Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: life of art

  • subway sounds

    In New York I came into 34th St subway station to hear a bunch of dudes playing a kind of washboard bluegrass. They weren’t excellent but they had vigour. Called themselves the Ebony Hillbillies: cute. O you’re from Australia & you wanna make a record? Love to!

    Later I rang them up. “We’re not lettin you put Our Sound on Your Record for less than $800.”

    I said, baffled, ‘But… it’s only one song.’

    “You know, we getten called the best black banjo band in America.”

    Sound engineer said to me, “Why are you crying? That shouldn’t hurt your feelings.” And he is right. But it does. It’s the lack of music, the tower of ego I cannot climb. The hand-to-hand combat whereby everybody has to constantly outdo everybody and every interaction is a kind of business deal. Where you have to self-promote and be the best this, the best that. It exhausts me. It chills my soul with its coldness and shrivels me. I’m not asking people to play for free but I want them to be interested, to love the originality of my project and to love the music enough to play as though they would do it for love.

    Once I played one of my songs – a homemade sample off my first website – to a man of some stature when the website was new. This was during my year-long journey to build courage to do this thing. He said, in my opinion, you are going to be one of the greatest artists this country has ever produced. I burst into tears with relief. But later I looked over his website. It was all, the greatest this, the most highly qualified that. It was a minefield of pyramids. I don’t live in that field & it doesn’t seem real to me. That’s not how life works. I live in the jungle where every tree has its flower in the elbow, every bird has its arrow-glistening feather. Where there are a multitude of voices. Somehow they make a kind of complex harmony. Sometimes it is mayhem & a shattering din. More often it is sweet & overwhelming, it seduces me.

  • through Glass, darkly

    Philip Glass: a man who halfway through his own memoir, written by himself about his own life, can start a paragraph with: “But look at it from my point of view…” The innocent jostle of his ego crowds every page. He takes up plumbing as a day job in order to support his children, whose appearance in his life occupies one small paragraph out of 396 pages. He and his friend simply walk into the local plumbing emporium whenever they hit a snag and ask “for supplies and advice.” He recounts the time and energy spent by these professionals in training him and his friend and then says, “We taught ourselves basic bathroom plumbing this way.” Having reframed their teaching as his own auto-didact determination he then further undermines it with, “We weren’t that good at first, but it wasn’t that complicated, either.”

    Eventually Glass gets work under a proper licensed plumber, an older man who presumably has taken the time and trouble to earn his own certification. Everything works out smoothly for about three years, until one day an artist friend of Glass’s offers him more interesting work at the same price. He immediately dumps the plumber who has spent three years training him: “That was fine with me and I began practically the next day.” Audiences in Europe who didn’t like his music are described as “a bunch of yokels there who didn’t know anything about world music or even new music” – “They didn’t know anything.” How I wish there were a stronger alignment between good work and great character.

  • writing hardily

    Today I was writing in a cafe and when I pulled out my laptop to transcribe out of a messy notebook the woman next to me got up and slid between our tables, saying something over her shoulder under her breath. “I’ve just come from the office…” I was wondering why she would feel so insecure that she would need to explain her movements to a stranger when it sank in – as she sank in, to the bench seat opposite – what it was that she had said: “Ich komme gerade vom Büro, I’ve just come out of the office and I don’t want people doing their office work around me.” The funny thing was she was clutching her mobile phone like it was a huge reefer she was about to lift on the ball of the hand to her lips, and the flickering of her screen had caught my eye and momentarily bothered me, before I caught myself and realised how insane it was to resent someone for poring over their screen while I pored over mine. She was staring at me across the room, I raised my shoulders and spread my hands. “Was, denn?” She called the waitress over and repeated her complaint in the exact same words: “I’ve just come out of the office and I don’t want people doing their office work around me.” Around the flower arrangement she pointed me out. The waitress shrugged helplessly, her face relapsing from an attempt at sympathy into a foolish smirk. What could she say? I let go the sward of ideas I had built in the air as they demolished themselves and dissolved in the face of such tiny, such concerted ill-will, and took out my notebook again and tried to let my gaze fall into the precise point of the middle distance where happiness and contemplation and, it sometimes seems, poetry lie thick on the chilly air like leaves on the ice. I told myself this place – a “literary cafe” attached to a bookshop – would not exist if not for writers like me and took up my pen again and foraged on.