WMV Music Web Log

There is a German-American woman who sends Rosh Hashana and Chanukah cards to every Jewish person she knows even slightly. I have been getting them for years. It brings tears to my eyes every time I think of it.

I think we all try to redeem the sins of our parents and teachers by the conduct of our lives, hoping that we are not creating new havoc for the next generation.

I go back and back to music I was taught - I must think I owe it to my teachers to finally get it right, despite all the nonsense they said. Yes, there is real syncopation in Brahms' music, he is not pretending after all, and I am finally playing it the way it is supposed to go.

This upcoming studio event has certainly captured the imagination of this married artist couple - we share nightmares about it. In our dreams we are fighting with someone for a parking place or a table at a restaurant, or being stalked by a previously friendly male artist turned psychopath. Or, dreams which I won't describe, that suggest an embarrassing superfluity of suppressed rage. She wakes up shaking, and I report the mirror image of her dream, each of us having been screaming at someone who prevents us from getting what we want.

My interpretation is that this seemingly small and innocuous gathering around a few artists and a scholarly study represents more to us than we had anticipated. It is on the one hand a thumb in the eye of the status quo - none of the participants are establishment folks, yet we have "set ourselves up" to pronounce on the "state of the arts" for Washington artists. In fact, Mike's study demonstrates how artists here are systematically oppressed by the very cultural institutions that purport to cultivate them.

But as artists, such knowledge compels us to wake up to the fact that we have options: to speak up about the reality of our lives, to engage in meaningful ways, claiming our rightful place in the general society, and to actually do something to make a difference.

I think we may be dreaming the nightmares of every artist in Washington.

Labels: state of the arts

Mar with Tom Friedman at Dulles Airport - didn't you know they were friends?












Mar with Parisian street art - it seems to be a new international style.













Notre Dame window - King David (click to enlarge)








The Marais

Labels: paris

Can't quite adjust to not being in Paris (!). I don't speak French and had never before been there, but Paris felt like home to me. What does that mean?

There is a terrific interview with composer David Rakowski at New Music Box. He is a wild man - we've got to program some of his music!

Pondering a new collaboration, with the bookstore(s) in the warehouse next door. Osiris Books has set up a living room-like space, with couches, tables, carpeting, and book lined walls - it cries out for a salon. I could simply roll the Yamaha out of our bay, into the parking lot, and right into her space. We are thinking of a December event - hopefully it will draw some folks who actually read (and buy) books, as well as dig our informal brand of music, art, and talk.

Mike Hummel has come up with some great questions for Saturday night's panel discussion/performance event in our studio - it looks like the Kensington BannerArts series is once again alive and well. Here are Mike's questions, and I have added some notes for my answers, pretty much off the top of my head:

1. How do you experience the tension between the internal artist and the external rewards and criticism (or neglect) the artist receives? Is success an internal or external measurement?

Things that have registered as success: passionate performances, projects that came off the way I imagined, hunches that worked out, mp3 downloads, audiences that return, reviews, appreciations, respect of my peers.

2. What kind of support do you need around you to be an artist? What’s available in American society, what’s missing, in terms of support for being creative? How has each of you carved out a support network for your creative work, your creative "soul"? And most importantly, how and why do you keep going?

I need: piano, venue, audience, enthusiastic and capable colleagues, money to pay musicians. All of these are surprisingly tough to acquire. I had to go to the trouble to start a non-profit corporation just to make any of this possible.

3. How did your relationship to your art change when you decided to take an entrepreneurial step like working freelance full-time, leaving your “straight” job to pursue your creative goals, or opening up a performance venue, putting together your own series? Why did you take steps toward a more public identity? Why wasn't it possible for you to be a “contented amateur”?

There was surprisingly little change – mostly I took on more ambitious projects. There were misguided attempts to be accepted and supported by institutions that couldn’t care less. There was a desire for a public identity as an artist, again misguided, because I could only confer that identity on myself. As a performer, my art is only possible in a public setting – without an audience I am speaking only to myself.

4. What are the satisfactions of pursuing one’s art in a serious manner? What are the frustrations? How do you cope with the frustrations?

Permanent absence of boredom. Fundamental satisfactions, spiritual, emotional, sensual. Practical frustrating issues: financial, physical, business, marketing, unpredictable vicissitudes, politics, competition. Unreliability of anything in the arts environment. Hierarchies, pecking orders, in-groups. Coping by withdrawal into artistic solitude, making do with the available resources. Fighting back when possible: blogs, websites, video – maintaining a public profile in spite of everything.

5. I was particularly struck by how Carl encountered so much resistance early on in his comeback, and that raised the question of how do you make it work when the “establishment” arts world won’t welcome you? Are there back doors and side entrances, parallel tracks that can allow you to find fulfillment?

No one can stop you from pursuing your art; they can only stop you from realizing the material rewards. Persistence can result in grudging recognition that you exist, without necessarily granting you access to the means of production. It is absolutely vital that you acquire your own means of production, whatever those may be, so that you don’t rely on the beneficence of an essentially hostile system. God bless the child that has his own!

6. Is being an artist a sort of transcendent identity that allows you to integrate all aspects of your background? In our culture we try to label people—African-American, WASP, etc.—do you think being an artist supersedes such categorization and how does it play out in your life? What does the identity of artist mean to you?

Yes, as an artist I feel that I can communicate on some level with artists of every origin and time. My responsibility is to stay as true as possible to that which moves me, but that may or may not have anything to do with being male, white, Jewish, American, middle class, straight, a parent, etc etc. African-American culture, for instance, is one of the fundamental inspirations of my work. On the other hand, it was by encountering the music of Ullmann, written in a concentration camp, that I felt the most personal connection with the holocaust.

We just got back from Paris. Here is Marilyn in front of a Josef Beuys poster, at Gordon Pym & fils gallery. We were shooting pictures in front of the window (because of the Beuys photo), and then noticed that the guy in the gallery, who turned out to be Gottfried Tollmann, was playing a guitar. We went in, talked, and heard amazing blues guitar. It was very hard to leave.

"Creativity isn't the monopoly of artists. This is the crucial fact I've come to realise, and this broader concept of creativity is my concept of art. When I say everybody is an artist, I mean everybody can determine the content of life in his particular sphere, whether in painting, music, engineering, caring for the sick, the economy or whatever. All around us the fundamentals of life are crying out to be shaped or created. But our idea of culture is severely restricted because we've always applied it to art. The dilemma of museums and other cultural institutions stems from the fact that culture is such an isolated field, and that art is even more isolated: an ivory tower in the field of culture surrounded first by the whole complex of culture and education, and then by the media which are also part of culture. We have a restricted idea of culture which debases everything; and it is the debased concept of art that has forced museums into their present weak and isolated position. Our concept of art must be universal and have the interdisciplinary nature of a university, and there must be a university department with a new concept of art and science".

Josef Beuys, 1979, From an interview with Frans Hak