Supporting the Artist

Hello,

This is a rare direst communication and ask to my followers on this blog, rather than the usual essays or poems or photos. I rarely speak to you directly, except in comments, so this is a bit new to me, too.

I have started a Patreon site, which is intended to help me make a living as a creative artist.

Below, I will post the text of a long email, with updates, that I have sent out to family and friends. I have a favor to ask, which is detailed in the email, but which I will summarize briefly, first.

Basically, going forward it looks as if my best recourse in life is to pursue my arts career full-time, in which case I need patronage and support. Now that I am disabled, it's hard for me to do anything else, like hold down a regular job, but I do need to earn some level of income, and the best way to do that is to ask for help, and in return make everything I do creatively available to my patrons. They see what I am doing first, and they get first crack at what I have created, be in photographs, music, a new typeface (I have made three in the past year!), and so on.

The favor I want to ask is in two parts:

1. Please visit my Patreon site, read the introductory text I wrote about all this, or watch the video I made to introduce myself. If you would like to support me as an artist, in whatever small capacity, please do. No amount is too small, and every bit helps enormously.

Link to my Patreon site:
https://www.patreon.com/ArthurDurkee

2. Please pass on the news to your own friends and email contacts, especially those you think might be interested. To do that, you can cut and paste the email text below into your own email, and send it off. Or if you just wish to pass along the Patreon site and other links, please do that.

Thank you!

I am in the process of moving my creative activities, including the kinds of posts I have done on this blog for the past several years, onto my Patreon site, and making it into my new blog. I post a Public post at least once a week, which the whole world can see. The rest of my posts are for patrons only. But my lowest threshold of support is only US $2, so if you really want to keep following me, there's a very inexpensive way to do it.

Thank you again. Sincerely Yours,

Arthur

Email text is below.

Here are the links, also in the email below, relevant to this occasion. More will be added later.

Link to my Patreon site:
https://www.patreon.com/ArthurDurkee

Link to my Redbubble online store:
https://www.redbubble.com/people/arthurdurkeeart?asc=u

Link to the GoFundMe set up to help me replace the gear stolen from my van in Palm Springs, last March:
https://www.gofundme.com/replacingstolenmusicgear

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Dear Family, Friends, and Supporters—

I am contacting many of you on my email list with an update and some important arts-career-related news. Later on, I am going to ask a favor.

First, an update:

I am for this summer living in the Ann Arbor, MI, area, for now, where I will have a roof over my head, and thus can get a lot of work done in a settled place—I can set up my recording studio and work on the two albums of music I have been thinking about for awhile; I can paint; I can write; I have a base from which to roam, go camping, do road trips, and bring back more new photos and ideas to work on.

Ann Arbor, MI, many of you know, is the closest thing to a home town that this nomad has. It's a little strange being back in Michigan, this summer—much remains the same, much has changed. I will be based here in Michigan for the summer, during which time I will be doing some camping excursions, a music seminar in July at Interlochen Arts Academy in northern Michigan, and more. I will also be driving to Wisconsin periodically, to continue to sort through what I have left in my storage lockers there. As for where I will be past this summer, I haven't planned that far ahead. I have options, including heading back to the Southwest and California for the winter. All that will depend on where I find a place to stay.

This past winter I spent mostly in New Mexico and California. I was very happy to stay with my bestie Becca and her Mr. Man in Paso Robles, CA. Because, you know, wine country! After that, I was in Palm Springs for several months; or rather, in and around PS, as I never found an actual place to live. Some things happened that were wonderful, like having an opportunity to sing with Modern Men, the Coachella Valley Men's Chorus, which led to a very fun concert experience singing choral jazz arrangements from the American Songbook. I made many new friends, and renewed some existing friendships in the LGBT chorus movement. I knew that the Palm Springs area was a retirement community; I did not know that it was such a huge gay chorus retirement community!

Some less-than-great things happened during my stay in Palm Springs, too, all of which I survived, learned from, and which I have now moved past. My van was broken into, and music gear and my cameras were stolen. I am currently raising funds to replace my stolen microphones, while some friends and donors have already helped me replace the cameras and other gear. (I include links to my GoFundMe campaign and my other online arts activities below.)

I learned how to live fairly comfortably in a tent and a van. My friend Al helped build me a solar power rig, which is portable and which I can use to power my laptops and mobile devices wherever I am camped; it works very well, and allows me to do my creative work well into the evening, even while living far off the grid. I now have a Disabled Access pass for the National Parks, which means I get into the National Parks free for the rest of my life, and also gives me a 50 percent discount for camping. I also now have the same sort of access card for the California State Parks, which discounts 50 percent off all fees.

All of that is going to be VERY useful. Traveling and camping out West becomes a LOT cheaper. I feel at home in the National Parks; they are a huge source of inspiration to me, and also a place where I feel at home, and alive, and safe. I am probably meant to remain semi-nomadic, at this time of my life, so I hope to travel safely for as long as health permits. The "snowbird" pattern of spending winters in warmer climes appeals to me.

During my time in the Palm Springs area, I learned that asking for help leads to help being given, in large ways and in small. People stepped forward to help me after the van was broken into; others in Modern Men helped me enormously with attire for the concerts; still others found music-recording gigs for which I earned a little money. Being my Mother's son, asking for help, when you need it, is kind of a new concept for me; but I am getting a lot of practice. I am no longer ashamed to ask for what I need, and no longer afraid of getting a "No" in response. All you an do is ask; people help you if they can; even if they can't help you in tangible ways, the moral support is also wonderful.

To that end, I have created a Patreon artistic patronage website.

Patreon is a patronage paradigm: people support creative artists whose work they like directly, via donation, rather than going through a record company or a publisher as distributors. All kinds of creative work appears on Patreon, from music to comic books to the genuinely unclassifiable. I support a few artists myself, in my own small way, including Amanda Palmer, whose TED talk and book "The Art of Asking" inspired me to do this, along with some friends who recommended Patreon to me directly.

Patreon.com makes it easier for artists to connect with their audience, no matter how specific or tiny their niche is. I currently have a dozen patrons who directly support my art-making. Part of the agreement between artists and patrons is that patrons get first access to the work I am doing, and special treats that no one else gets. That is described in more detail on my Patreon page.

So here is the favor I want to ask, in two parts:

1. Please visit my Patreon site, and look it over. There is an introductory video I made that introduces the concept, and gives some of the background; there is also a text description. (I filmed the video at one of my favorite locations for photography in Joshua Tree National Park.) Please consider becoming a patron of mine, for as little as $2 per month, or for whatever higher value you think the work is worth. I assure you, every bit goes a very long way.

You can look my Patreon site over at this URL address:

https://www.patreon.com/ArthurDurkee

2. Please pass this email along to your own email circle of friends, especially those you believe might be interested in supporting the arts, so that they too can look it over. Please help me spread the word! I would be very grateful.

The good people at Patreon say again and again that the way this works is to spread the news far and wide, and see what happens. I just need a few more people to be fans—fans of the art I make, and the music, and video work, and type design, and all the various art forms I practice, many of which have already started to earn me some income. I have several friends around the world, who are musicians and artists, who are somehow making it work, via means similar to Patreon, and via their constant presence online. You have to let people know what you are doing—so I am! Even if you can't support me as an artist, please do support me in passing the word along about what I am doing.

That's it. That's all I am asking for.

This is my best shot at rebuilding my life, after long illness and recovery, and several years that were hard to get through. And here I am, still going. I am doing better, I am feeling better, I have restarted my life after that long illness, and I feel positive about it. My mind can still get fogged over by lingering after-effects of the chronic illness I survived; yet even on my worst days, I make art. It's what I do.

I anticipate that, going forward, making art will be more and more what I do. It's what I am best at doing. Perhaps it was what I was meant to do all along, and in some ways it's the only thing I am very good at doing. It is as fundamental to my being as breathing.

So, if you are able to help me, in any way, to continue to do my creative work, and to grow and evolve as an artist and human being, please do.

Thank you reading this very long email.

Thank you for being my friends, and fans, and supporters. (I know that for some of you this update is not fresh news, as you are already my Patreon supporters. Thank you for your additional patience.)

Thank you for being my family, both family of origin and family of choice, in every way that matters.

Thank you to each and every one of you who has helped me get through the past few years, to finally emerge on the other side, and start over, and build a new life as a professional creative artist. Thank you!

Please look over my Patreon site, and let me know what you think. And please pass it on. I am also researching means to sell my original photography and visual art online, and also my original typeface designs. I hope to have more news about that soon.

Thank you very sincerely, and with much love and gratitude—

Arthur Durkee
www.arthurdurkeemusic.com
www.arthurdurkeephoto.com
www.arthurdurkee.net
artdurkee.blogspot.com

Link to the GoFundMe set up to help me replace the gear stolen from my van in Palm Springs:
https://www.gofundme.com/replacingstolenmusicgear

Link to my Patreon site:
https://www.patreon.com/ArthurDurkee

Link to my Redbubble online store:
https://www.redbubble.com/people/arthurdurkeeart?asc=u<>BR>

Why Do You Write the Way You Write?

Lots of writers ask me why I write the way I do. Especially poets. There is an assumption behind the question: that writing is an act of will, or of self-expression, or of conscious activity. I dispute this assumption.

Why do I write the way I do? Because when I listen to the trees, the wind, the waters, the sky, the trees, the dancing fire pit, that's what I hear. I listen. I pay attention, and what I write is what I experience, and is my response to that experience.

I learned that from Matsuo Basho, the haiku master. I also learned that from Pauline Oliveros and John Cage and Morton Feldman, who each in their own way created musical situations in which listening was paramount. Oliveros took this to the point of almost sacred intensity. Interaction with the environment, by listening and responding, is central. Oliveros called it deep listening. Cage called it paying attention to the sounds of the environment. Feldman called it forth by playing his music always very softly.

I feel like the assumption behind the question, why do I write the way I do, is ultimately about ego. It's about wanting to fit a key into a lock and have a pat explanation. I feel like it's about control, in the end. In the days of social media, it's hard not to feel like it's also about narcissism, and self-empowerment, and self-expression, and emotional process work, and placing the individual personality foremost in the field of being.

This unspoken assumption about why writers write, perhaps especially poets, also leads me to be often asked about my writing habits. We have two generations of poetry workshops and MFA writing programs, now, which if you've been paying attention has led to an over-emphasis on craft. Why? Because you can't teach anything but craft; you can't teach heart, the writer has to have that, or develop that, on their own. When people ask me about my writing habits, I am alert to their quick judgments about how my habits differ from their own. According to one poet I knew, I have no discipline, because I write when listening calls me to write, not for an hour or two every morning, like a newspaper opinion editor. I don't write every day. I write when what I hear calls me to write; which takes me back to deep listening.

All of this puts me in a secondary stream to what poetry publishing is now. It puts me in a lineage of meditator-poets, nature-engagin artists, listening composers, writers whose work is based on observation and listening rather than milling their personal biographies for grist. Maybe that's why I rarely get published in the mainstream. There's not enough "I" in my poems, perhaps. I do not claim to be a great poet, or even a good one; but I *know* that some rejections from some quarters are due to the unfashionability of the way I write. Which is another assumption behind the question, that I also dispute.

Well, some of that is indeed about finding your niche, fitting a key into another lock. But some of that is not: it's about making an egoless art, rather than an art that projects personality-ego.

Egoless art is VERY unfashionable lately. Don't kid yourself into thinking that art isn't subject to fashions.

I don't know where my poems fit in; honestly, I haven't been trying very hard to find or create a niche. It is, or it is not. I do feel deeply connected to a lineage of writers, though; not just influences but kindred spirits. I certainly have the same small amount of ambition and ego as any artist, in wanting my work to be heard, seen, read by others. Another favorite poet of listening and response, Odysseas Elytis, once said, "Every poet needs an audience of three, and since every poet has two good friends, the search is for that elusive third." The poetry written the way I write has always had the two, and is always searching for the third. So, there is a stream of this kind of poetry, and there are many who do it. Perhaps they are content to be far outside the mainstream, and just keep listening.

Playing and Making

Music performance and composition:

Lots of us play musical instruments, or sing. I play adequately, and I sing well (albeit not this week, thanks to pneumonia). But I was not a performance major, practicing several hours per day. I was a composition major. My urge has always been to Make, rather than recreate.

I do believe you have to be able to do both. I can read music like a sonofabitch, and I could do so even before I went to music school. I've been musical since I was 4 or 5 years old. I started piano at age 6 or 7, and I started singing in choir and chorus at that age, as well. The Lutheran church in Ann Arbor that my family went to had a music staff who were at the University of Michigan, and we did a lot of ambitious music in church choir: before age 24 I had sung probably a third of all the Bach Cantatas, some more than once. So I have some pretty good performance chops.

But I'll never be as good a Chapman Stick player, or bassist, as several of my friends are. I don't put in the practice time. (I'm not a slacker. In fact, for most of my adult life, I had an undiagnosed chronic illness that sapped my strength and willpower, and which I will spend the rest of my life recovering from.) There was a period in my 30s when I was in several bands that focused on improvised music; so you could say I was composing on a weekly basis, and playing spontaneous music. But most of that went direct to recording, and was never notated. It's only in the past five or six years that I've begun seriously notating written music scores again, and I've been prolific throughout this period. (Within the limitations of chronic illness and post-illness, always.) When I was in my 30s I did not suck as a player, but in fact I'm a better player now, even though I play gigs less often: time and experience do that, no matter what age you begin. I don't have as many opportunities to play, which sucks, but on balance I'm musically satisfied because I'm writing more.

My focus was always on Making. On writing music. On composing. I have been reading a biography of Wayne Shorter, which made a comparison between Shorter's meticulous writing of music and Joe Zawinul's habit of improvising a piece, then transcribing it, and declaring it done. Actually, I do both. Both of those methods work for me. Most of the music I recorded in my 30s and 40s was never notated, but it WAS recorded, and stands as pieces. I did on occasion transcribe music I had recorded and made it into a score others could play. ("Night/Fire" on my album The Western Lands was done this way.) If I had enough energy, or an assistant, I could transcribe most of what I recorded in those years, and give you a score you could play from. (But I don't. If I have any regrets about surviving chronic illness, it's that I never had the energy to do what I wanted to do, and so much never got finished.)

You see, that's been the trade-off: I will never learn to play as many songs as many of my friends do, and I'll never play them as well as they do. (Mostly. I do have my moments.) But most of them don't compose as much I do, either. That's the trade-off I observed way back in music school, where I was majoring as a composer: what your emphasis is, is probably what it will in future. Bruce Cockburn, the great songwriter, once said something that really stuck with me: "I don't know many songs that I didn't write." (He then said, "But this is one of them," and launched into Monty Python's "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life." A song, I might add, that I also know, that I didn't write.)

In music school I focused on making new music; all of us music school students who were not performance-track were required to play or sing, and have declared instruments, but even then in my piano and percussion minors I preferred to focus on new music. (Or music so old it was new all over again: hence my minors in Medieval and Renaissance music.) In music school, and after, I was involved with a group of composers and performers who presented concerts of new music several times a year; some of us were both performers and composers, and traded hats as needed. It was a very fertile ground upon which to write and have performed new music scores. It was also the time in which I began to learn to play jazz, and improvise.

Im not sure why I wanted to write about this, today. Maybe it's because I never stop thinking about music, no matter what else is going on. Maybe it's because I see some of my Stick playing pals and other musician pals having all these minor and major successes in their musical lives that make me want to stand up and cheer. And I do cheer! And then, sometimes, I think about how the touring musician life was never one I could take on (undiagnosed chronic illness, for one; opportunities, for another). It makes me very happy to see some of my friends out there on the road, and to get to their concerts as often as I am able (energy permitting: I'd go to a hell of a lot more concerts if I had the strength).

I genuinely enjoy hearing my friends make their music. I love hearing what they do. I'll never play as well as they do, and I'm okay with that.

And then I go home and go back to writing. It's just what I do.

Creativity: Observing Improvisation

Observations on making art in the moment of making it:

When I'm improvising music, or playing music in general, I'm often making lots of decisions about what to do in the moment. The fallacy that many intellectuals have about the improvisation process, though, is that this requires verbal cognition. It doesn't. It's a profoundly non-verbal sort of process. Making art for me is not an intellectual puzzle-solving game-theory process; you can only analyze it that way afterwards, not during. Words are the very last tool in use to guide or distribute the process of improvising in the moment. Even when I improvise a poem in the moment, the words are the product, not the tool; which perhaps accounts for why so many of my poems are sequences-of-images.

Many writers I know cripple themselves by revising as they write, rather than dumping it all onto the page and editing it later. If you bring in the inner critic or the inner editor too soon, all too often the creative spark is what gets lost, and the result is often very dry, very cerebral. It may be very interesting to the intellect alone, but it won't endure in the somatic or sensual memory.

That's the problem with almost all verbally-directed cerebrally-dominated art-making: its products don't endure in the emotional, somatic, or psychological memories, just in the intellectual. (Not neglecting that many intellectuals conflate the intellect as being all of psychology, when it is in fact only a small element.) Writing a poem in a fixed form is a fascinating intellectual game, but I can only think of two or three sestinas or villanelles I've ever read that stayed with me; the rest are all forgotten, more form than substance. Machaut wrote memorable villanelles a few hundred years ago; Neil Gaiman write the most memorable sestina I can recall about ten years ago. And that's about it.

The only poetic form I regularly write in is haiku, which is a hugely open-ended form emphasizing how images lead to emotional responses; it's actually a very emotive form. When you see an ironic or humorous poem in the 5-7-5 syllable form, that's actually NOT a haiku (unless it's in the mode of Issa); it's a senryu, or something else, not actually a haiku. Again, the prevalence of the haijin (haiku writer) state of mind in my poetry might account for why so many of my poems are sequences-of-images. It's a natural form and style to me, made even more so by time and experience.

When I was improvising music yesterday to play along with a silent film I wasn't stopping and thinking about what I was going to do. There was no outline. There was response in-the-moment. The big thing that many people forget, who are not experienced improvisors, is that every decision that happens is not thought out beforehand. There's no time for verbal analysis. You just go. Improvising music is in fact a very non-verbal process. Analysis, by critics and music theorists, of what happens later, is by contrast a very verbal process. But it's not that way in the moment of making. Critics and theorists (and artists who are cerebrally dominant) would do well to remember that distinction. It's a very important one.

Floating in Space

I suppose my mood is being affected
by a lot of dying right now. I'm reading death poems
by the saints and angels, the Zen masters
who on their deathbeds would dictate one last poem,
haiku, tanka, Chinese syllabic quatrain, whatever.
The enlightened masters gave one last lesson
when departing. One of the greatest of masters
left us with the haiku: "Now that I'm enlightened,
I'm just as miserable as ever." I suppose that must
be true, or at least hopeful. Meanwhile I read poems
from Jim Harrison, of late life, the darkest things
I've read from him since "Letters to Yesinin," where
he wrote to Sergei as a way of not joining Sergei,
not killing himself and becoming another dead poet.
That whole book, and one other, inspired me to do the same,
not kill myself, when I was dying, or so close to it
that I didn't want to live. I didn't care. Nothing
was less fun than living, just then.
And today the news is full of the last words
from another saint, David Bowie. Someone once asked
John Coltrane what he wanted to do, now that he had changed
the entire face of jazz. He said, "I want to become a saint."
And he did. THere's a church in San Francisco
dedicated to Trane's sainthood, where they wroship
with an all-day free jazz jam. I can't think what's more fitting.
Now Bowie. I'm not sentimental. I never cry when expected.
I reserve my tears for when I cannot prevent them,
which is rarely the usual suspects or times.
Some movies will make me weep consistently, who remains
dry-eyed at most funerals. The truth is, when you're too full
of feeling it stops you up rather than brims over.
When it's too much, you go numb, at least for awhile,
and nothing can come out without explosives.
The tributes that get to me are the ones as weird as
who inspired them: like Chris Hadfield singing
on the International Space Station, a free-fall rendition
of "Ground Control to Major Tom." Hollywood, never the best
at being tasteful or sublime, couldn't pay for a backdrop
or special effects like that. Actual guitars floating in space.
Now this long distracting mournful stretch of a day
is ending. All day I've tried to focus on what must be done,
and never got as far as chores or duties. I was stuck
on the cusp of contemplation, a tired man sitting on a stump
in a desert thunderstorm, weeping.
What else is there to do? I'll tell you:
If you want to make a tribute to the artists who have changed
your life, do something at least as amazing as what they did
that changed yours, or at least inspired you.
DOn't settle for weeping with the herd. Make a fire.
Here's a random guitar. Place it on the funeral bin,
or set it slowly spinning down the length of the tin can
out there in space, with the Earth rotating out the window.
Don't imitate, steal. Be just as good as your gods.
After all, that's the minimum tribute they deserve.

•

Chris Hadfield performing Bowie's song "Space Oddity" on the Space Station

Random Notes on a Writer's Life

Productivity: as usual, I am sporadic. As always those critics who think all composers, writers, and songwriters are (or should be!) daily-disciplined craftsmen who write every day, and who dismiss inspiration and the Muses as beyond the pale, are wrong. I've had that argument too many times for it to be interesting anymore: the "you're not a disciplined writer!" accusation against me, because I'm not a daily-disciplined writer, but one who waits and listens for those inner voices to bring something forward—and yet the critics and writers who would chastise me for being "undisciplined" by their standards still can find nothing wrong with what I write, it's not inferior to their own work, I produce enough work to satisfy demand, and despite grumbling they often accept it for publication. My discipline is to always be ready to write it down, whenever it comes forward to be written down. I find nothing kills freshness like stale rote "discipline." It's true that daily writing practice can help you polish your art, and improve your craft—but if you have nothing to say, so what? It's just hollow words.

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So, as usual, I'm sporadic. Yet, in the past week or so, I've gotten down three poems, two of which are probably more in the song lyric column, all of which will be worked on more, later. I've also had some musical ideas floating around. In the next few months, I need to write another larger choral commissioned work, and I'm putting out tendrils to gather in ideas, inspirations, and texts.

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Last night I rolled into the computer a cassette of a Barbaric Yawps live show, recorded in July 1996 at the Madison Art Fair on the Square. I was listening in particular to my own solos on Chapman Stick for those world-music-inspired progressive/free jazz band pieces that we worlked hard to perfect; the Yawps always played on the fractal edge where form and chaos touch, always intentional but near the edge of flying off in any direction. There was a power and life-force aspect to playing with the Yawps that was one of my favorite things about the band. We opened this Art Fair set with one of my own pieces written for the Yawps, "Nomads," which is written in a post-Ellington complex (world music inspired) scale, with polychords; I can readily admit that "Nomads" was my response to "Caravan," just pushed further and a bit more off-kilter and polytonal. (I wrote a few tunes for the Yawps, but most of the music was created by reeds player Tom Lachmund.)

Last weekend I was at Interlochen, in Michigan, for the biannual Interlochen Stick Workshop, my second time attending. I want to do more Stick workshops. I need to reconnect with the music and musicians, and begin doing regular gigs again. This is way of both improving my own playing skills, and networking; both are beneficial. The social aspect of the Stick seminar was actually as powerful for me as the actual classroom work.

Hearing the Yawps recording from 1996, I hear myself playing chordally-complex jazz solos that I can still hear in my head, but haven't played lately. I can hear my conceptual zone in play there, and I had finger dexterity I lack, now. I know I lost ground when I was really sick, a few years ago, and didn't have the strength to do much playing. Now, I want to turn that around. I'm getting my strength back, slowly, and want to get my playing skills back. I like what I heard during this 19 year old performance: recorded before I was really sick, and before I moved out West, and things got chaotic and my (as yet undiagnosed) illness worsened, and robbed me of life-force. I no longer had the strength to practice regularly, and even though I was gigging when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, it wasn't regular, and it was more on the avant-garde and free-jazz range of music-making, which doesn't require me to deepen my performance technique, in some ways. Being at a seminar that forced me at times to back up and re-learn some basic techniques and ideas was refreshing, stimulating, inspiring, and enlivening. Give me more!

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Downside of being a lifelong science fiction, mystery, and fiction reader: I often spot the plot twists well in advance. It's partly because linear narrative has s logic to it, and it's partly because, as a storyteller oneself you know how stories are constructed. Even more than that, as a student of myth and folklore, and of the archetypes, you look for and find patterns in how stories are constructed. It's no secret that Joseph Campbell, the mythologist and anthropologist, was a student of Carl Jung, the depth psychologist who proposed the idea of archetypes of the collective unconscious; and it's no secret that I am a student of both these teachers.

Still, when I encounter a storyteller who can really surprise me, or whose work is a fresh take on the oldest myths, I treasure being surprised. That itself is one big reason I still read SF.

(And for the record, nobody uses "sci fi" to describe the genre except outsiders and popular media junkies.)

•

Meanwhile, I had a real, genuine, short story published this year, in JONATHAN magazine. An actual short story! An actual, for that matter, science fiction short story! It was titled "Shimmer," and is in the May 2015 issue. So I guess I can legitimately call myself a fiction writer now, a storyteller.

And I have had a scattering of short-short stories accepted for next year, as well.

I have also had a number of poems accepted for publication later this year.

I don't submit a lot, and I admit I'm sporadic about writing. Sometimes I do my best work under deadline pressure, and when I am asked to write something. It gives me a kick in the pants to get it done.

And my art installation at Silverwood County Park, The Temple of Deep Time, has been extended for a year. And I am being asked to submit proposals for new installations, for other settings and occasions. So I am being asked, and I am working to meet those deadlines.

This also reflects my increasing ability to actually Do The Work. The return of life-force and strength makes me able to meet these requests and goals. For now, it's very helpful for me to have an external push; at some point, the external push will be less necessary, but always welcome. I am still getting used to the idea that, for most of my adult life, I was not actually lazy and unmotivated, I was sick. I was sick! Sick with an illness that robbed me of strength, of life-force, of motivation, of mental health, and much more. I am too old now to probably ever fully recover; and yet here I am, able to do more now than I could imagine a few short years ago, and with the desire to do it all. I will never have "normal health" for someone my age—but I can do more than I have been able to in a decade. I am aware, today, that when I am not feeling PTSD or crushed down by life, I feel so energized I can barely keep myself in my body. And I am aware of how much I want to get done in whatever remaining years I have left.

•

It needs to be said, again, though: I don't make art for purposes of "self-expression," that hoary Romantic myth. Sometimes I do, but mostly when I make art I feel egoless rather than ego-empowered. There are things I have to say, and want to say, but a significant percentage of what I Make just has to be made, and I don't feel like I'm in charge, or "controlling" that, or the master of it. It just happens. Often I don't know what's going on anymore than you do—until afterwards. Craft is great for analysis, and theory is great for figuring out what you just did. It's not a very good prescriptive master, though, but more of a tyrant when applied beforehand rather than afterwards.

Fantasy LP Covers

Fantasy LP covers made from my own artwork and photography, and used to both appear in gallery shows, and to promote my own music. Some of these have been printed as 12x12 prints and attached to vintage LP record sleeves found in thrift stores. A couple have been displayed in gallery show openings. At least one was used to promote a new song I have written. Which also gives me the idea to finally record and release an album of my own songs. I'll get around to that soon, I hope, life willing.







This next group of LP covers was made for the opening of a showing of my photographs of Silverwood County Park:

Music is Life

There was never any doubt I was going to be a musician.

I started piano at age 6, as soon as we got home from India, at my mother's insistence. She herself had been a concert pianist, played live music on the radio, taught piano, and got her degree in piano and education, before my parents were married and took our family to India, where my father was a medical doctor. I had my first piano recital circa age 7,experiencing horrible stage fright. Thankfully, stage fright went away soon, and I've never really experienced it again. It was a function of profound shyness, which I still experience but have learned to work through, mostly; but with music performance, I am sure of myself when onstage, due to long experience. I studied piano with Frances Danforth in Ann Arbor; years later, after I had graduated from music school, we reversed roles and I tutored her in composition. I have a few of her solo piano music scores around here somewhere, including Karelian Light, which I remember as being a luminous tone poem for piano.

I did try to go into science in college, specifically geology, which I still love to read about, and look at rocks in outcrops. Nonetheless I followed my bliss and I transferred to music school for composition, against everyone's wishes, except for William Albright, the composition professor who became my mentor and academic advisor and friend.

Most of my career missteps in life have come from listening to "sensible" advice from family and friends who told me I'd never make a living in music or the arts, and that I should get sensible work, pay my bills on time, be an upstanding citizen, and so on—on one level they were right, but most of the years I worked as a graphic designer and desktop publisher in corporate culture I felt unfulfilled and unhappy, except on those rare occasions where I was allowed to use my creativity as part of the job. And let's be honest, that kind of job security was only false security in the long run: after many years in publishing I got kicked to the curb with little to show for it.

The only corporate jobs I ever liked were ones that allowed me to be creative, in whatever ways were available. I did like working for book and magazine publishers as a graphic artist, as I occasionally got turned loose creatively; and I taught myself to become a Photoshop expert during idle moments on the job.

In more recent years, sick and unable to work corporate hours anyway, I've written reams of poetry and essays, been commissioned to write large works of music, written several new songs, and a few new medium-scale compositions. I am writing more music now than I had in years, and almost all of it is getting performed. So I've come full circle from when I was in music school, when almost everything I wrote was performed; in part because I like writing for specific performers, many of whom ask me to write for them. It's not a guarantee of getting a performance, or even a good one, but it is incentive to write.

I have also been singing my own songs: for the first time, I have enough confidence in my own ability to play and sing my own songs, to be able to get onstage and do it. At first there was some stage fright. But what you learn from experience is that courage means being scared to death, and getting up there and doing it anyway. I am gradually gathering enough new songs, which I have written mostly for myself, to record an album. That will come to fruition in the near future, I hope.

Therefore I am always going to be someone who encourages young musicians to keep making music. Even if they don't make it their career, they will be better people, and happier for having music in their lives. As several psychological and medical studies have shown, playing music at a young age has many benefits later in life.

Music is life.

Living is dancing.

Ten Albums That Have Influenced Me

Ten albums that have influenced me (I'm cheating a bit as some artists have more than one album listed, and in some cases their entire body of work has influenced me):

1. Wendy (née Walter) Carlos: Switched-On Bach. Either the first or second LP I ever bought. Wore out at least two copies over the years, maybe three. First, here are modern electronic instruments playing some favorite classical music, proving that it works. Second, this was my introduction to the possibilities of the Moog synth. (I own two at this point.)

2. Bill Laswell: Hear No Evil. Laswell has always done really interesting kinds of music, often ten years ahead of everyone else. HNE is a fusion of hard urban grooves with Americana, West African and Indian rhythms, and Beat sensibility. This is one of my main influences when I pay improvised rock, prog, and jazz. Laswell proved that you can put a dub bassline on almost any kind of improvised music and make it solid. There are several other Laswell albums I could have listed here, yet this is one I keep coming back to again.

3. King Crimson: Discipline. Like so many others, Tony Levin was who influenced me to play Stick. This is just a great and enduring album, light and dark by turns, proving to me that "math rock" at its best is gutsy and emotional, not just cerebral. "The Sheltering Sky" contains a flavor of emotional intensity I had only ever heard before in composers like Bartok, Ligeti, Gorecki, or Grieg.

4. Javanese Court Gamelan, Vol. II: Istana Mangkunegaran (Nonesuch Explorer Series). The whole Nonesuch Explorer Series was very influential on my life, opening the door to world music (long before worldbeat was a pop music genre), and eventually to studying ethnomusicology. This album, from the Mangkunegaran influenced me not only musically but personally: eventually I traveled to Indonesia on a Fulbright and studied gamelan at the Mangkunegaran itself, playing some of the music on this album on those same instruments. For me that was a numinous, thrilling, amazing, near-religious experience. I devoted many years of my life to playing and studying Javanese gamelan, and it affected the way I play improvised music, too.

My immersion in gamelan and world music completely changed how I think about music and music-making. Gamelan was part of my immersion in pattern music: music based on ostinatos, on repeating patterns, on additive rhythm, on gradual process. The next three albums are also part of that experimentation with that kind of music, each from a different direction: jazz, rock, classical.

5. John Klemmer: Touch. Before late high school I had had no interest in jazz, rock, pop, or anything but classical and avant-garde music. This LP got me into jazz because the music was ostinato-based themes treated as jazz heads. I still find it really appealing, as well as still being outside the jazz mainstream. From here, all of jazz opened its doors to me, although I remain most strongly drawn to the jazz avant-garde, the more "outside" music like "free jazz" or the composed complexity of Ellington. And I could also list Brubeck's "Time Out" as a key influence here, too.

6. Mike Oldfield: Tubular Bells, Hergist Ridge, and Ommadawn. I remember having an argument in the van on a free afternoon when I was studying geology in Wyoming, when a bunch of us college students were stuffed in the van listening to the Jackson radio station. "Theme from The Exorcist" came on, and everybody was into the music, but nobody but me knew it was excerpts from Tubular Bells. Oldfield built layers of melody and harmony over gradually built-up musical patterns. All three of his early album-length recordings were influential on me, but Ommadawn is in my opinion one of the greatest works of the 20th Century. People don't realize how much folk music influenced Oldfield, and as an ethnomusicologist I can hear that influence all through here.

7. Steve Reich: Drumming (DGG 3 LP set) and Music for 18 Musicians. Gradual process music, which is actually the opposite of "minimalism," a term Reich has never liked. Small repeating musical patterns change gradually, and expand and contract, creating layers of interacting sound. This music influenced me as a composer, certainly, as well as a listener. Music for 18 Musicians is one of the greatest works of classical 20th Century music; and this is proved in part because it is now being played by talented high school groups, too.

8. John Cage. I've always listened to lots of classical avant-garde music, or "experimental" music. I can't pick a particular Cage recording that was a major influence, because his entire body of work has been a major influence on me. Maybe I could single out on the LPs of the Variations. I've performed a lot of Cage over the years, as well. Probably the 2 LP set of Indeterminacy (Folkways) is what I would have to single out as an important influence, as it combined music, "noise," and words together. This led me towards text-sound poetry, which of course had a lot to do with, which is the use of the spoken word as a musical element.

9. David Munrow and The Early Music Consort of London: Music of the Middle Ages and The Six Wives of Henry the VIIIth. Munrow was one of the leading lights of the Early Music revival scene in the 1970s, which was a both scholarly and popular revival of Medieval and Renaissance music performance on original instruments, that continues to this day. Munrow's 3 LP set of Medieval music was my first introduction to the very modern-sounding music of the 13th and 14th Centuries, which still sound avant-garde. This was my first intro to Perotin, the great composer of organum. And Munrow also did the soundtrack, period music on period instruments, for the hit BBC TV series about Henry the VIIIth, which my family avidly watched together as it was first broadcast on PBS. Medieval studies has had almost as big an impact in my life as has ethnomusicology, and in similar ways. Munrow was who opened that door for me.

10. Joni Mitchell: Hejira. There have been a lot of singer-songwriters of the "folk revival" who have had a big impact on me as a songwriter, but Joni Mitchell towers over all of them. This is not only an album full of great songs, it's also musically adventurous and was ahead of its time. Mitchell took a lot of flak for always evolving her sound, rather than staying the little waif with singing autobiographical songs about love, and jazz was a huge influence on her, culminating at one point with Mingus. It's all there in Hejira, though, combined with the appeal of being a musical road trip full of vivid characters and scenes. Some of the songs on "Hejira" have not only influenced me as a songwriter, they have at times seemed to be the narrative of my own life.

Letter to Orphée

Thinking of a lyre of wood and wire and earth,
an earth lyre, I think of an elemental music,
a music made of earth, metals and woods
and stones of earth, played by wind howling
outside the house this dim, blustery day. The clouds
last evening, and pale light this morning, look like snow coming,
not rain. Rushes of sound, wind blowing across
the housetop, reverberate down the chimney.
Orpheus picks up a strangely curved branch of fallen
wood off the forest floor, strings it with copper wires, and plays.
His lyre summons spirits of the air, voices hiding behind
wind and mist, his singing voice, his poetry, becomes the telling
of seasons, days turning the planet under stars.
An elemental voice describing a concerto of ever-changing forces
and spirals in the sky. Spiral wood beams struck by lightning
embrace a pale white stone from anywhere but here.
Perhaps an ancient sea. You cannot be unaware, Orpheus,
that time and change take us all, that these stones eroding
to dust and leaves in this interstellar wind were once
a shallow sea, or that the peak of our tallest mountain
is made of shells of sea creatures that died millions of years gone
to fall to deep ooze and be pressed into rock
by the pressures of what came after. My home
is a temple of standing stones. Red and gold sandstones
form a shelter around whose curves the wind howls. We work
these metal flakes, gold bright and soft copper green, into veins
of the lyre of Orpheus, seams in the wood, ore seams in the earth.
Its copper strings gleam with forged memory. Its curve
is a memory of birds nesting in the crook of an ancient bole,
a tree much older than any bird, once fallen forgotten
by the descendants of sparrows and robins who once it sheltered.
Birds nest in the hair, the ear, of Orpheus, and dictate their songs
to his receptive tongue, his voice which forgets nothing,
not even the oldest groan of the planet giving spontaneous birth to life.
It's tempting to believe that those who refuse to hear these spirits
singing have themselves no souls, but we must not judge, we must
leave room for revelation. Everything connects. Webs and orbs
and lyre-spiders who weave them. Atoms of everything, whirling
in apparent silence within these fossiled stones, glint and spark
in light cast by the voice of the son of dreaming. His torn limbs
cast upon waters and forest floor. Orphée retrieves his own bones
and sinew as he picks up another fallen treelimb to weave
a newer lyre. Look, will you not: gold leaves glow
in the last rays of afternoon, below this hillside meadow,
and behind that is the whirling sparkle of molecules dancing,
and behind that the velocity of a shining planet, an orb
hurling itself into silence. We are the cliffs we jump from.
Our naked flesh breaks the laketop shimmer as we fall,
we disappear forever into that water mirror, then placidity returns.
Low hum of oceans singing in the blood, wind in the copper wires
of a sacred city, a lyre strung above dark streets the moon guards.
A forest of shadows grows within oil slicks reflecting streetlights
and trash bins. But in time, deep time, this forest made of bricks
will be overeaten and digested by new forests, returned and ink-vined
along borders of papyrus leaves woven into sheets of sand
by the lyre's unending song. The lowest string on a harp
of air and ice, the lowest tone that, struck,
can shatter crystal mountains. Wind strokes
the highest strings into humming.
Orpheus takes breath, opens his mouth to sing again.
What comes forth
shapes wind-blown broken sandflakes
back into mirrors full of starlight.

Memorial Day 2014: Flags of Memory

Flags of Memory

A short film depicting flags that are on display from Memorial Day till Fourth of July, Veterans Cemetery. This is an annual tradition that I love, evoking memory in a beautiful and affirming way.

Video and still photography in color, B&W, and infrared, & editing by Arthur Durkee
©2014 AP Durkee. All Rights Reserved.
www.arthurdurkeemusic.com

This short film is my Memorial Day tribute to veterans and soldiers, fallen and living alike. This is one day we set aside to remember service and sacrifice: let us not forget these things during the rest of the year.

Tango and Milonga

Over the past winter I wrote a pair of instrumental pieces to be performed with dance, and they were premiered live in March, with wonderful dancing. I have listened to and enjoyed tango for many years, although I had never written in the genre before this. The process of analyzing (yes, we do use that music theory we learned in music school, sometimes) and figuring out what I wanted to write was a long process, with several false starts and blind alleys explored before I reached that point where I often write my best music: the feel and style of the genre becomes internalized, and I write by following my ear rather than from an intellectual outline. Once I had done that, these two interlocked pieces appeared, one a fierce, fast tango, and the other a slow, inward but still darkly passionate milonga. Part of my loves the milonga form above all, because of its inwardness, its passion and melancholy, and the feel of a very late night after you have survived something dangerous, exhausted and sad but still glad to be alive.

When we premiered the tango and milonga live, with dance, I thought it went very well, and I got some good feedback about it. This is the kind of music I love to play, to accompany dancers. I've played a lot of live dance concert music, some of it improvised, over the years, and the excitement of live interaction never gets old. So everything went well. But we didn't get a very good recording, mostly due to my errors of mic placement; well, it was a new unfamiliar room to perform in, and I guessed wrong. So a few weeks later, we set up a living room recording live session, and made some good recordings of the music. These videos are from that session. The live music vibe is still there, I think, as we recorded live to two-track from the room sound, and I didn't try to over-produce or over-control the session. We just set everything up, turned it on, and played each piece several times till we felt we had played it well and made a good take. I edited that session down into these short music videos. I may at some point edit down the premiere performances, with the dancers; that will happen if I can get the audio to a place where I like it well enough to share. So stay tuned.

Tango of the Knife Fight:



Milonga of the Time of Leaves:



Daniel Atwater: Accordion
Brian Schultz: Piano
Arthur Durkee: Chapman Stick

Written, Produced & Engineered by Arthur Durkee. ©2014 AP Durkee. All Rights Reserved.

A Summoning of Fireflies

A new short film.



A Summoning of Fireflies. 2013.

Video, sound & music by Arthur Durkee.

Music: "Summoning" by Arthur Durkee
AD: Animoog, softsynths, bass guitar, live recordings, effects.
All Rights Reserved.

In June, when I was out shooting footage of the wind in the grass, as dusk fell the fireflies began rising from the verge. They pulsed alongside the road ditches, in the trees, and over the fields.

I have spent several evenings this summer filming fireflies at dusk, gathering a lot of good material. This short film is the first in a series.

consort, with fireflies

An evening of Renaissance winds in a cloistered tent on prairie's edge. As dusk deepens to blue, fireflies rise from prairie fields and grass and tall flowers under cypress. Green pulse on stem of tiger lily, cupped in hand reflecting. Bronze lions watch these moving lights. Whine and throb of ancient pipe and reed. A skirl of dance marks time to the finger-tapped drum. Redwing blackbird in the bower sings counterpoint to sacred chant, while crickets drum in corners. Unbroken consort of recorders. Voices tuned to rhythm and pace of breath. We are still as rapt grass in windless rows. Night's shadow line crawls high behind this brightened stage. Long intertwined counterpoint of melody weaves spirals and leaves in air filled with weaving pulsing light. Long past the blue hour in still twilight lights scatter along the road. These darkened fields full of life turn to rush towards light. All alone in the alien darkness of empty backroads winding past lost hearths, I drive homewards through crowded firefly constellations.

prairie evening
concert lit by fireflies:
ancient music

elegy for George (remix)

In 1984, I was the featured performing artist on the radio program Studio Live on WCBN-FM Ann Arbor. (Disclosure: I was a longtime volunteer programmer on CBN, and had a couple of regular shows. This was a special event, a live performance show that I was invited to be on.) I just found the cassette master recording of that broadcast, which also includes the tape music piece I made from part of that broadcast in the WCBN Production studio later.

It was during the live broadcast, when we were playing a tape piece of mine, that a phone call came in informing me of the death of my George Cacioppo: good friend, mentor in music composition, founding member of the ONCE Group of experimental music composers in Ann Arbor in the 1960s, and philosophical gadfly. I then made the rest of the live show into a memorial elegy for George.

The piece I made from that evening, "elegy for George," was later broadcast on WCBN, and also played as a tape piece at a memorial concert in George's memory, at the Unitarian church in Ann Arbor. William Albright, my advisor as a composition student, and one of the most important mentors in my life, organized the event, and when he heard I had a piece, he had it included. So my music was performed alongside the music of some of my heroes in modern, experimental, avant-garde music: Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma, George's own music, and other members of the ONCE Group and Fluxus.

Last night I digitized the cassette without difficulty into my studio computer. Tonight I spent an hour cleaning up the digital version, then making a new piece of music out of it, a remix. Consider the musical category to be trance, drone, ambient, meditation. But the piece itself is a very emotional piece of music, and it can get under your skin.

This version is digitally edited and remixed. It is stretched to three time its original length, then heavily processed in Sony Vegas using heavy-duty reverbs and processors like Lexicon Pantheon and Waves Enigma. Essentially this is an extended, blurred remix. I can also hear maybe adding Tibetan bell sounds to this piece, in another version. Fodder for another ambient/meditation album, an idea I've been working on for a few months.

elegy for George (enigma blur remix)    


George Cacioppo


"Cassiopeia," by George Cacioppo
A marvelously sensual and beautiful piece of aleatoric music that I have performed a number of times.

Hull Breach

from the Surgery Diaries

It becomes clear to me why having this ostomy makes me feel so unattractive. I'm fat, I've got an ostomy, I've never felt so sexually unattractive as I do now. And I've been rejected numerous times precisely because of the ostomy. Then again, what do you expect? Most people can't deal with things outside their normative boxes.

And I figured out why, this morning, knowing that friends have been sleeping together in the next room, and myself wanting to go nude today but knowing that I probably won't. I feel completely open and naked already, so why bother?

This isn't a warm-up to a pity party. It's a moment of clarity. It just happens to be about stuff most folks never want to have to think about.

It's that this ostomy is like a breach of integrity. A hull breach. The appliance is like a patch job on an oceangoing vessel, and you have spend a lot of attention on the patch job so that the ship doesn't sink. A breach in structural integrity. If you don't give it lots of attention, this ship will fail.

There are days when I hate it. Hate having to give it this much gods be damned attention. Hate having to think about it all day long, as it constantly demands my attention. Hate having to deal with it when the appliance does occasionally fail, ad there is a mess to clean up. I have lost entire days to this, where nothing else gets done. Some of my friends who have had friends with ostomies, or have themselves had a short-term ostomy, think they understand, and they mean well, but they don't, really. A colostomy is not the same as what I have, a high flow ileostomy. A colostomy is still a once or twice a day thing. But I have to empty the bag multiple times every day, and if I wake up in the night, usually then as well. It's like a demanding baby that won't stop crying. It's like a Siamese twin you cannot ignore. It requires hours of your attention daily. Not minutes. Hours. So there are days when it is hard not to resent it, even when you know it has saved your life and is keeping you alive. Even though I am grateful for being alive, and no longer have a deadly chronic illness, I have this shitbag now, and my quality of life is not significantly improved, nor has it reached the level promised to me when I first agreed to this surgical journey. Life hasn't always gotten better, although it is sustained. I am alive. I am still here.

This breach in hull integrity not only makes me feel unattractive, it is proven to turn people away. No one wants to hear about it. It brings out in many people that same kind of uncomfortable avoidance and insecurity that you see when someone who has never thought before about their own mortality confronts a dying child: when what they have always taken for granted is called into question. People might care for you, but they no longer know how to express it. With an ostomy, even a hug can be a problem. You can have no idea how isolated this hull breach can make me feel. It is capable of denying me even simple basic human contact. How would you feel when you see even people who care about you become tentative about giving you a simple hug? When you need hugs more than you ever have before?

I am struggling with this isolation, even alienation, a lot right now. This entire week has been a battle to just stay afloat. Yes, its depression, shut up with the convenient and misleading labels. I struggle against throwing a self-pity party. I struggle all the more when I see everyone around me making contact, making connections, and I feel excluded. People ask me why my mood is not better, when so many things seem to be going well for me, or at least better. They want me to be upbeat and positive, and the best I can do right now is not be dark and brooding. Call it neutral bouyancy. Call it trying to trim the battleship so that the hull breach doesn't sink it.

A couple of months ago I wrote a song. It was one of these occasional pieces where I sit down at the table or piano, with no plans, then inspiration takes over and a few hours later I have a finished poem, a finished song, a finished essay, usually needing little revision. Experience has taught that I can rely on this kind of inspiration happening often enough to be pragmatic about it. I don't take it for granted, and I also know it will come over me a few times a year. So a couple of months ago, I sat down to play and started working. The words came with the music, at the same time, which is a little unusual. The song, more lieder than folk song, is titled "Still/Here."

It's a simple song, musically, but there's a lot of emotion in it. The song is about survival, about having survived death, on a level that's underneath the surface of the words. You are still here. You are still, here. What lies underneath a song like this is hard personal experience. Its not obvious in the lyrics, although as with poems if you look for buried layers of meaning underneath the metaphor you can find them. What have you survived, that you are still here. What have you lost, that returns to the light.

Last night, I performed this new song for the first time in a concert setting, before a room full of people who had never heard it before. You could hear a pin drop. It was perhaps a little scary. The song ripped something open in me, opened a door to these emotions and deep feelings I'm talking about this morning after. I felt naked. (I feel naked, still, lying in bed in the morning, here, not having put clothes on yet, and not really wanting to.) What small amount of the gift of bards that I might possess was in full operation. I really felt the song as I was singing it. Felt it on every level, more than I ever had. There was applause, although I pretty much ran off the stage. I had to step out of the building, and get my feelings back under control. You know, lest I be weeping uncontrollably, that sort of thing. Getting back to center took awhile. And I have been feeling open and vulnerable ever since. I got almost no comments about the song afterwards, which I don't know what to think of. It would not be the first time that an audience doesn't know how to respond to something of mine. I can guess why, and I don't feel like it at the moment.

I don't feel fragile or hungover this morning, the way an emotional experience can leave you the next day. I feel strong. I also feel very open and very vulnerable. I will be performing the song once again tonight, though I doubt it will be the same. I imagine it will be much more controlled, less of an upwelling of deep waters flooding. After all, the flood already happened, the waters are still settling. I am very much feeling my feelings this morning, so there won't be any surprises on that front. The emotional hull is breached as well as the physical. How do we go through our lives with these walls keep us so separated and safe? When that's an illusion, the grace of this wound, and it is a grace, is that I have no more illusions about safety, security, or boundaries. I don't take any of this for granted anymore.

I am still here. The rest of it is a matter for moment-to-moment attention. Keeping the ship afloat, checking the hull patch every so often, making sure we're trim and sailing on. It's enough to just be still here.

Songwriting: Influences

When you list your influences as a songwriter, everyone who reads such lists has certain expectations, expectations which have become clichéd. Even defying the usual expectations has become clichéd; for example, when a songwriter cites as influence "a flowery meadow," or plays a game of reversals.

Never having myself been a member of the Cult of Dylan or the Cult of Cohen, you won't find their names on my songwriting influences list. That's not to deny giving Bob his due as an occasionally unique and brilliant songwriter, with a knack for a turn of phrase both memorable and fresh. But he's not an influence on my songwriting.

There are a lot of songwriters you learn from, that you can learn craft from by looking at their material, learning their songs, analyzing the scores, just listening. I learn a great deal about songwriting by looking at songs. That's just going to school. But that doesn't mean those songwriters become your influences.

No, your influences are those songs and songwriters that get under your skin, that get at your guts, where you go, "I want to do that!" Not imitate, though imitation is often where we learn to start to write, but incorporate. Some sensibility, or mood, or way of looking at the world you never experienced or imagined before. Songwriters who have influenced me have all had a moment for me, or many moments, where I got lost inside the worlds they created, inhabited those worlds, and started writing about those worlds myself, using my own words and music to respond from inside those worlds.

It's about being haunted. Haunting worlds created inside a song, and being yourself haunted by what you found there. That's the stuff that gets inside your bones and blood, and even though the new songs you write may be nothing like those ones the influenced you musically or lyrically, there's a ghost in there that took up lodging in your chest and still sings through your lungs, using your body as its shell to sing its songs.

It's a hungry host kind of haunting, that won't leave you in peace, but requires you to keep on singing. Eventually you learn that music is the alchemy of survival, just as art is the alchemy of life, transforming suffering into something that can be endured. Just.

One of my influences, by this definition, as a songwriter is John Dowland, the great Elizabethan composer and lutenist and songwriter.

In the alchemical transaction that is music, doing the blues, singing and playing about the worst things in life, makes you feel better. Making music about despair, death, horror, suffering, love lost, loneliness,violation, pain, all that paradoxically helps you feel less alone, feel better. Some days the blues are the only thing that keeps you going. They give you a reason to get through the night, when there isn't any other.

John Dowland wrote the Elizabethan blues. They still help us keep going.

Here are the lyrics to what is still one of the greatest songs by one of the greatest songwriters ever: "Flow, My Tears," by John Dowland:

Flow, my tears, fall from your springs!
Exiled for ever, let me mourn;
Where night's black bird her sad infamy sings,
There let me live forlorn.

Down vain lights, shine you no more!
No nights are dark enough for those
That in despair their lost fortunes deplore.
Light doth but shame disclose.

Never may my woes be relieved,
Since pity is fled;
And tears and sighs and groans my weary days
Of all joys have deprived.

From the highest spire of contentment
My fortune is thrown;
And fear and grief and pain for my deserts
Are my hopes, since hope is gone.

Hark! you shadows that in darkness dwell,
Learn to contemn light
Happy, happy they that in hell
Feel not the world's despite.

A Painting Journal

Aurorae, acrylic on paper, 2012

A painting journal

Trying something semi-new. Keeping a journal as I paint. Writing down thoughts in the pauses between painting during a session. Just as a record of the creative process.

Listening to music, while I paint, on random shuffle on iTunes on my laptop. Keep in mind that on my studio computer, my iTunes library can now play for over 190 days continuously, with no repeats. All kinds of music, truly random.

•

Thursday, November 8
4:16 PM

Feel like painting today. There is sunlight streaming in for the first time in weeks. There’s one painting that I want to finish, now.

Don't be afraid to paint over something you liked before, but which didn't work for this painting. I am finding myself wanting to finish one of the “Lights” (Aurora Borealis) series of paintings today, after having it set aside for weeks. I have the iTunes music library on shuffle, listening to random pieces while painting. All over the avant-classical pop rock map. Copland to Patsy Cline to books on CD to Kate Bush.

Several layers of dry rush blue night sky, over existing backgrounds. Then the luminosity of the aurorae themselves. Lots of edge softenings, nuances, translucencies.

Even though I started this painting with bold geometric shapes, I've moved away towards something more fractal, more natural. Follow the brush. Bold and solid under layers yield to thinner, translucent, feathered upper layers. It looks better that way.

Because of the way I'm painting right now, or because of the abstract-realist subject matter, I find myself using large flat brushes. Angled strokes, really rather calligraphic. Sometimes the brushtrokes form lines and surfaces like geographic texture underneath the more visible layers.

Peter Gabriel to science fiction soundtrack creepiness. “He's got a ray gun!” Melodic punk Bob Mould. Zen shakuhachi.

The painting darkens but the lights still shine through.

•

Thursday, November 8
4:46 PM

The next layers will lighten the painting up again. Let the dark over-layers dry for awhile. Then continue. Often I don't let the acrylics totally dry, because I do like the slight mixing that happens when you dry brush paint over a still slightly wet layer. The same kind of mixing that happens in nature, layers of sedimentary rock feathering and mixing together as they form, bleeding color from minerals leaching into the matrix.

Continuing to photograph each painting in progress, with the idea of using these closeups and sectional photos of color and brushstroke as painted stock backgrounds. Might even create and sell CDs of original stock on my own, of these my own materials. Why not? No one else has them, because no one else has these paintings in progress.

Photographing the painting in progress is also a way of looking at it, contemplating it, looking more closely.

Quick sunset of oncoming winter. There goes the last of the natural light. Even in the failing light, though, continuing to paint, kitchen lights turned on now.

Sometimes the texture of the paper still comes through, as do the lines of brushstrokes on lower layers.

Of course lighting affects mood. Color does as well. Despite what the neuroscientists claim, I don't think that's hardwired, I think it still has some culturally-bound factors. A lot of neuroscientists are not even aware that their own fundamental assumptions about what they observe are culturally-bound; unaware that their cultural bias is Western-scientific; as opposed to, for example, Inuit-mythic or Hindu-Buddhist-cosmological. Is a fish aware that it’s breathing water?

Color palette and language are not the same from culture to culture. What is held in common are the perceived colors of natural world objects. Red berries on forest plants around the world are poisonous often enough to humans to be of note. But there is no equivalent color in the northern Midwest to the color of young rice in the paddies, that unique yellow-green. So what we associate with those colors has at minimum some cultural input and conditioning with regards to how we interpret colors as emotions.

Yet I’m a North American, born on Turtle Island, and my roots for this kind of painting that I find myself doing are in Kandinsky and other branches of early Modernism, from the period before Modernism went ultra-rational, began to worship logical-positivism, and threw away all of its early vestiges of both irrationality and mysticism.

People forget that some of the key branches of early Modernism were deep explorations of the newly-theorized unconscious self, the realm of dreams and myths and archetypes; that got discarded in favor of rational utilitarianism. Not always an equal tradeoff. What the expressive color, the color of expression, in my painting means might mean what it means only to me, but as Kandinsky notes, if the experience of viewing the painting evokes an emotional, or mythopoetic, response in the viewer, all is good.

Laurie Anderson runs into Coldplay. Then 40s pop hits. A favorite slow movement from a Vivaldi cello concerto. Truly random music choices. The BBC Radio drama of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

Rest awhile. Make some more photos of the painting. Think about starting dinner.

•

Thursday, November 8
5:16 PM

I'm not remotely tired of photographing these paintings as I make them. It's not really about recording the process, more about watching change. Each working period yields a new painting. The painting you start with is not always like the painting you end with, and it might change several times during the process. Eventually it tells you when it's done, and you stop.

That's something a lot of my non-artist friends never seem to understand: listening to what the work tells you it wants. Non-artists all too often think art-making is all a conscious act of will, as though it were all planned out, pre-designed, engineered to the artist’s willful blueprint. Well, sometimes you do start out that way, but it almost never ends up exactly as you pre-visualized. It moves. It always has a will of its own. The artist doesn't control things as much as people think. There's a lot of intuition involved.

One of the things that makes a lot of current postmodern art so dry and emotionally flat, and often frankly boring, is precisely a lack of intuition, with too much conscious intent and control. Trust me, I've worked in advertising art and commercial design and illustration, where you are in fact working to a goal, an outline, a conscious intent. Art with a purpose, art intended to pass on a specific message. It's often still creative and fun, and sometimes even nuances, but it's not art that’s meant to endure. It’s meant to be seen once, clearly convey its message, then the reader moves on. Most art you see in magazines is like that. You don't desire to keep coming back to it, to look at it again and absorb it.

When I look at a Jeff Koons piece, for example, it's often very clever and flashy and interesting, really eye-catching and fun. But once I've seen it, I’m done with it. There’s no lingering. Looking at it a second time, I shrug. There is no desire to come back. It's commercial illustration writ large, and what it lacks is precisely that emotional intuition (Kandinsky again) that I find myself seeking from my own paintings. I don't tire of looking at them, or making photos of them.

Probably most artists feel this way about their own work, so it's hardly a revelation, I imagine. If it didn’t interest you as an artist, you wouldn’t return to it, or to doing it.

October Project. A movie soundtrack. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Cowpunk ditties. "I hate to wake up sober in Nebraska." Music rolling on.

Pause to make dinner. Ravel solo piano music.

•

Friday, November 9
11:45 AM

Now we lighten up the colors again, so they emerge from the dark, glowing. Red glows over green.

Thinking ahead, planning ahead, envisioning in advance with the mind’s eye, what photographer Edward Weston called “pre-visualization,” is something I learned to do years ago as a graphic designer. You keep the goal in mind. You can hit the mental undo button to go back a step if necessary. You visualize what the end result will look like, and you approach that visualization even if you never quite match it in the real world. Imagination remains more malleable, in the end.

Working in layers on a painting, adding layers over layers, is for me analogous to working in layers in Photoshop. You know what's above and below, what masks and what shows through, how they interact. There is a similar sense of happy accident, the indeterminacy I often like to see in all the art I do. Being surprised as the artist is one of the things I love about the process. Discovery. The mystery of an unplanned but even better outcome.

Thinking about this further, layers are natural to me because they are prominent in my music, and the music I play and listen to. All those years spent playing Javanese gamelan, which is layered cycles of melody and heterophony. The influence of the Indonesian music I've studied and played on how I play in a jazz or rock combo setting, in which I also tend to think in layers. Avant-garde classical music and jazz, often structured similarly. I'm thinking of Steve Reich's cyclic gradual process music, and also more recently of Nik Bartsch and his ensemble Ronin, in which the tension between layers of melody and rhythmic cycles is integral to the music.

The underlayers of the painting show through in parts, in textures underneath, even when the pigments are covered over or mostly so. Remnants. Memories. Little bits of the past. Every painting is a history as well as a fact.

•

Saturday, November 10
12:34 PM

Recently acquired the special edition DVD of Ed Harris' movie "Pollock," which is an excellent biopic about the artist Jackson Pollock, unsentimental and deeply moving. It’s not a psychoanalysis of Pollock, it’s a presentation of his life. The most interesting and intense parts of the movie are the scenes in which we see the artist at work, creating. To do this role, Harris learned how to paint. He built a studio behind his house, and began to learn. The paintings seen in the film are re-creations of Pollocks, made by the film studio art department, but also worked on by Harris on camera. This is one of the most realistic depictions of a painter in the films: there’s no faking it.

Watching Harris paint as Pollock painted, in character but also DOING the paintings is enthralling. You can see that the actor has absorbed how the painter moved, physically, which gives a strong clue to how he painted. This is a simply terrific film. It inspires me to take up the brushes again today and work some more.

Painting is becoming something that, once I've started doing it, becomes self-sustaining. I still have trouble with all the labels around art: painter, artist, etc. I'd rather than just do it than have a label I have to wear like a name badge. So I still don't think of myself as A Painter, I just paint. I’m happy to say I paint, and leave it at that.

•

Monday, November 12
2:07 PM

This painting is now finished. No title yet, though I do know it’s part of the aurora borealis series. Call it simply “Aurorae” for now. I’ll put it up on the bedroom wall with the other painting, and continue to grow the cluster of paintings there, adding color to my room’s most empty wallspace.

Finished. Rather, I don't know what else to do with it. The end result is a bit darker than I had envisioned, nonetheless it's saturated with rich color. There are a lot of details here I like. Brushstrokes like waves of light and air.

Poet Paul Valery once opined, "A poem is never finished, only abandoned." I feel some of that now. This painting is abandoned. I feel the need to go on, to work on other paintings. To do something new and unknown. To improvise.

In painting as in poetry, there comes a point after which more revision won't fix anything, and often makes things worse. I once was boggled to hear that a poet was teaching her writing workshop students that she sometimes revised a poem sixty times. I frankly find that either unbelievable or pathetic. If it takes that long to "fix" a piece of art, chances are you never will. Either it has defeated you already, or you've gotten stuck.

I don't feel that way about this painting, it just feels done. Abandoned, maybe, or perhaps it’s just telling me that it’s done. I don't know what else to do with it. I'm satisfied. I'm ready to move on to the next piece.

Make Art

The guidelines for the beginning of survival. The mantra for coping when you can't really cope because you're overwhelmed and exhausted all the time. The method of staying sane when it's a real challenge.

Make art. Record music. Write a poem. Make art.

When upset, make art. When sad, make art. When angry at situations or the stupid people involved in certain situations, make art. When tired of talking about problems, record music. When you can't face that stack of letters and bills and other things that make you crazy to think about, even though you know you'll have to deal with them eventually, make art. Always prioritize for art.

Although in some ways my health has radically improved in the last just-over-a-year since the surgery, I'm still recovering. I was sick for twenty years, I'm not going to bounce back in six months. I still tire out unpredictably. When too exhausted to do anything but feel frustrated and weepy, make art. The last few days I've been as exhausted as I used to be when I was really sick, and anemic. I just can't get it started. So make art.

When nothing else works and you're totally stuck and can't see your way out to ever getting out of whatever hell you find yourself in again, make art. Make art. Make art.

Songwriting: Polishing and Revision

I woke this morning with the urge to write. I wasn't feeling very verbal, though; having spent time late last night laying down tracks in the recording studio, that's not a big surprise; I've known for a long time that when the music is flowing, the poetry tends to be quiescent. Still, I felt like writing. So I pulled out my song lyrics workbook and my journal and poetry sketchbooks, and worked on revising some sketches into a coherent song lyric.

That's the process that works for me: write it down while the images and words are coming. Revise later. I know some poets and other writers who revise as they write, but that has never worked for me. In fact, it can even block the flow, and make what comes out all too cerebral. For me, it's "Spew now, edit later" that works best.

Sometimes a poem comes out almost fully-formed, and needs only a few changes to polish it up. For me that's actually fairly common. That's partly because I don't push the river, I let it flow however it will. My writing discipline is not to try to force myself to write every day, to meet some workshop-defined ideal of productivity or daily practice. My discipline is to always be listening, always be ready, always have my tools at hand, so that when something does come forward to be written down, I'm always ready to do so. I don't write every day, and I don't try to. Experience has taught me that my writing discipline achieves more or less the same quantity and quality of good results as poets I know whose discipline is to write a couple hours every day; so which is the better practice? Neither. It's just different means to similar ends. I've met a few poets who seem baffled that their writing discipline isn't what everyone else does, or should do, and they particularly have a hard time understanding why I can write a good poem in a first or second draft when I don't write every day.

So, sometimes a poem comes out fully-formed. Sometimes a poem, or a song lyric, comes out in very rough form, with good images, but the words are all over the place, incoherent, and unformed. It's like throwing paint at the wall: sometimes you get the outline of an image, but it's not yet fully-formed. In such cases what often works for me is to revise by writing-through the words again. The cinematic flow of the images may be the same, even in the same order, although not always, but the words might be completely new and different, or assembled from the scraps in your sketch, in your journal. Sometimes I come back to things I wrote months or years ago, on these mornings when I want to write but don't feel very verbal. Every writer probably has a file of random ideas written down that were never developed, to dip into when the urge to write is there, but words aren't coming into one's mind the way they usually do.

This morning I went back in my journal and found some scraps of poem and image that I had written months ago, and re-formed them into a provisional song lyric. It probably needs more polishing, another revision or two, still.

I thought the process might be interesting, by way of example.

•

On a roadtrip through the Southwest last winter, I spent the night in Winnemucca, NV, which is a truck stop town on Hwy. 80 in a desert region of the Basin & Range. It's a good place to stop if you're driving across country, and there are hotels and restaurants there to support the custom. I spent the night there at the end of February 2012, on my way back home from California; the next day I got as far as Salt Lake City, then up to Jackson, WY, for a couple of days spent photographing in the Grand Tetons.

That night in Winnemucca a desert windstorm came through. The wind howled at the doorsill all night long. I stuffed towels around the edges of the window and door, but the room still smelled of alkaline desert dust, triggering my allergies. A couple of rain troughs were torn off the eaves during the night, and the trash cans were knocked over and blown down the line. Everyone in the hotel was on edge all night long, alert in our rooms to every sound, occasionally peering out between our window curtains to make sure our vehicles were okay.

In the morning, it was still window, but no longer howling. Puffy dark clouds filled the skies all day, making light and shadow patterns on the land all around, a mottled, piebald look. I wrote what follows in my journal the morning after the night-long storm; you can see how it's unformed, not really even a poem, just some impressions and phrases, ideas and images. So here's a good example of a bad poem from my own journal. I present it, unedited, for the purpose of demonstrating how a little revision and polishing can make a huge difference.

howling wind outside door
begging to get in
long night terrors
in morning's light dispelled
but hiding still behind
low swift-groaning clouds

raven in the dead grass
hovers wind-whipped and inarticulate
silent this morning
all thought drowned in wind

picture mountains
mottled by day and cloud-shadow
gray, tan and dun
snow-crowned, isolate
red side-walls canyoned with ice
picture them groaning
with pines bent over
giving birth to wind

•

sage winter white
palest aqua
solitary tree gold branched
against darker brown hills

raven hovers in swift wind
floating above sea of grass

•

last night I feared the wind
would trap me, the snow keep me
locked into a dream of sterile
hotel room, frozen, unable to venture out

now midday wind robs
the day of heat, freezing
but the mountains and clouded clay
are beautiful, and all moves as it would

•

trails of light
written by wind on stone

I wince to read that now. Not a few lines are pretentious and puerile, the language removed from the experience and fond of its own smartness—which is exactly the sort of crap I produce when I try to force myself to write, rather than go with the flow. (Which is why I don't write that way.) Words I'd never actually use in a finished piece. There are a few turns of phrase that show promise, but more that don't.

This is why we ought to leave such things in our journals, and never present them as finished poems. I do agree with some poetry critics that a lot of poems presented these days aren't finished, aren't revised enough, and are basically just journal-poems. The Beatific advice to write "first thought, best thought" actually only works if you're already an experienced bard, long-trained in poetics, and long-practiced in poetic improvisation.

Although this excerpt from my journal isn't good on its own, I see a kernel of something that could be good buried in it, if I can just tease it out, rework it, and make it something a little more focused and concise.

When I'm writing a song lyric, a key emotion or image is what makes the refrain, the image or phrase you come back to between verses. It needs to anchor the entire song. Sometimes the anchor can be the music, but when the song has a refrain, rather than just a recurring structure, you need to make sure the refrain has some of the strongest words or images in the entire lyric. This morning, I read through this material from my journal, and saw that the image that kept recurring was a raven hovering in the wind over a patch of dead brown grass. That was something I'd seen during the high winds, an image that stayed with me. So, let's take that and make it into the key image of the revised song lyric.

Also, on purely technical grounds, when I am writing a song lyric rather than a poem, I tend to count syllables-per-line, usually in a pattern of longer line followed by shorter. That pattern of variation also fits with much of melody I hear in my mind when writing song lyrics. It's mostly intuitive, not planned out far in advance. (I'm reporting here on what I observe of my own tendencies, not dictating music-theoretical rules.) Whether or not there is an end-rhyme, whether or not you are using meter of one kind or another, counting syllables gives you a framework to hang the imagery on. I prefer counting syllables to using formal metrics, as I think it's more flexible and fluid, and allows you to occasionally vary the count and stress of a line, and be able to throw in an extra syllable where needed. I strongly dislike iambic pentameter because few modern poets do it without making it sound sing-song and clichéd, so I avoid pentameter in my song lyrics. Yet since the English language is built on stressed and unstressed words, you can't really avoid using iambs per se; but you don't have to use them in rigid forms, you can be loose and improvisatory wherever possible. Especially when combing words with melody. Setting words to music changes all the rules—something poets ought to remember, although few get past their internalized formal prejudices to be able to do so.

Song lyrics tend to be more formal than "pure" poetry, especially in this age of free verse and organically-emerging poetic form, and by necessity: repetitive pattern assists memorization. There's reason the ballad form is so common in folk music: the pattern of word-stress and melody makes ballads memorable. So when I am writing a song lyric, or in this case polishing up some otherwise loose material into a song lyric, I tend to find ways to say it within the syllabic form. You can't always shoehorn a long poetic line into a form, sometimes you have to sacrifice it. When you're revising and polishing, you need to let go of what you've written in order to make better what you're about to write. You can't afford to cling to even your own words; you sometimes have to be brutal.

With all that in mind, this morning I produced what follows, which is a more structured and formal, and I think better, piece of writing: a song lyric which I will eventually set to music. It still needs some more revision, I think, and some individual word-choices haven't been settled yet, but overall I hope this can serve as an example of the revising and polishing process.

raven floats in morning wind
above a sea of grass

howling wind outside my door
begging to get in
long night terrors, fury's call
gone in morning light
linger still behind these clouds
moving fast and tight

raven silent in the sky
all sound drowned in wind

picture mountains gray and dun
bare tree on the ridge
piebald sun and shadow cloud
red side-wall canyons iced
picture groaning pines bent down
giving birth to wind