Hoops, not litigation with Adam Davis

I can be kind of a dick to work with, just really demanding and insanely committed to story. My problem is that people encounter my smiley, stoney facade and don’t take into account that, at the end of the day, I am of a crusty, old-school reporter.

Like, some of you know I got fired from an Antifa motorcycle crew for being “abusive” a few years ago. Those quotes signify that I contest the description. Their inclusion says that I don’t mind being viewed that way. Sometimes I cannot see anything but the story, and life of actual people around me suffer for the tunnel vision.

Which is my reason why it’s great to have Oregon Humanities’ Adam Davis as the WCS podcast’s newest guest. I never expected to talk about the NBA with him again.

Oregon Humanities Executive Director Adam Davis

In the winter of 2016 to 2017 I made a short film with Oregon Humanities. My co-director and I were not speaking at the project’s end, and bringing that baby home for OH was one trial and a quarter. After that difficult shoot, I only did a little more local storytelling.

By summer I was back in Los Angeles, running the LA Coliseum’s Twitter account. Possibly my favorite part of the OH job receded, as often happens with favored co-workers when gigs to you are a disposable resource.

Retrospect allows me to understand how briefly Davis had been on the job when I began doing OH’s Conversation Project. He arrived in 2013, after a sting directing Chicago’s Center for Civic Reflection. The native Chicagoan has trained thousands of discussion leaders across the country, facilitated hundreds of community and workplace discussions, moderated onstage conversations with community-builders, office-holders, and authors, and worked on organizational planning, support, and growth.” He hosts Oregon Humanities’ podcast and radio show, The Detour, and has edited books including Taking Action, The Civically Engaged Reader, and Hearing the Call across Traditions.

“I always liked the amateurs playing in the Olympics. But I guess now they're just kind of too small when they're playing up against these grown men. But you would think that the basketball pool, like maybe they should like only include players whose teams didn't make the playoffs or something, you know, and give some of these other players some love.”
—Lev Anderson

My cohost actually provides the best reason Adam being on The Sojourn. Anderson, a recipient of California Humanities grants for two film projects, audaciously veers from the pro hoops track I was determined to keep our conversation on. That funding for America’s 56 humanities organizations is so obviously not about curtailing waste that Anderson could only set off a small rant about the culture war reasons behind the DOGE cuts.

Davis, whose organization lost 45 percent of its budget this winter, is suing Trump in Portland District Court. The idea that savings is why the nation’s entire humanities network has bereft of credibility. As the facilitator points out in our conversation, $3,000 for a creative project in Madras, Oregon or $10,000 towards a Seattle historical doc is all but negligible to the feds.

Venmo a tip my way and I’ll consider that going into a gesture of gratitude.

“We're talking about 5,000 bucks, [like] a rounding error means anything to the federal government,” Davis says. The funding can mean everything for the cultures that make us more than just a company.