Somewhere in my post-viral fuzziness, I lose all my keys to all the doors I need to open. Later, I make so many trips up and down the stairs because I forget one thing after another. I am not fastidious enough when plugging cables into boxes and discover later that I have recorded one channel of audio and one channel of silence. I tell myself to be careful with the marker while doing measurements around the pictures, a purple line glaringly appears unwelcome in a margin. I download some footage I captured to make a video, I manage to lose it all in the process, and only realised after I had deleted from my photo. Argh!
That’s how a week starts. Small and inconsequential irks when held in comparison to the big issues of the day. In a doubtful moment, I ask, “What is this for?” “What does my art add in the scheme of things?” In a world of fear, anxiety, murder and massacre art can seem like a folly, a luxury, a something that’s “nice-to-have” as one politician recently spewed.
It makes me ask of myself:
- What ways should I think about what Im doing?
- Am I making escapism?
- Am I making something that helps me/we/us step outside of the pressures of the practical issues of today?
- Is my thinking captured or critical?
- Am I making something in context or am I decontexturalizing?
- Am I making a brand?
- Am I making something meaningful or grandiose?
- What do I think now that that gatekeeping position has shifted?
- What in my work addresses the bread and butter issues of the day?
Big naval gazing questions. In fact sometimes the only response to questions such as these is a big ‘Fuck it and Fuck Off’. They have a time and a place. But if it’s inertia they create then it’s not welcome. A reflective pause is different from the dead air of being inert.
The last post contained a photo of the Bread and Puppets manifesto. I hadn’t really thought too hard about why I added it other than I think the words are good. Today, I think differently. It states ‘Art soothes pain, Art fights against War & Stupidity, Art is like good bread, Art is like green trees’.
Art is like Green Trees. It makes something that makes it easier to breathe.
It amazes me how easily something so ephemeral can remind us that we CAN imagine something different, sweeter, better, and fully welcoming. Everything constructed we see starts in the imagination. If it can be thought of, then it can be done. The algorithm of feeds, the corralling of ‘If-it-bleeds-it-leads’ news reporting, the shouting of opinionated anybodys online sucking up airspace, and the limitations of the corporate storytellers shut down the notion that the world remains full of options, opportunities and alternatives. Here we say, “Fuck it and Fuck off!”
I think of my own experience. Music has always made sense to me, captured and captivated me. It ‘spoke’ to me before I could speak for myself or even figure myself out. It gave me a hand up when I needed help. If you knew the young adolescent me you would have known I was trouble, or trouble was on its was to find me. But music gave me an option. In fact, I think music gave me my first real confidence. When my own mental world was at it’s bleakest, most slippery, I could always find some purchase in some musical expression to grasp.
And I would never meet the makers of these sounds. Or in some random rare and precious moment I might. But on the whole they would never, ever, know the tiny but deeply meaningful impact they installed in this small life. And the way we obsess about things like bands, books, and such, I’m feeling confident that it happens all over the place, all the time. Small individual acts of making things better. That’s a gift to give. So massive thanks, love, applause and appreciation to all those, everywhere, who give without expectation of return.
If you’re a maker, keep making!
Soundbites:
- Clocks! I hear clocks. The kind with hands and mechanisms making noise. Big ones. Ticking away in seconds. They sound close, overhead, omnipresent, inside my head. Your poor house has no clocks like these. There’s a timekeeper on the oven only. I am being haunted by time, hallucinating time, imaging time as if it were there. It’s just the solvent talking.
- Listen back to recording, time wobbles. A snare hit’s untidy. Out of Time. I demand the snare’s attention! To human time. Timed time. My Time. But here’s the But. What did I hear that threw my strike? Distracted tight time? Mmpatient time? Glide time. I listen to something in its Own time. Can I be brave and accept organic time? Messy time? Not My-time.
- Sounds like the ocean. The wet is beer and sweat. I am driftwood on a wave in a moshpit. Together it’s both dangerous and safe. I look for the band. I’ve lost the song. I cannot tell where we are or what comes next. Beats flails after beats. The bass is a weighted blanket. The guitar is the Cheshire Cat’s grin. The music holds me. It is ferocious and full of smiles.
- She listens small. There’s something inside it. A fragment of action, a shout from friction. If she can find the start, that doesn’t exist, and the end, that doesn’t exist, she will have made something that does exist. And repeat. Turn fractal into pattern, turn figment into rhythm. Something that was not there. But she could hear it, she just needed to find it. Here it is.
- I fell in love with Foley through Star Wars. I saw a demonstration of how the sounds of stormtrooper blasters was made. Somewhere in a desert, large pylons were anchored with cables, securing them to the earth. Hit the wound steal, cymbals made of metal strings. Zap! The ordinary everydayness of things became the sounds of the future.
skirted Records 