Across the Transom: November 2023

New forms of culture, fresh narratives, and novel ways of telling stories will be part of how America resolves its collective feelings about decline.

I’m just as passionate about curating as I am about making art. It might sometimes be even more important because holding space and having the opportunity for community to be together and experience whatever transformative art is present is so important. That’s the way that we use art to organize our communities—by actually experiencing it together and having space for people to be inspired.

I find when looking at memory, particularly intense memory and intense and creative moments, my memory has more to do with the feeling of the event than the factuality of the event, if that makes sense. Another thing I've noticed is that in a creative moment - for instance, live performance - the artist viewpoint can only be subjective.

On very rare occasions I have known something is going on in a live performance, and I've always noticed by listening to many archive recordings that a particular performance which is considered by fans and reviewers and online commentators to be classic performances, very powerful and moving, if you actually listen to the music, the music as such, per se, and standalone, may not be exceptional. But there is something within the event which is exceptional and touches people very deeply...including, perhaps, even the performers.

So within a performance event, there are a number of factors involved: the music, the musicians, and the audience. And the combination of the audiences and the musicians with the music can generate an event that goes beyond the specifically musical...or to put it another way, something can come through the music to touch the audience - and perhaps the musicians - which bypasses the notes that are actually being played and moves directly into the performance event. Something like that.

I remember after the first prac doing that tune w/ig, me asking him about this tune and he looked at me serious and said “mike, little richard” and damn if I didn’t realize and think “no shit,” only to ponder that for days later cuz it made TOTAL SENSE.

It might interest such people that the Indigenous themselves wondered why their enemies—who were manifestly not superior to them in any intellectual sense—had far greater technological endowments. (Without access to radiocarbon dating of archaeological sites, they had no way to measure the length of time peoples of the Old World versus those of the New had spent as sedentary farmers!) It might interest many to find that supposedly stoical Native people regularly demonstrated both a wry and a raunchy sense of humor; that they wrote poetry bemoaning death and war; that they wished they could win the war and tell the Spaniards where to go; and that they wondered why the gods had disposed certain things the way they had and what, if anything would happen to mortals after they died. They expressed anger at the situation they found themselves in; they worried about their grandchildren; yet they always found something to laugh about.

Beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life.

Whether musicians, or visual artists, or sound artists, each of them made choices that left them able to create works of art. They gave up day jobs, and nice houses, and in some cases their health in order to create works that would speak for them, and for others.

These have never been people who look for short-cuts.

Perhaps more importantly, the artists in my life are people who work incredibly hard at both developing their skills as artists - be it paint, or pencil, or editing tape - and in thinking long and hard about what they’re about to create.

Yes, some artists just jump in and go entirely on inspiration and intuition, or at least present themselves that way. You’ll still find that this “in-the-moment” inspiration actually builds on hours and years of thinking, and practising, and exploring dead-ends.