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

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

Blood in the tweets

Why do recognized leaders of the GOP use gun and violence metaphors in reference to political opponents in their tweets and bites?

‘Let’s start getting Nancy [Pelosi] ready for the firing line this November.’
Michael Steele, Republican National Committee

‘He [Ohio Democrat Steve Driehaus] may be a dead man. He can't go home to the west side of Cincinnati. The Catholics will run him out of town.’
John Boehner, US House of Representatives Minority Leader

‘Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America: "Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!’
Sarah Palin, Twitter

Why don’t Republican leaders condemn threats and violence carried out in the name of ‘real Americans’ the way Muslim leaders condemn terrorism carried out in the name of Islam?

‘We continue to strongly condemn all forms of extremism and dogmatism which are incompatible with Islam, a religion of moderation and peaceful coexistence.’
Dakar Declaration signed by leaders of the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference, which represents 1.5 billion Muslims across the Middle East, Africa and Asia

Conservative Radio and TV personalities fan the hate fires; some of their followers respond with shameful, bullying acts. But why are official voices of the Republican party - Steele, Boehner, Palin - pouring on the violent rhetoric? Do they expect to gain supporters by lending their stature to extremist groups? If that’s their game, are these Republican leaders prepared to share the blame for blood in the streets?

‘We've had a double-digit increase in sales of handguns and tactical rifles beginning about a week before the [2008 Presidential] election. Manufacturers can't keep up with demand and we are seeing a backlog of orders ranging from six months to two years for certain products.
Fox Keim, vice president of the Kittery Trading Post

If those of us who stand for civil discourse and honest protest do and say nothing in the face of the clamoring mob, we abandon our moral obligation to each other. In the dawning of this realization, citizens are gathering in real time, with real alternatives.

‘I pledge to conduct myself in a way that is civil, honest, and respectful toward people with whom I disagree. I value people from different cultures, I value people with different ideas, and I value and cherish the democratic process.’
Civility Pledge, Coffee Party USA

Photo Matt Fields, Sarah Palin and John Boehner

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

Two Emmas

In a world where Mars, Inc. spends tens of millions on cocoa research for the commercially coddled (i.e. those of us who can afford both health and sweet indulgence), let us pause to consider the lives and loves of two Emmas.

I have to confess my heart skipped a beat to think the venerable Cleveland Playhouse was bringing Howard Zinn’s play about the revolutionary anarchist Emma Goldman to the stage. How very - revolutionary - of them!

But no, the Emma coming to Cleveland this month is described in promotions as the ‘beautiful, witty, and much too mischievous Emma Woodhouse, one of Jane Austen’s most unforgettable heroines.’ Reading the script for a study group, initially I found Austen’s Emma a faint pastel compared to the Zinn character’s vibrance. What’s so unforgettable about Emma Woodhouse?

Austen’s Emma plans tea parties, country excursions and formal dances, the better to practice her matchmaking cleverness on young friends and admirers.  Zinn’s Emma is a garment worker who spends her cleverness convincing the boss to unlock the eighth story shop doors so the workers won’t perish in a typical factory fire of the late 1900s.

Austen's young women of Britain’s Regency era are fragile creatures, admonished for going to the post office in the rain (‘You sad girl, how could you do such a thing!’) and warned against being ‘extremely imprudent. Emma might catch cold from the draft.’

Meanwhile Zinn’s Emma is handing out leaflets at the crack of dawn with like minded cohorts and facing down club wielding cops at populist rallies.

I might write off Emma Woodhouse of Hartfield if she weren’t so much like me. I’m not into the social flitter flutter, but I’m fond of domesticity, the intimacy of meals and music, the intricacies of the heart. Austen’s Emma renounces marriage at one point, because she craves autonomy.

‘Oh, I will never marry. Few married women are half as much mistress of their husband’s house as I am of Hartfield... I shall have music and sewing and books and nieces and nephews.’

When she does decide to marry, she veers around the handsome charmer to choose  Knightley, an aptly named challenger to her egocentric lapses. Hearing her condescend to an elderly, less privileged neighbor, Knightley tells her,

‘If her situation was equal to yours, I would leave her silliness to itself and not quarrel with any liberties you might take in mocking it. But she is poor. She has lost most of the comforts she was born with, and if she lives to a very old age she will probably lose more. Her situation should elicit your compassion... Yet now she is laughed at, humiliated... It isn’t pleasant for me to say, Emma, but, as your friend, I have no choice but to speak the truth. It was badly done, Emma. Badly done indeed.’

After which Knightley walks away. But Emma stays, thinks it through, and in a keen blast of selfless autonomy, decides he is right.

‘How could I have been so contemptuous? Why have I sacrificed the good opinion of such a great friend?’

Her response reveals the steel of a woman who, born into other challenges and partnered with her noble accomplice, might well remind us of Emma Goldman, the heart muscle of downtrodden citizens, beating at the system with her passion for a more perfect union of power and principle.

Picture credits Morning Dress from 'Ackermann's Repository', ca. 1820 and T. Kajiwara, Emma Goldman

Smitten with writers

‘What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.’
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield

Having just finished The Observations, an absorbing read, tea time with the author isn’t on my wish list. Jane Harris is probably a perfectly endearing friend to her inner circle, but she’s already shared a generous swath of herself in this book. That’s enough for me.

When I was a kid, William F. Buckley Jr. dropped by our living room once a week, slouched himself into a low chair with a pad of notes propped on his boney knee, and proceeded to ply his trade with erudite precision. I distinctly recall thinking, ‘I wish I knew enough about the world to be his sparring partner.’ It looked like fun. It wasn’t his ideology that lured me; it was the way he unfurled the life of the mind with his langourous repartee. Pal around with old Bill off the air? No thanks!

My reclusive genes probably guide my steps away from befriending talented greats. A checklist involving Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences reveals (no surprise) that I’m rich in the intra-personal style of learning, happily lost in the warm arms of solitude and reflection. From this comes a certain respect for artist anonymity. The likes of Salinger and Dylan would never find me skulking around their hedges, hoping for a chat on the front stoop.

My own friends and kin, even the gregarious ones, don’t tend to be companions of my artist life either. Something about the intimate honesty of a work of fiction, which most songs are, seems to incite a strong urge in said dear ones to pretty much ignore what I rather love to do most.

A gathering of songwriters I once lead gradually morphed away from, ‘What’s the state of your artist soul?’ to, ‘How’s the family? Any gigs coming up?’ The group did hone in on lyrics and melody now and then, reminding us all we were not alone in our singular passions.

Salinger’s Caulfield fantasized about getting to know his favorite authors. Salinger the author was known to shun contact with his fans. In reality, creation’s a high lonely road. We best befriend the work itself as most of those who know us well we’ll never chance to meet.

Photo credit Crime Magazine

Planet, people and profit

Sometimes an image calls out for words. For a sculptor, a painter, a photographer, it could be the other way around.

Following the filigree of Facebook, fingers on keys like soles on a gallery floor, I come to this photo and catch myself longing. The caption offers no clues about sculptor or setting, only this:

WELCOME TO 2010

THE BEST AWAITS YOU

In caps, a declaration, mirroring the letters of the figure huddled, or healing -  or just high above the fray? The little people look up, or down, in open, yearning gestures. No one in a rush to turn away. The light, the inconceivable letters promise a perspective on the future unavailable to readers of the daily news. Good things shall prevail.

Did you notice the figure's hand? There isn't one. It stops just short of tiny, slender people, lightly burdened by the fashion of the day. The sculpture's light endows them with something you nor I could fathom on our own. Call it hope. Name it humility or candor. Disbelieve their power to persuade. Yet, here they are, handling the future with aplomb.

Why does it sound naive to say the little people, we, are the purveyors of light? Because the powerful have grabbed our expectations, cynicism loves company, sophistication struts around in bling?

Time to listen to a woman like Emily Pilloton talk about the 'triple bottom line' - planet, people and profit.

WELCOME TO 2010. THE BEST AWAITS YOU.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Emily Pilloton
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

Photo credit Christine Balland

Reagan regalia

Before I hit delete concerning
yet another email from my dad to us,
his ever loving kids,
I wonder this.

Why did pater send it?

We’ve seen, we’ve heard
the trickle down nostalgia
for the good ol’ days
with Reagan at the wheel.

Dad knows how I feel.

His ruly children nod and smile --
the rest of us have turned our nodding sideways,
our smiles turned upside down
by homeless millions leaving town.

Is he hoping for some latter day conversion?

Wasn’t there ballooning debt
and unrestrained expenditure on war
in days of yore with Reagan king?
But that was war!
And now, they say, is socialist upending to
the status of our quo
by a savior who is secretly
our foe.

Religion clouds the vision, this is true.

The banks and lobby lords
who hold the purses
masquerade as kindly nurses
on the battlefield
attending to our wounds.
Take heed before you swoon
for any mortal with a mortuary tune.

The tired, the poor, the yearning to be free
are on the street,
our recollections incomplete.

Bojangles on my feet, I hit delete.

Photo credit White House Photographic Office

Streams of fire

Profound ideas arise out of chaos. Madness. Risk.

Although - the mad madame makes no choice, does she - to be mad, or sane?  If she’s sane enough to choose, she’s not mad enough to fly.  Sanity will lead her to lists, and lists to obscurity.

Vincent Van Gogh had brother Theo in Paris to send him money and promote his art.  We revere the tormented painter and mention his brother in passing. But who’s the more troubled, the obsessed genius or the dutiful keeper of lists? Who sacrifices more for art that bejewels the world? And is it even possible for one artist to hold two allegiances in her belly, the bold invention, the bland accounting?

‘Vincent wasn’t only an inspired, mad artist; he was a great painter desperately trying to remain sane. He saw the world with a rare intensity which gave great power to his work.  And it was while looking and painting that he knew the greatest pleasure of which his tormented nature was capable.
Martin Gayford, The Yellow House: Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles

 Poor, tormented Vincent. I see his work and weep hot orbs of gratitude.  If it hadn’t been for Theo, not a drop of noble Vincent would remain. 

Painting by Vincent Van Gogh, The Sower

susanweber.com

The sower

‘The sower broadcasting his seed was an image that had been with him almost since he had become an artist. It stood for a painter - or an evangelist - sowing the seed of beauty and truth.’
Matin Gayford, The Yellow House: Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles

If I were a sower who saw her art as evangelism, her seeds indispensable to the good earth’s survival, my priorities would change.

Perusing my to-do list, which, out of curiosity, I’ve segmented into beneficiaries, fully two thirds of planned tasks benefit others and/or me. Family, friends and my teaching cohorts fall within this category. Earth, by which I mean the planet in toto, is assigned the remainder. This category holds my art and, largely because the other list is both large and short-term rewarding, is given short shrift.

Vincent Van Gogh, sometimes businessman and arts-community organizer, nevertheless prioritized his painting. Even his persistent melancholy failed to distract him from his call. Look at one of his sunflowers and know he chose wisely.

When I leave this earth, some imprint of my time here will stay.  Intuitively, I feel posterity’s rush when I compose, practice, record or perform music. Oddly perhaps, it’s also evident as I muse on art and culture here with you. It may be impossible to measure the scale or quality of my contribution to earth’s longevity.

For now, it makes sense to remember the sunflower seeds of a man named Vincent.

Painting by Vincent Van Gogh, The Sower

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

Botox lullaby

Tis the day after Christmas
and all through this place
not a feature is stirring.
I’ve botoxed my face.

I’ve Stepford perfected
my vacuous stare.
I’m grimacing blandly
my inner despair.

My wrinkles are smuggled
all suave in my head.
They carved out a living
but now they’re quite dead.

Come anger, come jealousy,
plunder, conniption.
Come playfulness, happiness,
wonder, conviction.

Come shed your suggestion
that Botox is rape.
Oh ravaged emotions
dream not of escape!

Your passion is pointless,
your impotence funny.
My flesh has suppressed you
by medicine’s cunning.

I silence your sirens
with Stonehenge’s call.
Pass away.  Pass away.
Pass away. All.

Photo montage Susan Weber

Chron us

My nephew drives his invention, pictured here, around southern California, for no apparent reason.  Were he selling busses, boats or amusement, he’d have the perfect schtick.  Crazy contradiction gets our attention.

His cousin, new college grad, went from cap and gown to shirt and shoes in a day, writing code for a midwest start-up.  He loves his job but sometimes wishes he’d majored in design, a place he gets lost in.

Losing track of time while cramming it with pleasure is what artists do.  The problem being, of course, that unless there’s somebody minding the store, monetizing all this pleasurable time, artists starve for lack of food - or recognition.

Venues stocked with savvy patrons did not seem to be a problem for early jazz musicians.  Nor did time.  Charles Hersch explores the role of time in the emergence of New Orleans jazz.

‘A defining feature of slavery was its near total control of the slave’s time... Emancipation held out the promise of, so to speak, time recaptured, but sharecropping and routinized industrial labor monopolized time in a particularly dehumanizing way.  Improvising musicians controlled time and how it felt - for what is music but sound unfolded in time? - and created a variety of experiences (rushed, languid, tense, or relaxed) with the rhythmic figures they played.
Charles Hersch, Subversive Sounds

Musicians who tinkered with time in rhythms that challenged long established norms found a willing audience in the beleaguered workers of New Orleans.  Jazz was escape from and revolt against oppression.

‘In this liminal state, individuals exist both ‘in and out of time,’ as if the clock were stopped as timepieces become useless or a hindrance to the flow of activities.  As a contemporary jazz musician once said about the trancelike ‘groove’ created by good jazz, “it’s about feeling like time itself is pleasurable.”’
Charles Hersch, Subversive Sounds

Time is not so pleasurable when monopolized by the boss, unless that boss is muse or spirit.

‘I came upon a photograph in a book; it was a small statue of a woman... But she had no face.  She was crowned with waves of water, covering her head, overshadowing the face.  It was her entire body which spoke, her breast-belly body, a thick bulb rooted, pushing up a halo of water, the water which moved within me.  I’ve been looking for her face ever since.  I had then, and still have one essential prayer: “Show me your face.”’
Meinrad Craighead, The Mother’s Songs: Images of God the Mother

Yesterday my phone rang as I hunted down gifts at the mall.  My family wanted to know if I’d join them for lunch any time soon.  Jaded by the numbing assault of ten thousand consumer items blinking and winking their wild desire for my cash, I wanted to interrupt the time warp of shopping.  But I still needed smart socks from Dick’s and a book from Border’s.  What to do?  Drive home in my busboat of crazy contradiction?  Tinker with a day’s rhythm, shrug off the new (old) oppressor: stuff?  Prove I’m an artist, not a drone?

A funny thing happened on the way to Dick’s.  I lost the impression I had to be there for any other boss save the muse.  Art had its way with me.  To this end, time and I eloped, by busboat, to the Aegean archipelago.

Photo credit razielthomas

Word is

Words can be toys. Children’s books bank on the likes of those who thrive on words like mugwump and quoz.

‘The idea that language is beautiful and strange and that you can play with it is very appealing for children, and also very important.
Catherine Bohne

Words can be tools. Educators serve the tool-like qualities of words. They give us lawyer, doctor, scientist enthusiasts of orderly abstraction. Or artist grunts who lay down guns and pick up pens of battle.

‘When Oliver Stone returned from Vietnam, he enrolled at New York University, studying on the GI Bill. He's been wrestling with those experiences for years, expressing his feelings through a trilogy of motion pictures about Vietnam.’
Bill Moyers Journal

Celebrities crouch behind impotent words, betraying and braying impossible breaches of honor and love.

'I have let my family down and I regret those transgressions with all of my heart.’
Tiger Woods

Words can be travesty.

Sometimes words are like music is to a child with Asbergers.

"The music somehow evoked a world in which I felt at home, as opposed to the real world, which I did not feel at home in."
Tim Page, Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic

Words can be salve. Friends in foreign times. Anchors in storm. We keep words around on shelves and blogs and owners manuals just in case the world dissolves and leaves us frail and speechless as the wind.

Word is not all, it is some. It isn’t enough; it’s often rough approximation. Sometimes poets get it right by accidentally bothering to try.

Photo credit Victorgrigas