crossed out with an “X”.

    NO KINGS said it all: the simplest most powerful motto with which to reclaim the symbol of America’s founding. One tenth of Seattle’s population took to the streets, in one of the largest demonstrations in the country.                                            

    (more…)

  • Spirit of Place, a Personal Evolution

    The Russian Church, view from the Washington Irving

    I first began to hear the phrase “sense of place” in the late 1970’s. At that point in my life my experience of travel was limited. I had no car, no money, no formal education beyond the 10th grade of highschool, and a three-speed bicycle. I lived in a 400-square foot studio with cut glass doorknobs and a tiny tiled kitchen that matched thousands of other kitchens in the historic apartment neighborhoods of Seattle. Because I had no car and did not know how to drive I went only where my bicycle, my feet or a bus could take me. My routines were small and circumscribed by economic and spiritual urgency. I rose at 5 AM, practiced Tai Chi and yoga, and rode my bicycle to Chinatown 3 times a week to the martial arts club. I sat every day at a window overlooking the domes of the Russian Orthodox church, and practiced calligraphy, grinding ink on a slab of black stone and learning kanji and sumi with a series of Chinese and Japanese masters.

    My view of geography looked not to the globe, but inward, to the imagined and remembered. I built my landscapes from books, the soundtracks of childhood movies, and the Shambhalic images of transcendent consciousness adrift in the incense of the West Coast. I did not call this “place,” but it was where I lived. When I heard people talk about sense of place and where they had traveled (sense of place was never right “here”) I sniffed privilege: money, mobility and education. I wrote it off as pretension, particularly when people talked about Taos and New Mexico, their stories always accompanied by knowing glances and gestures towards the sky.

    (more…)

categories

recent posts

about

A mostly-words venture that elaborates on themes I have been exploring for several decades on my design, art and politics blogs. Here I will write about the connections between art, politics, life and community, and how we bridge the disconnections of time, space, tribe and opinion to live a life of meaning and purpose. (See more here.) Contact me at TheIskraJournal (at) gmail (dot) com.