Genius at work

Artists are the ones we get to gawk at.

While pundits rant, journalists drone, politicians hedge and various experts wow us with the jargon, artists try to connect, and ask us to think for ourselves.

My recent brushes with art bear this out.

I didn’t expect to like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Sadist murder is not my cup of tea. But friends were keen to see it, so I went. To my surprise, it moved me.

Both protagonists have a strong predilection for justice. Her cyber smarts and his journalist brawn skin the lies off elitist hides. As the Swedish film excoriates malevolence, a US audience, stunned to silence, recognizes our own culture’s obsession with power. I recognize myself, minus the culturalization. What if I’d not been taught this particular version of woman?

Or, take the work of a writer who raised a child in a racially mixed union:

‘White culture persists in holding material affluence as the highest symbol of achievement. The way this plays out in the lives of people of color and those who love them can be summed up in one word: cruelty. We suffer for a lack of basic resources because of the hoarding, the feverish consumerism, and the complete lack of concern by people who have more than they will ever possibly need.’
Ann Filemyr, Loving Across the Boundary

A new play, Bill W. and Dr. Bob, goes to the roots of Alcoholics Anonymous. Tendrils of happenstance and desperation brought two men to a strange discovery 75 years ago: ‘I need to talk to another drunk.’

Stranger yet, Bill W. and Dr. Bob knew they had to pass sobriety on to stay sober themselves. What feat of modern medicine has healed more lives than AA? The play makes you wonder.

I was also there Friday when musicians, actors and dancers told A Soldier’s Tale. Self-awareness hushed us all.

After the show, a man in the audience told us he’d experienced mindless military authority firsthand.

But the play resonated with him even more as a civilian, a playwright pressured to get a ‘real’ job to rake in money and status, coins of the realm.

I think he’s already got the ‘real’ job, one that offers the rest of us a deeper relationship to ourselves and each other than any other kind of job can claim. Artists pour themselves into work that moves us to reconsider our world, change how we treat people, alter how we process information.

So next time you pass a ‘genius at work’ sign, look out for the artists, and look out for you, transforming.

Photo Haw-wee

Peanut butter and iPads

There was once a wee child whose parents, in a pique of sound reflection (let us hope) said ‘no’ to his request for a snack.

Half an hour later, he presented them with a 3-D peanut butter and jelly sandwich of paper, crayon and hot tears. His defiance, of course, broke his parents’ hearts.

Fast forward two decades and find the young man, hungry for the magical (so we hear) iPad. He manipulates cardboard and glue into a spot-on replica of Apple’s fabula rasa.

His brother had his way of making miniature civilizations from snips of paper as a kid. Now he builds castles with elegance and code. The brothers launched a lovely new app before the iPad hit the streets.

Last night I saw seven dancers build magic for a rapt turnout of patrons. Verb Ballets worked experimentally with seven modern composers and seven choreographers. I once wished I were a dancer, until the day I noticed it wasn’t so much dancing I craved as the energy, the originality, the doing. I love how dance talks to me about making something with life and limb.

This week I forsook paying gigs for the sake of some timeless space. I now have two songs I didn’t have before, one of which requires considerable left hand practice to get certain guitar figures right. The double gift of song creation: if you really want to play what you hear, you’ve got to work out.

The best part of this week is reading a book, Women’s Lives: Multicultural Perspectives. I never took a women’s study course, so my mind is blasted into bits of revelation. Through this lens I notice, in a recent podcast, how male indie musicians call their female counterpart a ‘girl’ while kidding her about how prepared and smart she is. This alone suggests a place for me in a music culture stuck in gender roles long expired. Let’s name this place defiance.

Which brings us full circle to the child’s response to obstacles. He didn’t sulk, wheedle or yield. He played it smart; he made himself some art.

Resurrection row

I was born in Cincinnati. My father sang Barbershop and made sure the local pool got built. Mom taught me to paint and read and how to make puppet plays and beautiful cakes. Mrs. Wynn showed me how to make mistakes. I taught myself to dream.

Gramma carried Europe on her tongue and pitted cherries for Swiss pies. Grampa built his stone house under white pines and taught his sons construction.

When we moved from Loveland to a tony suburb in New Jersey, I played piano and thought about in groups and out groups and not fitting in. Girl Scouts was not cool but it was fun, with tent camping and folk songs sung in children’s homes.

My best friend and I laughed a lot. We made it through high school by sheer grit and common sense. She embraced my nerdiness and even became a scout.

One day I found myself in college with a mind I hadn’t noticed rising. My first three classes were German, art and film. I went on to study God. My prof inspired us all, then died of cancer. We never quite forgave him but we understood his pain exceeded ours.

My duckiness evolved to something else. Not so much a swan as something sisterly, and brave.

Guitar was just another thing to get my hands on and make things with. I learned three chords or so and felt inclined to try my voice at Dylan, Prine and Cohen mixed with oldies like The Sloop John B. and Go Down Moses. But I made no sense of who was writing what. I never factored nomenclature into songs; it seemed enough to sing them.

Years later, there I was all married and pregnant and a mommy peeling paper off the kitchen wall and the radio wanted to be turned off and my hand scribbled words on a scrap of mail and a song was born and I liked it and figured that was that, but of course it wasn’t.

It was only my mind getting hungry for her heart. My heart. My self.

Which should be the end of story. But all these songs later, I’m looking back and seeing something I hadn’t realized was here. I’m the same nerdy, friendly, complicated girl who’s good at certain things, bad at others, pleased to get my hands on something no one needs to notice. But they’re welcomed if they do.

Photo credit Walt Campbell