Whisky echo bravo echo romeo

That’s me. My name, spelled out by the reservations clerk over the phone last week.

It could also be the Julie Roberts character line in Larry Crowne. Campus lush to Juliette luscious in two easy hours of movie magic.

Or, make it a writing challenge: use whisky-echo-bravo-echo-romeo in a song set in Dodge City 1848, sans cliché. Good luck.

I just got home from a short stay with kin who live in a seniors village. I’m glad for them for whom the stress of accomplishment has subsided. I’m saddened by the sure knowledge that we the boomer-gen will likely one day frame our wanderings in borders of sore knees, stiff backs and way too many keepsakes.

But consider 60 year old Diana Nyad, about to swim 60 consecutive hours in shark and jelly fish infested waters from Cuba to Florida. She has a different take on aging: “I want the candle to burn bright. We have changed a lot. Our parents’ generation, at 60, they considered that old age. I’m in the middle of middle age.” 

So what does whisky echo bravo echo romeo DO with her next few decades of relative freedom? From pain. From caution. From softly shrinking sidelines?

Well, there is this Muscle and Bone project. Walter and I sing songs of Dylan, voice of our generation and poster-bard for neither shy nor retiring. Our repertoire is a font of youth in a pond of plenty. Fond regards. Faithful friends. Eternal re-awakenings.

Spell check all of the above and you get Weber and Campbell hitting the trail. Two bravos, amigo, and no regrets.


Painting Maria Catharina Wiik, Out into the World

Coop's entourage

In times past, members of the masses, those with very little clout to start with, were neatly packed in God and Country. These two cellophanes remain, reminding us to be humble, idealistic and resigned. We work, we pray, we soldier on.

Then came the mad men who injected commercials into the matrix of mass consumption. Brash celebrities took their extra money for the important job of convincing the rest of us we wanted to be just like them. Nice mansions. Nice cigarettes. Nice cars.

Glitter and glitz took our eyes off the prize which, if you’ll pardon the melodrama, comprised our very souls. By which I mean our own individual personalities that give character and dimension to our lives.

The Coops, the Kates, the Cary Grants were bigger than life, grander than anyone the movie fan could really be. Hollywood worked hard behind the scenes to serve up impossible dreams.

Now we hear there’s another revolution afoot. The masses stand to gain new clout. Madison Avenue can’t have our hearts and minds anymore. The net has set us free! Free to consume vacuous glitz, from Hollywood smooth to Youtube lewd, we are facebook twittizens curating our hipness in snippets of savoir faire. Consumer fools consumed by tools of coolness. Just try and pry my iPhone from my cold, connected hands and... well... watch me blog!

At the end of the high pitched day, what is the distinction here? Then, we watched a few famous people tell us how to behave. Now, we watch each other amateur our ways across the ethosphere as emptiness nips at our insides and the admen scheme to monetize our gape.

What are we to do about the state of our souls? It’s trafficky out there. If an artist has something to say to this loud, littered planet, good luck with finding an ear without an earbud set to stun.

Have you heard about the hermit artists? Of course not. They are hermits. They don’t publish, record or put on airs. They don’t compete with the happening acts or weigh in with the media.

What might they do? you ask. Why would they tell you that? They’re hermits, reclaiming their individuality. Choosing deep over wide. Supposing that the well is not dry, it is merely clogged with quivering mothlings, badly singed.

Photo of film stars Gary Cooper, Phyllis Brooks and Una Merkel

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

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

Borderlands

Our culture is about success, ‘Rich & Famous’ our mantra. No matter how badly we screw up, a strong tenet of Western Civilization assures us ‘they’ will suddenly adore us (and regret ignoring our fledgling efforts) once they see we’ve succeeded (ie. we are rich & famous, yes!).

Counter culture rejects all that, celebrating communal values and humble anonymity.  We’re not supposed to hear of counter culture heros until they sell out, ie. get rich, famous, or both.  The counter culture ideal of success is to be wildly productive, ingeniously inventive and ambition free while maintaining a seductive cool.

Bloggers punt indie bands mentioned by Rolling Stone off the ‘it’ list because they are now eligible for celebrity and its incumbent wealth (do the wee bands care?). To get around this, an unknown art-savant can be groomed by the well connected patron saint (think O’Keefe-Stieglitz, Smith-Mapplethorpe, Dylan-Grossman) who swings wide the pearly gates pour l’artiste anonym. It’s a way to keep your street creds while joining Scrooge McDuck in his money bin.

Then there are the outliers revered by the masses for their creative (as well as lucrative) success:

'In this book I'm interested in people who are outliers—in men and women who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a cold day in August.'
Malcolm Gladwell

Film editor Walter Murch compares the collective nature of creativity in old world art forms and new, from the Sistine Chapel (starring outlier Michelangelo) to modern cinema.

‘Fresco painting was an expensive effort of many people and various interlocking technologies, overseen by the artist, who took responsibility for the final product... Every person who works on a film brings his or her own perspective to bear on the subject.  And if these perspectives are properly orchestrated by the director, the result will be a multi-faceted and yet integrated complexity that will have the greatest chance of catching and sustaining the interest of the audience, which is itself a multi-faceted entity in search of integration.’
Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye

Caldwell devotes a book to outliers and our notions of success.

'My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just because of their own efforts. It's because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances— and that means that we, as a society, have more control about who succeeds—and how many of us succeed—than we think. That's an amazingly hopeful and uplifting idea.'
Malcolm Gladwell

Outliers seems like a book worth exploring. It’s on my list for 2010. In the meantime, I wish you creative sagacity.  Work your fertile borderlands one row at a time, high-fiving the neighbors who ground and surround you. 

Photo credit James, Scotland England border

Try to disappear

My mother’s standard answer when complimented on her cooking was, ‘I just use good recipes.’ As though, with the right recipe, tasty food just makes itself.

I though it was her English reserve talking, the ‘don’t blow your own horn’ approach I tried to overcome as performing songwriter, where self-promotion is part of the game.

But from here, staring down a new year, I’m rethinking my mama’s humble pie.  Where would any of us be if we didn’t have good recipes?

Georgia O’Keeffe, moving west to paint, spent her days exploring the desert terrain.  Her recipe involved observation, thought and constant application of paint to canvas.  After all, those vistas, vivid to be sure, don’t exactly paint themselves.

‘The cliffs over there - you look at it and it's almost painted for you, you think. Until you try.'

Georgia O’Keeffe

Walter Murch, film editor on movies like The English Patient and The Godfather, Part III, describes his recipe for achieving invisibility in his work.

‘I will keep on working until I can no longer ‘see myself’ in the material. When I review my first assembly of a scene, more often than not I can still vividly (too vividly!) recall making the decisions that led to each of the cuts. But as the scene is reworked and refined, it reaches a point, hopefully, where the shots themselves seem to create each other: This shot ‘makes’ the next shot, which ‘makes’ the next shot, etc. In this way, the Walter Murch who decided things initially gradually recedes until, finally, there comes a point where he has become invisible and the characters take over, the shots, the emotion, the story seems to take over. Sometimes - the best times - this process reaches the point where I can look at the scene and say, “I didn’t have anything to do with that - it just created itself.”’

Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye

I gather, from these artists, that none of them think good recipes are substitutes for hard work and creative flow. My mother’s comment about cooking nicely joined O’Keeffe’s ode to ‘try’ with Murch’s acknowledgement that excellence lets you disappear.

Recipes are road maps and measuring tools.  Between setting out and calling it a day, there’s work, play, patience, judgement - every painstaking facet of art. The recipe gives an artist a familiar structure within which to dare.

Here's a very good recipe for relationship to anything and anyone you love:

‘Always wave goodbye until they can't see you.’
Regina Brett

Because your loved ones, human and created, need your fond attention, until you disappear.

Happy New Year!

Photo credit Alfred Stieglitz, Georgie O'Keeffe