2013 morning oatmeal anecdote

In our house, everyone likes oatmeal. And for people who know us, "our house" means many different locations these days, as Jo goes through grad school in Illinois and I come back and forth and go elsewhere for work. So the idea of "home is what you make of it" or "home is what you make in it" is especially meaningful.

Whichever place we live in, we do good oatmeal. With sautéed apples and dates, nuts, a little maple. Slow-cooked, fast-cooked, whatever. We are hot cereal aficionados. (Afficionadi?) We have it down to an art and a science. It’s a practice, the thing we do many mornings in a row, regardless of how the day before has left us feeling. It’s totally ordinary and totally celebratory – the idea that the day’s first taste should be sweet and nutritious. It pairs well with other flavors and you're not hungry 15 minutes later. 

I don’t know what 2012 was. It wasn’t ordinary. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t something I’d like to repeat. It had many, many things worth celebrating, and many, many people came to me through it that were inspiring. Many people gave us their homes when we needed them.

2012 was a lot of work, the right kind if not the easiest. It involved some mourning and some renewal, slivers of light and palpable fear. But we got up at least some days and tried to make the first taste a good one, something on the tongue that would whisper that the rest of the day had promise.

Back to oatmeal. We can make it after any kind of night before. It’s always pretty good. Sometimes it’s great. Sometimes it’s a little underdone or wanting. But it gets you back into your life from the dream world.

This morning, Jan 1, 2013, I was up early, so I made the oatmeal. I put a few drops of balsamic in the sautéed apples and figs; I used ghee instead of regular butter, and that gave it a bit more depth of flavor, a little more shine. I let the cereal cool just enough so my son wouldn't burn his mouth, and I put in some sunflower butter at the end. I didn't rush but when it was done, it was done. 

While we ate, Jo said I had upped the ante, that I’d brought my a-game, to this cereal. That I’d raised the bar and set a new standard. This thing we tasted all the time had deepened our appreciation for what it could give us. This was perhaps overly flattering, but that’s how we talk to each other when we’re at our best, which I wish was more often.

My hope this morning is that, all year long, we all up the game on our oatmeal. That the daily events  that make our lives creative, tasty and good for us, the ones that combine the pleasing bitter sting of coffee with the salt of a walnut, with the crunch of an apple, with the sooth of hot grain, get better with time, celebrate the ordinary and lead us somewhere more peaceful and more alive.

Against the binary

I am tired of binary arguments on the web. This blog is dedicated to something else. Otherwise you're just wrong and I'm just right. More to follow.

Getting CATT-y Again

The debate in the comments below let me to revisit the work we did at the Collective Arts Think Tank a couple years ago.

It's largely centered on the dread cultural hub of New York, but it's relevant, I think, beyond our borders. And I think Scott Walters and I have lots of crossover - we just approach the situation differently. 

Chasing Our Tails

In reading this article, and the responses in the comments section, and on other sites, most of which seem to engage in the, “Jane you ignorant slut” style of debate, I started to feel a little crazy.

One of the things I want most for people in the arts to do is stop complaining about what their colleagues have, that they don’t. As if there is a direct correlation between the grant I got and the one you didn’t, the gig you got and then one I was rejected from. If they hadn’t picked you or your kind, they’d have picked me or mine. I don't think that kind of hating helps. We all work hard. We all deserve it.

I think it’s important to recognize systemic problems (whether related to the arts or not) that need improving, and to call out specific examples of where those problems manifest. But I think, ultimately, to blame each other is not helpful, and in fact becomes its own kind of opportunism.

It would be great if rural art was more robustly supported. But then, it would also be great if artists in urban cultural centers were more robustly supported, too. (Very often "support" in an urban center means "an opportunity to work for free" - the euphemism is often something like 'increased visibility' - in the service of a venue whose staff is working for almost-free. If we expect that it has to be kind of work or one locale over the other, I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere.

In so many online conversations, it quickly becomes a version of one side saying “just do it (like I did)!” or “in my day/neighborhood/city (circle one) we just made it happen,” or “be the change you want to see in the world, douchebag!” Meanwhile the other side says, “you have no idea what it’s like today/where I live/in my brain (circle one),” or “you didn’t even hear what I was saying!,” or “punk is/is not (circle one) dead.”

Here are some questions. I hope people will respond in the comments.

1. Whether you’re in the position of maker, interpreter, scholar, producer or critic, what are you and your peers telling each other about the state of the field that might actually not be true, but that by saying it over and over you're reinforcing?

2. Why does theater seem so irrelevant to so many? Would we be better off if it mattered to more people?  

3. What would happen if the NEA’s annual budget was $1,000,000,000 (a little less than 10 times what it is now, but still only about $3 per American man, woman and child per year). How do we get there?

4. What are the best kinds of exchanges among artists in urban, rural, and suburban environments, and how could those happen more readily? 

Laura Poitras

Beautiful interview between Creative Time's Nato Thompson and filmmaker (and target of harassment and surveillance by US intelligence agencies) Laura Poitras:

LISTEN

What is amazing here is how deeply and fluently the conversation moves among history, craft, aesthetic, politics and meaning.

Color Me Obsessed (a fan letter to a fan letter)

I rented this documentary last night. It's about The Replacements. I was lucky enough to grow up in Minneapolis in the 80's, while they were at their best/worst, and I am easy prey for nostalgia trips about that time. For the first five minutes my resistance was up - the film is full of terrible documentary filmmaking cliches, including massive Ken Burns' Effect, talking head after talking head and middle-aged men feeling profound about what they are saying.

And then I was sunk. Color Me Obsessed is free of concert footage of, or interviews with, the band members. Instead it's a fanumentary. It's just people who followed, knew, roadied for, engineered, managed or were married to the band. It actually becomes, implicitly about the way we make certain people iconic, the way we cling to our better memories of our worst times. It becomes about what we put on our heroes. The film sticks you with yourself. Your overweight, overeager, nostalgic, longing self of now, as you remember how great you didn't think you thought you were back when.

By unvarnishing the truth about the band, via an embarrassing honesty about they way they affected those of us within or near their orbit, the movie does a remarkable doubling: it shows us the band through the lens of its listeners; and it shows us ourselves through the lens of the band. In their absence, we only have ourselves to look at.

There's a guy who grew up on a farm, and who had imagined conversations with Tommy Stinson every day after school; there's a woman who cries when she mentions the song "Unsatisfied;" there's the still-bitter fanzine editors, deriding the band for selling out and firing Bob. I am all of them, minus the actual farm.

Color Me Obsessed also nailed, quietly and in an overly sincere way (how else), the climate of desperation that spawned punk. Ronald Reagan, nuclear standoffs, economic crisis, and, in Minneapolis, an emotionally buttoned-up community with a dark alleyway of perversions that lurked unmentioned behind the gas station or SuperAmerica store.

An act of faithlessness

Jim Findlay and I were talking about The Replacements a month ago, doing a little armchair critique of artists in their 40s who self-describe as punk, and I credit him with nailing something true: "Punk was an act of faithlessness. It was nihilistic and selfish." It said 'we don't matter and neither do you.' The part of me that wants something to believe in, conveniently, or that wants to believe what I experienced was necessary for some reason other than my own relief, was shaken, until I realized that what got me through adolescence was not faith, but was actually a kind of energetic, enveloping comfort in the idea that whatever we do, it's probably bullshit.

Punk was by young people for young people. We're not punk now. We're in our 40s and our heroes from that time are at least that. We might have moments of it (like my friend Esther getting arrested at a Pussy Riot protest). We still listen to it, maybe we use it as a benchmark, but we are not it. We don't represent it. We have final reports to do, kids to raise, insurance policies to buy. And the new Cat Power's not that vanilla, is it? Surely it goes great with our microbrew and our dinner party?

Whatever punk was it is not us now, if it ever was. And that's good. Someone else is doing it. Someone else in some terrible town is thinking about killing herself, and instead she picks up something to make sounds on, hopefully loud ones. She finds the other loser at her school and they do something that makes everyone else mad because it's almost impossible to listen to. And that is the point. That is what adolescence sounds like unless you are very lucky, or very privileged.

Acts of faith are acts of theft 

A few years ago, I stopped in for coffee at Porto Rico on Thompson Street in lower Manhattan; it's a little sliver of a place that's been there forever and I was on my way to a meeting. Inside Pleased To Meet Me was playing. Not my favorite of their records, but still pretty awesome. The guy working behind the counter looked like he couldn't have been more than 16. And he had eyeliner on. And a chain on his jeans, which were ripped and saftey pinned. Time warp.

I ordered and he made my coffee without looking at me. When I paid I said, "were you even born when this record came out?"

"When'd it come out?"

"1987."

"Nope. I wasn't. I stole this from my dad."

The End.