"This Is The Power We Carry"
Murder in Portland, beauty on the rez, this week's recs
Good afternoon from the land of coughing! I don’t know how it is where you are but, oof, as Kmele Foster put it in the latest Fifth Column episode (which is super-tight), he does various things at Freethink “when I am not suffering from illnesses brought home from my daughter’s school, which is pretty much like the Wuhan lab.”
That’s enough of that (cough cough). We are winding down summer in the city, which is fine by me; the past month has been like living in the devil’s armpit, at least when I’ve been here, which has not been very much, having reported from Kansas (abortion) and from Tulsa (art) and most recently from Portland, for a story that is driving me bonkers: the murder of Rachael Abraham by her estranged spouse, after he was released on $2000 bail by a fund that provides relief for brown, black and indigenous people. I’ve said it before: if you want to provide bail for left-handed Croatian tennis players, be my guest. But do your due diligence, which the Portland Freedom Fund - don’t bother looking them up; since Abraham’s murder they’ve scrubbed their online presence - did not do. And yes, that’s enough to drive me bonkers. But there’s something else going on here, a mystery at the heart of the killer’s release, a “how the hell did this happen?” scenario that either has a simple explanation (i.e., clerical error) or a more opaque one. Let’s just say, in the course of trying to find out which, I’ve been hung up on, and if you think you have a line on the possible machinations at the Multnomah County Courthouse or, maybe more specifically, prisoner release from the Circuit Court of the State of Oregon of the County of Multnomah, I’m all ears.
That’s Rachael, second from left and a girl her friends called Mouse, as a 19-year-old. She was 36 when she was murdered, leaving behind six little girls. The youngest, ages two and three, will all but surely not remember their mother at all. Sorry for the heartbreak but here we are. I think people should know how this murder happened, was in fact abetted. And I think that we have to do better, that we have to in a sense be watchdogs* when do-gooders end up doing bad things.
“It appears to me that they were more concerned about his rights than they were the rights of the person that he had [repeatedly] offended,” I was told last week by Margaret Carter, Oregon’s first black female legislator and also, Rachael’s adopted grandmother since the girl was a teen. “I am for people doing good. But doing good must not be done at the behest of a person being murdered.”
Switching tracks to the moving and the beautiful. Obviously I bear some prejudice, but I’ve also seen someone comment that “Offering” is the most beautiful episode of television she had ever seen. So come, come with me, to season 2, episode 9 of the Hulu series “Reservation Dogs,” on which my non-actress daughter Tafv Sampson was conscripted to play a part. A few clips, first, Tafv playing the spirit, with Lily Gladstone, who stars in the upcoming Scorcese film, Killers of the Flower Moon:
How did this happen, you might ask? I can tell you for sure Tafv (pronounced “tava” and meaning feather in Creek) did not want to do it, that she hates the spotlight, that the night before it aired she texted, “Everyone in my life is absolutely forbidden from watching that Episode by the way, that includes you.” Of course there’s only beauty and rightness to it, which I talk a little bit about here, starting at around 5:10:
I cried fourteen buckets watching the show; I have written previously about how many decades if not centuries have gone into making a show about Natives just so. Creator and director Sterlin Harjo talked about some of this last week on “Fresh Air with Terry Gross.” And on “Trailers From Hell” podcast, starting around 35:00, he explains how the original role he’d had for Tafv was in homage to her grandfather on the basketball court in “Cuckoo’s Nest” but Covid changed some plans, oh and also his mom and Tafv’s dad were homecoming queen and king at Indian boarding school.
In any and every case, I highly recommend Harjo’s work, from the grueling…
… to the so so funny
A few recommendations this week:
“The Great Canadian Grave Hoax,” Bari Weiss speaking with veteran journalist Terry Glavin, whose clear-eyed reporting on a devastating story that turned out not true was, you guessed it, met with reprobation from most of the media.
I would not fault you if, like me, you read “How Russian Trolls Helped to Keep the Women’s March Out of Lock Step” (Ed: “lock step”?) in last week’s Times and thought, you mean it wasn’t the anti-semitism? The Louis Farrakhan worship? The missing money? The infighting and underhandedness? Sarah Hepola and I get into it on “Women vs. Women! Girls Against Boys! It’s Cage Fight 2022 (with Russian Trolls),” episode 35 (!) of our podcast, Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em. Please subscribe!
Over on a Fifth Column members-only episode, Michael Moynihan interviews Bob Colacello, Andy Warhol consigliere, Interview magazine editor, knower of all interesting and glamorous people since the 1960s. It’s a gas.
Graphic novel I read four years ago and had a chance to re-dip into this week: Jessica Jones: Alias Omnibus is gorgeous and engaging.
For those who don’t check in on Paloma Media, and I really don’t know why you wouldn’t, we run a Person of the Day every day, anyone we think is interesting. I wrote tomorrow about Fletcher Christian, the mutineer of the HMS Bounty. We also have a daily visual feature called Beauty Mark. Here’s tomorrow’s!
Kisses and pie always xx
Your daughter looks so much like you Nancy and sounds like you. She did a great job. Such a good show, underrated!