No app for that

There's not enough value on the web for the artist to spend much precious time there. Information is useful in context, interpreted, magnified by understanding. Wouldn't a writer be better off in a wireless cottage, sequencing ideas dug out of mad interior play?

The web stream is a dungeon ride through future world, suspended by servers and developers who offer the public a glimpse of life to come. Can the artist find sustenance, strapped into the little car, gaping at the blinking lights of silhouetted rights and wrongs? For this, one needs to do the work of genius, the dangerous non-linear delving into past shadows, present tension, future truth.

Granted, there are facts alluded to by characters of make believe. Otherwise the amorphous yearning of a poet would loll in the womb, generative and warm, unborn. But the web and the world of art are separated by vast and useless corridors of magnitude inhabited by hapless creatures of curiosity in a land of factoid feasting and unsubstantiated conjecture.

Had there been Web 2.0 in Socrates' day, the App Store would lose him in endless choice of chiclets, abandoning his voice. Internet is wide and small, infinity in thrall to scant attention span, while art is time and space and silent breath and confidence to muse them.

Empathy in concert

(Bob Dylan’s) uncanny relevance comes from reaching as deep into empathy as he can. -- Kurt Gegenhuber

From the Dylan poster on my nephew’s wall to the devoted Dylan fans at Muscle and Bone shows to the calliope of artists who perform and transform Dylan songs, it’s obvious that Dylan’s relevance metric remains high. Gegenhuber says this relevance hinges on empathy.

My latest conversation with empathy started this spring while designing anti-bullying programs for schools. Pre-schoolers just exploring friendship and older kids working out social puzzles test their capacity to occupy someone else’s point of view. If they fail the empathy test, they might fall into the bully trap where they can only find emotional highs by inflicting pain.

It’s not too farfetched to see empathy as the touchstone of a civilized world.

Even as I traveled north to carve out empathy lessons from world folk tales, I happened upon What Good Am I? on a Dylan playlist. I may as well have googled, ‘song that captures the nuance of empathy,’ so perfect is this one for teaching kids to be kids (ie. not bullies).

This is the relevance of Dylan’s work: it illuminates our capacity for human empathy. His characters say things like, ‘You’re right from your side, I’m right from mine,’ and ‘I know you’re sorry, I’m sorry too.’ He conjures up sympathetic outliers (Your daddy he's an outlaw and a wanderer by trade) and understudies (The vagabond who’s rapping at your door is standing in the clothes that you once wore). Songs like Hollis Brown and Queen Jane Approximately empathize with their namesakes from start to finish.

Dylan songs team with riotously unorthodox role models with enormous hearts. He lets us experience strangers without judgement, within a frame of tolerance. He eloquently demonstrates how art in the hands of a master fuels our empathy, perhaps our most elegant human instinct.

Painting by Manoel Lopes Rodrigues

Enigmatic Dylan

"Creativity is neither a rational deductive process nor the irrational wandering of the undisciplined mind but the emergence of beauty as mysterious as the blossoming of a field of daisies out of the dark Earth."
Thomas Berry, The Great Work

As I study lyrics of Bob Dylan, I often wonder how he experiences beauty’s mysterious emergence. I’d like to know how it feels to write a song like Blind Willie McTell or All Along the Watchtower. Is he proud, humble, satisfied? Does he wonder where it comes from, or does he know full well? Is he exhausted, as the woman birthing? Exuberant as a young pup?

I’m not sure why I’m so interested in these things. The artist who insisted, ‘I am my words” seemed to say my curiosity is irrelevant, that I know enough by inhabiting the words for the space of a song.

Maybe I just want a peek from the mountain top without the bothersome climbing. But that’s the mystery, isn’t it? How one soul accomplishes brilliance while another cannot, will not, dare not - we know not why. Hard work enters in but never explains genius.

I’m as close to Dylan’s psyche as he or I want me to be. In his songs he’s created a vessel by which I may be intimate, from a distance, with greatness. In some ways, he and every prodigal son pays the price of fame and fortune. Neither one comes cheap. In the summit’s glare, he forgoes the snug anonymity most of us forget to cherish.

But I still wonder - what is it like to spawn a field of daisies from your own dark Earth?

Photo Böhringer Friedrich, Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license

Capacitance

My dear father knows a great deal about frugality, magnanimity, cheese and bees. He can distinguish himself in a card game, tossing out helpful tips and random quips, all the while creaming his opponents. He’s aggregated funny and wise, humble and proud, stoic and wry into his crossword puzzler’s brain over ninety plus fruitful years.

But there’s one thing he’s wrong about, and I’m about to tell you why. One Sunday morning of my impressionable youth, Dad pointed out that a pair of hymn singers into microphones had little to write home about because their sets of pipes were enhanced by technology. I, the wee girl, proceeded to disrespect my natural singing voice for just about the rest of my life.

Enter the iPhone.

Today, after Walter and I recorded ‘All Along the Watchtower’ on his phone, I slid the file into GarageBand, juiced up the reverb and listened, dumbfounded by the transformation.

You’d think by now my long hours in the studio belaboring sound waves would have cured me of the misapprehension that only a naturally voluminous voice is worth its salt. But alas, until today, I felt like impostor mom raising fertility drug quintuplets on borrowed pampers.

Nevermore. A quiet shred of evidence enters my tender mind, a whispered brushstroke signifying truth. Philosphers challenging the sea, actors strutting the Globe, sopranos warbling to the rafters, Streisand any day of the week - those are another species entirely from the studio rat, the circus mime, the no-name dame who shares her glory with programmers, engineers and the miracle knobs they twirl and tweak.

A song that touches your inner ear, rushes through your veins, roars out your soul and changes how you are because a microphone stands open to the singer's breath, this is a force of nature nurtured by the congregate contagion of civilization.

Photo Ben Köhler, Patti Smith performing in Finland, 2007 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

I can't compete with Santa

The challenge and lament of kindergarten teachers the week before Christmas strikes a winsome chord in me as I wind down from a spate of arts residencies in far flung public schools. Ponder days disappeared from my date book mid Fall. Early excursions o’er gray interstates to small Ohio towns took my imagination elsewhere.

As small fingers smush graham crackers and gum drops onto frosting spackled milk cartons on the last day of school before that jolly benevolence and his friendly team of mammals drop in, I’m home at last, watching snow fall on black branches, without a thought to the snarled traffic at 55th and Woodland.

I heard this week, while driving, an interview with Alan Menken. He writes soundtracks for movies like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin. Asked if it delights him to have his creations glued, like gumdrops on butter icing, to popular consciousness, how could he answer but yes?

That some of my songs are now ear candy for select grade schoolers in the midwest delights me too. Scale that up by a factor of millions and I might have an inkling of fame’s delight. Is delight scalable, I wonder, or does fame bring a sack of antidotes to the progeny of joy?

This morning I putter in the kitchen, Bob Dylan’s Every Grain of Sand flooding my ear canals. How many songwriters stand in awe at the fact that a young man from nowhere (pardon me, Hibbingers) rose to fame and fortune on a sleigh named song? Access to stunning women, valiant musicians, world travel and the never-ending press parade - all are his because of words he conjured up to sing us.

Dylan’s fame became more than celebrity - neigh cult yet short of worship. The volume of his resplendent work, dependable as Old Saint Nick, assures us of his mystical existence. We don’t quite care if the cherry nose is from too much sherry or too long stints in the barren winds of inspiration. We love him, our fond jester. This clause is non-compete.

Except for the miracle workers who teach our kids to love school, competing with Santa is moot. His job, disguised as Dylan or parents or other consummate sages, is to twinkle and bestow. Ours is to anticipate, provide ballast in our reverence, and to glory in the magnitude of good.

Photo Norbert Aepli, Santa Clause on skies in Adelboden, Switzerland, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license

Verlaine and Rimbaud

"Situations have ended sad
Relationships have all been bad

Mine’ve been like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud

But there’s no way I can compare
All those scenes to this affair

Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go"
Bob Dylan, You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go


I’ve been reading Verlaine and Rimbaud who, by the way, did scarcely censure underbelly fare.

Here's some morning verse de moi à toi.

Ignore the glial pundits
Analysis assaults the brain
exhausting bright ideas that turn
to excavate the breach.

Cobwebbed attic 'musements
There's gold that looks like rat poop in these rafters.

Now that's a pretty taste

of what's to come!

Arrival
Scorn the chilling splendor

of your youth.

Disenfranchise feelings
of despair.

Aristocrats await you
in their shady goal

emboldened by their shame.

Gustave Courbet painting of Paul Verlaine

Digging Dylan

A 34 year old Yale paleontologist appreciates good music as he scrutinizes origins:

For inspiration I listen to Dylan while reconstructing fossils.
Nick Longrich, Discover December 2010

Playwright Sam Shepard has pondered Dylan’s original gifts from time to time:

Watch the transformational energy which he carries... the kind that brings courage and hope and above all brings life pounding to the foreground... it’s no wonder he can rock the nation.
Sam Shepard, Rolling Thunder Logbook

What is this strange, haunted environment he creates on stage, on record, on film, on everything he touches? What world is he drawing from and drawing us all on as a result? It is right here in front of us but no one can touch it.
Sam Shepard, No Direction Home

Dylan’s contribution to poetry, music and the muse within us all garners critical acclaim merged with urgent gratitude.

Dylan reminds me of an American Brecht, the Brecht whose poems were meant to be sung. There is the same cold humor, the same ironic warmth, the same violent and splintered imagery, the same urgent idiomatic involvement in the way things actually are.... Dylan returned poetry to song.
John Clellon Holmes, Books 1965

By leaving things out, he allows us the grand privilege of creating along with him. His song becomes our song because we live in those spaces. If we listen, if we work at it, we fill up the mystery, we expand and inhabit the work of art. It is the most democratic form of creation.
Pete Hamill, Blood on the Tracks liner notes 1974  

Dylan’s instinctive distinction between polity and poetry has fed the sensibilities of many a fan. A distant poet forebear of the bard understood this well.

Yes, Art is independent of Morals and politics, Philosophy and Science.... The end of Poetry is beauty, Beauty alone, pure Beauty, with no alloy of Usefulness, Truth or Justice.
Paul Verlaine in his 1865 study of Charles Baudelaire

Dylan, world class icon, has reminded us to be thankful for pleasure large and small:

People don’t value their obscurity. They don’t know what it’s like to have it taken away.
Bob Dylan, No Direction Home

He respects the demands on his dueling spheres of expertise:

The writing part is a very lonely experience, but there’s strength in that loneliness. But I’m a performer too, and that’s an outward thing. One is the opposite of the other, and it makes me crazy sometimes because I can’t write with the energy I perform with. I can’t perform with the energy I write with. There just has to be time for both.
Bob Dylan, No Direction Home

Today let us eat, drink and appreciate the appreciators of beauty, unpretentious and unabashed.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Photo of Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg by Elsa Dorlman, GNU Free Documentation License

The ten cent rule

When I was a kid, my dad had a standard question when he handed out my 10 cent allowance. ‘Are you going to spend it or save it?’ he asked.

If I said, ‘spend it,’ that was that. But ‘save it’ produced another dime from his pocket. I used to think my depression-era parents had ruined me for life with thrift. But today I’m grateful for the capacity to relish life in slow motion.

I don’t know how his Hibbing folks approached fiscal education, but ‘madman-jester’ Dylan’s ‘hilarious love of the wisdom and idiocy of words' (Gabriel Goodchild in Robert Shelton’s ‘No Direction Home’), in a canon vast and deep, let his pen wildly savor experience.

Dylan’s ebullient wordage pulls emotion and meaning from a culture where words are a dime a dozen. I think about this in a metro hospital waiting room, TV set to the winter boot parade, a new survey of pop celebrities and a Chase Bank app for mobile deposits. Talky words chase out rare thoughts; show hosts twitch their mega-switches at our helpless minds.

The other occupant of the room has his nose in a paperback as I turn off the babbling box. New arrivals consist of a little girl reading the funnies and a mom with her morning coffee. The receptionist ventures from her desk to readjust the strangely quiet noise scene but agrees to leave it be when I lobby for the peace. A small man of carved cheeks sits down across from me, two tired eyed women at his arm. They discuss the prospects of the morning in Chinese. Now we hear the little girl’s sneakers pad the carpeted hallway through a squeaky door between her mama and the warm tones of a cotton clad nurse. The stillness sounds like freedom.

Dylan’s early Village expertise juxtaposed him to folk shows, poet rants and boozy giggle fits. He spun records and read volumes filled with worlds of sound. He fed the syllables erupting in his mind with morsels of observation, void of TV gibber jabber.

Do mad potions flood the streets of New York while our parochial hinterlands stand desolate and dire? What if Dylan had stayed in Hibbing or got as far as Cleveland and retired? The ten cent rule applies. For every dime’s worth of real time humanity, you can either savor it gladly or choke on the smoke screen of easy distraction.

It doesn’t take a madman-jester to make that call.

Original photo Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license, adapted by Susan Weber

Free Therapy

This never made it to the blog this summer. Life intervened. But here it is.

You might say it doesn’t take much to make me flee the pungent porch on a late summer night for the sanctuary of bright lights, notebook and lanolin. But here I am, resigned to write, and itch and wish I were sleeping.

Lately I’ve felt too shy to pick up the pen. With an author like Laurie R. King churning out wondrous mysteries, why use up time I could use to read her words, trying to formulate my own?

There is already a writer in the room.

How does she do it, thrust me into the role of participant in the chase? Quite a role, too. Trolling British-occupied Palestine disguised as a male bedouin, absorbing the culture, disposing of villains. Or perhaps I’d best let the author speak:

'We picked our way over mile after mile of loose, jagged rock, and although Ali kept reassuring us that Mar Sabas was just ahead, I no longer held much hope that I should see the place in this lifetime. One of my boots was sprung, I had twisted my ankle taking an incautious step, my tongue was swollen with thirst, my woolen garments and the snug binding I wore around my chest chafed and itched abominably, and the patches of raw skin, irritated by the salt water, now stung fiercely when the sweat trickled into them. I had long since entered that timeless state of mere endurance, placing one foot in front of another until strength failed or I ran out of ground.'
Laurie R. King, O Jerusalem: A Novel of Suspense Featuring Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell

I often wonder what compels a writer to give her days to the creation of a novel? Is she touched by a force outside herself, some creative unconscious? Has she made herself worthy of that touch with preparation and hard work? How does she know writing is what she wants to spend her life doing? What is the wellspring of her sustained, intricate form of creativity?

A screenwriter once compared seeing a good film to seeing a good therapist. Both leave you more whole, your ID less fragile. Similar things happen to me when I'm reading a good book.

As the next Mary Russell novel wends its way through CleveNet to my mind, I don’t really care whether my writer questions are answered. Dr. King’s receptionist calls me in. The good doctor will see me now. All I have to do is read.

Photo Nikswieweg, Bedscha

Shredification

Certain sons and daughters asked to stow their overflow with us so they might follow their dream to far off places. Since I’d begun to clear out the glacial accumulation of stuff from our attic and basement awhile back, inspired by the dismantling of my dad’s place, I was less than aligned to the prospect of yet more stuff. But family can hardly be denied when room can be made.

I proceeded to throw out, donate, recycle and shred a heap of my belongings prior to the influx of storage boxes. Halfway through the journals, our paper shredder let out a prolonged squeal under the onslaught of words, and abruptly died.

I might consider this a sign to halt the decimation of beauty, in light of Goethe’s lines on letters (and what is a journal if not letters to one’s self?).

“We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last destroy them out of discretion, and so disappears the most beautiful, the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverably for ourselves and others.”
Goethe

Surely this genius from another time has the knack for inflicting guilt on pack rat journalistas everywhere. But really, would hypothetical future readers gain much if they even found time to probe my delving mind?

My theory - and I grant you, I am no expert on humanity - is that we’re each born into a mind that wants to cross boundaries. Mom and Dad and village can only provide so much point of view. Our brain needs wider fields in which to romp. Which we find, say, writing. Or climbing trees. Or staging plays.

We find playgrounds when we consume art too, which coincidentally gives us less time and gold for loading up on unnecessary stuff.

If making or partaking of art satisfies the mind’s will to fly, and if sinking into a cluttered life clogs the urge to think new thoughts, it behooves the human creature to take down the tent and clean out the cage (thank you, Tommy Smothers) with bold regularity.

As for generations to come, deprived of our burgeoning thoughts? Dear Goethe, let them dance with their own élan.

Painting by Cornelis Norbertus Gysbrechts

Artist Shaman

The shaman has been revered by purveyors of culture who link our storied past with a starker spiritual present.

Shamans of tribal lore dreamed in technicolor so that humbler sorts might have a taste of raw wonder. Are the artists of today our shamans then?

Surely not all artists. Some sell out. Some mistake celebrity for art or feast on tawdry expectations.

What separates the shaman from the shameless, in a word, is dream. The shaman artist slips into madness for awhile to gather up insanity for a world gone sane. Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne ‘shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers... while Suzanne holds the mirror.’

Why do we need what the shaman offers? Ah - because we are so dangerously civilized. Take it from the jungle lad, who sees these things.

 ‘The city people are very careless and very dirty. Unlike animals, they have no sense of personal cleanliness. They do not eliminate odor and sounds as do animals in the jungle. They could not go half an inch in a jungle without being killed by somebody.’
Dhan Gopal Mukerji, Jari, The Jungle Lad (The following Mukerji quotes are also from this book)

Shamans deal with life and death, it seems. The further we roam from our astute animal instincts, the less protected we are. Devoid of nature’s teaching, people crowd together, calling it sane to hoard the wealth.

‘It looked to me as if people were always saving money in order to be robbed.’
Mukerji

The artist shaman brings us close to nature, a drama of the here and now.

‘This is what I call drama, this theatre of nature, where no one hoards for someone else to steal.’
Mukerji

So here is the secret of nature; it happens now. We may champion the profit motive, but profit forces us into the future. What value do we find in the work inspired by profit and how does the chasing of gold poison our character?

Humans, with our vast intellect, have been caged and humiliated by our noisy swagger, prey to the very fools we emulate.

‘Being noisy and thick-skinned has made a fool of the rhinoceros. I have known people who have killed him from the grass by driving a poisoned spear into his belly.’
Mukerji

There is a shaman musician, deaf only in the worldly sense out of which she steps in the giving of her art. She would have us overflow with now-ness in the otherworldly principle of sound.



Photo Nick Farnhill, White Rhino in the waterburg Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0

Swoop

If there’s one place on earth where joy eclipses toil and grief, it’s music.

But there’s an endangered tribe running through the bliss fields, prone to miss the magic. You guessed it - musicians.

Recently I heard Judy Collins describe her struggle with depression, alcohol and drugs from early on. If a singing angel yearns for joy in the midst of plenty, what’s to become of the rest of us?

Many people tell me they love music. Some of them are musicians. Most of them are connoisseurs, curators of their music collections, fans of bands and troubadours. At least that’s how it seems to me, but of course I’m biased because I’m a musician endangered by the making of music.

Music can be a buffer against the cares of the world. A friend of mine had a tough childhood. Hank Williams on the radio at night was his refuge and salvation.

But it’s hard to find joy in a craft you love that also says ‘get out there for the world to hear.’ Getting it out there is more than hooking up some mics and amps and letting ‘er rip. It’s a rowdy expertise we call ‘marketing’ which has a tendency to leak frustration, doubt and a certain crass materialism into the pure realm of music euphoria.

Imagine a winged creature at home on the wind, suddenly forced to truck around bird ads on her skinny legs and spritely feathers. You think we’d expect her to sing too?

I haven’t figured out how to avoid the derangement of the market place. Yes, I do love music. But I’m hopelessly inept at sales. ‘Swoop with me into the wild blue yawn?’ I might as well tell you to get religion (my religion), which won’t be happening anytime soon.

See what I mean? Hopeless.

Painting Margret Hofheinz-Döring, Meeting of Birds Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

Why do music?

My sister Mariah’s got a phenomenal cache of recipes. A large bunch of fresh dill from a Chicago farmer’s market needed one.

‘Do you have Mrs. Waltz’s dill bread recipe?’ I asked her. She clicked back immediately, ‘It’s in Mom's recipe booklet I gave you, Montana Dilly Casserole Loaf - and I love the attached potato salad recipe - it's the first thing I thought if when I heard fresh dill.'

Mariah’s our family recipe caretaker. Our mother used to say, ‘I’m not a good cook. I just have good recipes.’ Because of Mariah, Mom feeds us still. Caretakers abound where humans love.

2 Men and a Campfire shared songs they love at the Beck Cafe Thursday night. Cat Stevens, Paul Simon, Lennon-McCartney songs with spot on harmonies and well hewn guitar grooves had us humming down nostalgia lane. Dale and Ryan care for the good songs when they perform them and emulate them in their own compositions.

An original Lennon lyric sheet just went for $1.2 million at Sotheby’s. I’ll take the live rendition any day. Recipes are made for cooking/eating, songs for singing/hearing.

And what to make of the 45-year-old carpenter who retrieved his high school class ring from a quarry he’d lost it in as a boy, swimming with friends? Care taking is a communal story. Somebody’s got to drain the quarry and somebody’s got to want what’s down there.

Recently I strapped on my guitar to begin again to sing the songs I left behind some years ago. It can seem pointless, in the glut of digital music distribution, to be caretaker of songs I write. The communal piece appears lacking - no Beatlemaniacs or Dylanatics revere my tunes, hankering for more. Scarcely friend nor kin has asked about the golden ring ‘on a ledge that would have been 35 feet under the water line.’ I guess it’s up to me to drain the quarry and tote the ring, both.

A recent TED talker describes his 'why' discovery this way: ‘People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.’ He says rational explanations about how a product is so necessary and desirable miss the point entirely. Buying decisions are made in the intuitive, feeling part of our brain. The ‘why’ of our exertions draws others to things we revere and offer up creatively.

It’s not the zeitgeist's job to track down my songs for posterity. I’m the caretaker, quarry drainer, ring bearer - chief cook and bottle washer. I do it because I love making music. I do it for community. I do it for love.

Day dreams

What would make this a perfect day? Accomplishing tasks... creative work... friendship... earnings... life changing event... humor... acclaim?

Why did I once seek a stage - draw attention to myself? Could be something musicians do; we love to love and that’s how we know to do it.

Maybe the culture makes us all into publicity hounds. Mom wanted to be published. She loved the story of Grandma Moses. Did that touch me too?

Derek Sivers says a leader is a nut with a great idea. The first follower transforms the lone nut into a leader. We can’t all be leaders.

After all, I was raised to please, not to lead. But this very upbringing turned me against forced acquiescence. Pliable robot, Stepford wife: not my style. The problem was, I didn’t have a good model for non-Stepford attitudes, so I winged it. Didn’t know ‘assertive’ so I became stubborn. Wasn’t mouthy so I did sullen instead. Rejected sappy and soft, took up cynical and detached.

Much of that’s behind me now. I’m on the verge of wisdom, though it’s slow going. I often yearn for discipline and simplicity. A home that echos an urge to create. Less stuff in and around me, more space for the bold new thought.

Yesterday I finished a book, paid bills, shredded documents and whittled away at email. Word is I’ll have all this soil prepared by June 1 for planting new ideas. What good is rehash of the past or chewing on the webosphere one more time? Not much.

I asked what would make this day perfect. The answer is always the same. Something new. A thought, a realization that veers me off to someplace unexpectedly beautiful and clear. Clarity is of the goddess. All the rest is muddle.

Muck is of the she devil. She hangs out here because she tricks me into thinking I’ve been stubborn, sullen and detached in all my dealings, even towards her, but I only really treated me that way. Her? I feather her nest with bits of mental, physical and spirit clutter, which she adores.

So here’s the new idea. Clarity cancels out chaos. And once I know this, I’m on a road to perfect days. Free and clear.
Painting Paul Gauguin, The Dream

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

What's the big idea?

Or rather, what’s your big idea? Not trusting great ideas to conscious memory, I dutifully transcribe them. Some capture the wild beast in few words:

‘You cannot see the red-hot knitting needles spirted [sic] out by that red-faced trumpeter... which needles aforesaid penetrating the tympanum, pierce through and through your brain without remorse.’
Subversive Sounds, Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans

Some hold kernels of truth, ancient and modern:

‘All down history nine-tenths of mankind have been grinding corn for the remaining tenth and have been paid with husks and bidden to thank god they had the husks.’
David Lloyd George

Others suggest seeds of change:

‘It is impossible to overstate the significance of a sixteen-year-old Southern boy’s seeing genius for the first time in a black. We literally never saw a black then in any but a servant’s capacity. It had simply never entered my mind - that I would see this for the first time in a black man. But Louis [Armstrong] opened my eyes wide, and put me to a choice. Blacks, the saying went, were ‘all right in their place.’ What was the ‘place’ of such a man, and of the people from which he sprung?’
The Louis Armstrong Companion, Joshua Barrett

Excellent ideas can be complex:

'Jazz was not simply the free expression of individuals who happened to be black, Creole, or white. Race shaped the music, but the effect of race goes beyond the race of the musicians. A political analysis of the music must take into account the multifaceted interactions among musicians, audience members, and opponents of the music.’
Subversive Sounds, Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans

Big ideas can hit you in the gut:

‘The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours. The sovereignty you have over your work will inspire far more people than the actual content ever will.’
Ignore Everybody

So what’s the big idea, writing about creativity? All these quotation marks are like chicken feet, poised outside the great ah-ha.

Cluck cluck. Time to brave honest thought, from inside out.

Public domain image, Stamp of the Faroe Islands

Holding lemons

I once found an early morning perch on a wood bench surrounded by lemon trees and vineyards sloping towards the Mediterranean. Diffused light entered open windows and doorways of homes nested in grapevines and cobbled streets.

Caffeine at my elbow, pen and notebook peaceably open, my gaze bending toward sound, I listened to the newness of the day. Muffled voices, cook pots, barking dogs and bird calls caught my silent salvo in mid air, orchestrating morning with song.

It has been too long since I’ve thought of this time where nothing stood between me and myself, nothing but beauty, that is. I act as though it doesn’t matter how I fill the hours so long as I’m well and happy, harming no one.

As though I’ll never die or, when I do, I’ll never wish I’d sought out moments where difference and leisure and weather and dare conspired to free me from lesser masters. Surely we all have work to do and promises to keep, but tell the truth. Is worthy work the only captor on the prowl?

In a few days I’ll mark the anniversary of my last music concert, dished out to sensitive souls who reveled in the liveness of it all.  Labor intensive was the life of a performer, even at its best. Ego intensive, at its worst.

Yesterday a friendly neighbor asked when I plan to take the stage again. ‘Your fans are getting restless!’ he declared. I waited one beat to feel a miniscule bite of pride or seduction penetrate my hide. Nothing. The auto responders once so keen on believing just about any wisp of affirmation have, apparently, gone missing.

Adieu. Adios. So long.

Which isn’t to say a microphone and six strings are altogether out of the picture. Just that something intrinsic to self-reliance has found its welcome here again.

Maybe it’s been a good idea to write about creativity for awhile, swaddling whatever was broke inside a gauzy sheath. I have a feeling this blog may take a turn. And feeling, don’t I know, is good to have.

Public domain painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Girl Holding Lemons

Crazy is as crazy does

‘When you see a Gauguin,’ writes Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, ‘you think, This man is living in a dream world. When you see a van Gogh, you think, This dream world is living in a man.’

Artists are supposed to be our designated crazies.

‘We gawk and stare as the painters slice off their ears and down the booze and act like clowns. But we rely on them to make up for our own timidity, on their courage to dignify our caution. We are spectators in the casino, placing bets... and we can sometimes convince ourselves that having looked is the same as having made, and that the stakes are the same for the ironic spectator and the would-be saint. But they’re not. We all make our wagers, and the cumulative lottery builds museums and lecture halls and revisionist biographies. But the artist does more. He bets his life.’
Adam Gopnik, Van Gogh’s Ear, The Christmas Eve that changed modern art

Gopnik points out that our judgement of mad artists parallels their success, or failure, in creating great art.

'Gauguin’s is a prime real-life case where doing the wrong thing - abandoning your wife and children and betraying your friends - appears to be morally justifiable, since the art made was, as it happened, great... His decision to abandon his family for art looks heroic, in retrospect, because luck was a lady - a muse - who blew on his dice.’

Van Gogh was awkward around people, his manic depression untreated, his oddness off putting. Estrangement, merged with his desire for authentic community, infused his paintings. ‘His inability to join the living doesn’t erode his delight in life,’ writes Gopnik.

Perhaps the ultimate act of insanity, for any artist, is persevering without the slightest assurance that anyone else will ever value the work.

‘The letters of van Gogh’s last year mark his acceptance of his isolation, coupled with the belief that the isolation need not be absolute - that, one day, there will be a community of readers and viewers who will understand him, and that his mistake had been to try and materialize that community in the moment instead of accepting it as the possible gift of another world and time.’
Adam Gopnik, Van Gogh’s Ear, The Christmas Eve that changed modern art

A 21st century bard, Pere Ubu’s David Thomas, echoes this in a recent Plain Dealer interview.

‘I'm too old to pay attention to much anymore, other than just getting the work done that I've got to get done. Whether anybody hears it or not, that's not my problem. There's no point in worrying about it.’

A fan club spanning time and space so vast that never may the artist know of its existence. Just another instance of an artist out of touch with reality? In face of public indifference, ‘saner’ artists put down their instruments, forfeiting their chances to endure.

Painting by Vincent van Gogh, Vincent Willem van Gogh

Wyatt and Vincent

They lived oceans apart in the later days of the 19th century, Earp the gunslinger, Van Gogh the psychedelic sower.

From a distance, they could be brothers. At the moment I'm feeling a bit too boringly sane to editorialize further, but we can track their smokey trails in these two eloquent documents.

Notes from American Experience - Wyatt Earp on PBS:

Wyatt is accused of stealing a horse in Van Buren, Arkansas. He evades punishment by fleeing... spends the next several years in saloons, gambling houses, and brothels of the frontier. He has multiple relationships with prostitutes, as well as several arrests for his involvement with them.

Wyatt Earp never lost the quiet charisma that had inspired loyalty and hatred in Tombstone.

He did not look old, a friend recalled. Somehow like a mountain or desert, he reduced you to size.

He died at home unsure of his legacy without ever making sense of the forces that had shaped his life.

Notes from The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Provence:

Vincent - as usual connecting everything in his mental world - added Wagner to Monticelli, Delecroix, the Dutch painter Jongkind and himself in a list of crazy drunks and heavy smokers. These had all hit the bottle or lit their pipes, Vincent presumed, because of the mental exhaustion of devising complex harmonies of notes or colors.

That was no doubt what Vincent hoped to achieve with his painting: to find in art a force stronger than his neurotic temperament.

“Old Gauguin and I understand each other basically, and if we are a bit mad, what of it?” [said Vincent.] They would be vindicated - he thought, entirely correctly - by their pictures.

Vincent wasn’t only an inspired, mad artist; he was a great painter desperately trying to remain sane.

Photo credits Dodge City Peace Commission, Wyatt Earp and unknown, Vincent Van Gogh