According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a friend is “one joined to another in mutual benevolence and intimacy. Not ordinarily applied to lovers or relatives…a boon companion.” It first appears in “Beowolf” in 1018 A.D. as “freondum.”  Though the opposite of “fiend,” both words root in the same Germanic word soup for “love” and “hate,” so therefore inextricably intertwined.

 Here, two old friends, Teresa Jordan and Judith Freeman, both remarkable and accomplished writers and artists, born and bred in the American West, examine their own enduring relationship through the lens of Judith’s latest novel, the incisive, insightful, at times ruthless “MacArthur Park.” The novel’s core finds two older women, both accomplished writers and artists, born and bred in the American West, attempting to re-kindle their lifelong friendship after intimate convolutions blew them apart. Spoiler alert: marrying the same man may become a problem. No, not Teresa and Judith; her characters Verna and Jolene as they road trip across the West towards some notion of their shared childhood. What destroys friendships? Can good intentions alone heal those implosive moments of toxic intimacy almost inevitable in friendships? Who here has not lost a friend?

SHOW NOTES: Please spend some time on both their websites to appreciate the depth and quality of their respective creativity.

Judith Freeman: https://judithfreemanbooks.com/

Discussed in the Podcast:

Carolee Schneeman: https://www.moma.org/artists/7712

Judy Chicago: https://www.judychicago.com/

Elena Ferante: http://elenaferrante.com

Valeria Luiselli: “Lost Children Archive”: https://www.valerialuiselli.com/ 

Here’s great conversation about writing with Judith’s friend Barbara Feldon, yes, that Barbara, from “Get Smart:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NM1Vi-q1dg 

A special shout-out for her novel “Red Water” where Judith imagines John D. Lee's extraordinary frontier life and his disturbing, still controversial role in the Mountain Meadows Massacre through the eyes of three of his nineteen wives. Emma is a vigorous and capable Englishwoman who loves Lee unconditionally. Ann, a bride at thirteen, is an independent adventurer. Rachel, though she married Lee to be with his first wife, her sister Agatha Woolsey, is also utterly devoted to him.

Teresa Jordan: https://teresajordan.com/

In addition to all the writing, painting, sketching and storytelling you can find on her website, Teresa just returned from her residency at the Mesa Refuge, having been awarded the Marion Weber Healing Arts Fellowship to evolve her year of painting and drawing a different bird every single day into a book.

We’ve podcasted about the Lake Powell Pipeline, so we thought, as the drought continues and water levels continue to drop, let’s go have a look. We told our board about the idea and it turns out that board member Catherine Smith rafted the Colorado River through Glen Canyon as a teenager in 1955. We were so pleased that she insisted on coming along. We included David Petitt, a well-known photographer now painter, and of course, our producer and host Logan, his wife Angie, and our assistant producer Ben.

The level when we took our trip in May was only 1/4 full at 3523 feet – just 33 feet above the minimum power pool of 3,490 feet, or where there’s not enough water to run the power generators. Dead pool is 120 feet lower, at 3,370 feet. Because the lake dropped about 40 feet in 2021 they have been releasing 500,000 acre-feet from Flaming Gorge to delay that moment of truth.

But the big picture is that Lake Powell is really only of value to generate power, tourist economy aside. So if it drops below minimum power pool, then evaporation and rock-saturation coefficients start to play in. If preserving water is the sole priority, why expose all this surface area and let it seep into the sandstone? It starts to look like better water sense to send as much water as possible to Lake Mead. It’s an immense, critical set of decisions the water lords have to make in the face of the harshest drought in 1200 years, and due to climate change, looking like the new normal.

Now suddenly the Glen Canyon Institute — premised on draining the lake and revitalizing the river and deemed “looney” by Utah Senator Orrin Hatch — is gaining prominence, with Director Eric Balken finding himself in interviews in the New Yorker. At the end of the episode, we interview him too so he can help us make sense of our observations of both beauty and tragedy inherent in Glen Canyon’s re-emergence.

As we explored the re-emerging canyon, we also looked for Ancestral Puebloan evidence. Having found little, we reached out to Erik Stanfield, an archaeologist with Navajo Nation. You’ll his voice about halfway through the episode. 

Our trip begins with a long walk down temporary ramps as Bullfrog Marina continues to have to move deeper and deeper into the canyon as water vanishes.

For anyone concerned about the current global state of Democracy, which should be everyone, Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Digital Minister, may be our greatest hope:

“I’m not here to make citizens transparent to government, I’m here to make government transparent to citizens.”

She has flipped Big Brother, proving that this very same unprecedented internet connectivity can be harnessed to cultivate and manifest the very best of us as well — connecting instead of isolating, confirming truths instead of spreading lies, distributing power instead of consolidating it.

Very much due to Audrey’s work, Taiwan shot from 31st to 11th on the Economist’s Global Democracy Index to become a “Full Democracy,” and Asia's most advanced democracy. At the same time, the U.S. dropped from 8th to 25th, now a “Flawed Democracy,” also due very much to one man.

Here’s a foundational story of how she started down this road. During the 2014 Sunflower Revolution in Taipei, students and dissidents peacefully occupied the Taiwan Yuan, or parliament, for 22 days protesting a trade deal with mainland China, or the PRC. Audrey flew in from Silicon Valley, borrowed a laptop, plugged into 300 meters of ethernet cable, and connected over 500,000 citizens and over twenty NGOs in a real-time dialogue towards what she would ultimately call “rough consensus.” The demonstration won the day and resulted in a new trade agreement, very much due to Audrey’s remarkable and unprecedented real-time connectivity. The students remained completely peaceful throughout and respectfully cleaned up the parliament before they left, unlike other Congressional occupations of late. Powerful people in Taiwan’s conservative government took note of what Audrey was doing, and called her in to talk… and so it began…

I’ve listened to this interview countless times while editing, and I’m still hearing new things, so the odds are she’s going to just lose you, both with the technology and her philosophy. So here are two quick shorthands for each.

Per the tech: Virtually everything referred to, from Distributed and Polycentric ledgers to Multi-dimensional spaces to reverse accountability assures transparency, and empowers citizens, inspiring openness, real-time action, and the deployment of people’s different viewpoints. It all encourages plurality as a way to demonstrate, as she puts it, “our shared values are hiding in plain sight.”     

And all her philosophy, from calling herself a “post-gender, conservative anarchist” to the Lao Tzu and Taoist quotes sprinkled through this interview, are about cycling and returning power and voice to citizens, re-energizing the deepest, most fundamental precept of democracy: Power to the People.

View our complete show notes here: http://zioncanyonmesa.org/podcast-archive/steer-the-wind-audrey-tang-is-saving-the-world
https://oftaiwan.org/social-movements/sunflower-movement/
https://g0v.tw/intl/en/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang
https://theasiadialogue.com/2018/05/23/tsais-second-year-the-emergence-of-non-partisans-in-taiwan/
https://wtfisqf.com/?grant=&grant=&grant=&grant=&match=1000
https://www.snopes.com/articles/386830/misinformation-vs-disinformation/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_voting#:~:text=Quadratic%20voting%20is%20a%20collective,voting%20paradox%20and%20majority%20rule.