Smaller Art

I’m back from almost a month in New Zealand – first performing and then wandering around with Debbie. We had a great time.

When we reached Wellington, we had a nice dinner with a bunch of interesting people, organized by storyteller Judith Jones and her husband Tony. Among the great people we met that night was Anna Bailey, a puppeteer.

The next morning, at the farmer’s market on the Wellington waterfront, we sat on a bench and watched Anna give one of her shows, standing in front of an electrical junction box to shield her small stage from the gusts of wind swirling around the harbor. Children, mostly under seven or eight, sat on the pavement in front of her, with adults in a wider circle. Shoppers walked through her performance area, seemingly oblivious to the drama being acted out before them of a fisherman who catches a mermaid, then goes on a dance through the sea with her. The piece was about ten minutes long – no words, with recorded music providing backdrop. The piece, as many marionette shows are, was very lyrical and dream-like. There was a distinct narrative line, but it was up to the audience’s imagination to define that line – with no language, it was not explicit but implicit. At one point, she did roam the audience with her puppet, interacting with individual audience members, but mostly, Anna’s focus was inward, trusting the audience to come into her world, and not feeling compelled to go out and capture them, . She let the work speak for itself. Those of us who have done street performing know that there’s a choice you make about how you draw an audience to your performance – Anna, as seems to fit her personality, doesn’t seek an audience, she lets it come to her. I would say there were about fifteen of us who stayed through the whole piece. She had a little hat at the edge of the velvet blanket that served as the definition of the stage –  people dropped coins in. I’d guess she made about $30 for her work.

Watching the show, looking at the venue, and thinking about the economics of the whole thing, got me thinking about the vagaries of being an artist. Anna’s work (String Bean Puppets) is not a get-rich-quick scheme. She is not very commercial – and my sense is that at this point in her work, she’s not interested in being commercial.  Her work is small, not in the sense of importance, but in the scale that it works on – how many people it will reach, how much she earns, and how well known she would become doing it.

But really, most art is small. A good number of artists will, consciously or unconsciously, make sure it stays that way for them, either through eschewing commercial success, or happily shooting themselves in the foot if it gets near. (Believe me, I know…)And while some art deserves a bigger stage than it has, there is a lot of art that is about intimacy and the people in front of you at that moment Even the ones wandering by with a bag of leeks. Anna’s puppets are not large, and if the audience were more than a hundred people, something would be lost. Keeping it small is one way to insure a connection. Using a Jumbotron so that the people in the back of the stadium could see the mermaid dance would make it a vicarious experience.  I suppose that television has the paradoxical opportunity to make it intimate – it’s just one person watching something shot in close-up. But the live performance is at the heart of it, and that, it seems to me, is destined to remain small.

So why do artists do it? The short answer is because they have to. They can’t help themselves. It gives their lives meaning. This causes havoc when you depend on it for your daily bread. As Lewis Hyde points out in his great book, The Gift, artists have a hard time living in a commodity culture in which you have to determine your worth and drive a bargain. Most artists first want to do their work, and will do it even if they aren’t getting paid well.

I’m thinking these things as both of my sons, Noah and Dylan, are trying to find where music fits in their lives, and have an ambivalence about the role of the market place in their art. Well, I still wrestle with that, too. I’ve often thought that some things I do for love, and some for money, and I’m just trying to get them to be a little bit closer to each other.

But like I said, a lot of really good art is small, and it helps to know that and still see its value; it’s still worth doing.

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People Live Here – thoughts on out of the way places

Moose - a normal occurrence in suburban Anchorage

We’re home from Alaska after a whirlwind trip. I’ll write more about it later, but one of the things that strikes me about our two weeks up there is that wherever you go, people are leading their daily lives.

Earthshaking, I know. Big deal. But we forget that.

I say this because when I was getting ready to go, any number of people (including myself) said “I can’t believe you’re going there.” The unspoken words being, “You’re nuts.”

And in a way, I guess I am a little nuts. Working in Key West seems to make more sense in January. The underlying thought is “No one would go there right now. Forget about living there.”

And I’ve heard that numerous times when I’ve traveled places – Bosnia not long after the war, Mexico during the rise in drug wars, the Lower East Side during the crime wave of the eighties.

But whenever I get to these places, I find people living out their lives with a surprising amount of normalcy. For the vast majority of humans, day to day living is just that. There are challenges – more in some places than others. There are always some streets you don’t walk down, but if you follow that rule, most places are safe, and normal. Most people are worried about their work, and their kids, and whether their roof is leaking. Some people have a tougher slog than others, but they shoulder it and get on with what’s in front of them.

Alaska was, well, normal. Very beautiful. A lot of snow. Colder than New England. Being there, you’re more aware of the forces of nature. But, well, people are people. It cracks me up that a thousand miles north of Seattle there’s a huge city with art centers, street lights, hotels, an all kinds of chain stores.

Like I said, people live there.

And not even in just the cities. Haines, Alaska is a very small town, and pretty isolated. No hospital. Seven hundred miles or so to Anchorage. But I had some good soup at the Mountain Market and went swimming in the town pool. It was like the pool at my local Y. The hotel had bad coffee, just like any hotel. Kids have after-school programs and teenagers are reading the Twilight series. Sure there’s the random moose and bear to contend with – that’s what makes it Haines and not Seekonk. People are more aware of the outdoors, since it can be rougher, and it’s the reason a number of people choose to be here – they like that. But mostly, people get by and accept what’s in front of them..

Busy Downtown Haines, Alaska

This is not earthshaking, and that’s why it’s important, I think. Most people are living their lives, regardless of where they live. It’s something we have in common, and worth remembering.

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Sunny Juneau!

“You’re lucky you got in.”

Debbie and I heard that line a half dozen times on our first day in Juneau. We didn’t know there was a question, but getting in and out of Juneau by air is always pretty iffy, depending on the fog or rain or snow. Someone told me they spent five days in Seattle, just waiting for the right day to fly.

It reminds me of when I was visiting Bosnia – they told me they called the flights into and out of Sarajevo during the war “Maybe Airlines” – maybe we fly, maybe we don’t.

But we did get in and here we’ve been, slogging through the streets in “Juneau tennies” – brown rubber boots just like the ones I left at home and should have brought. (I opened up my suitcase and thought, “Who packed this? What was I thinking?”)

Jeff Brown, program director at KTOO in Juneau, has been playing my songs and stories for twenty years, so it was great to finally meet him (Also because he lent me the boots.)

Jeff Brown and yours truly at KTOO, Juneau, AK

An hour after we got in , he was driving us up to the Mendenhall Glacier. I had to take Jeff’s word that the glacier was there – as you’ll see in this picture. Fog. Beautiful, beautiful fog.

Debbie and I in front of the stunning Mendenhall glacier

And I’m also taking on faith that Juneau is completely surrounded by mountains. We really couldn’t see those either – not yet anyway. Maybe tomorrow when we take the ferry up to Haines.

Juneau in January - see the mountains!

No picture postcard views. That leaves us with the mush in the streets, the bald eagles flying right over our heads, the ravens the size of SUV’s, and the great people we’ve met. In the summer Juneau is filled with tourists – seven cruise ships at a time. Yikes. That must lead to a love /hate relationship with all of us from the lower forty-eight. (“Why is the glacier so dirty? Can’t you clean it off?” one tourist asked.)

But now the shops are closed down (just like Cape Cod, or Bar Harbor, or Avalon, New Jersey) and it’s just the people who live here – most of them by choice because they love the landscape, they love the pace of life, and they like, I think, being a little bit weird.

And they’re tired of talking about the ex-governor.

Debbie and I are fitting right in.

And since they don’t have to look for a parking place or sell t-shirts to folks from Phoenix, they have time to talk.

Yesterday I visited two schools and they were way too nice to me. This morning I did a two hour workshop at the library (on top of the parking garage – a strange retrofit that saved the questionable edifice and gives a great view of the passage) – I talked about stories and songs and how they fit in schools, even when they don’t fit in the curriculum. I taught a couple of songs and a couple of games and had them tell each other stories. What a job.

Workshop at the Juneau library - I'm the bald guy in the middle

Tomorrow we’re on an early ferry up the passage to Haines, where it’s colder. Maybe some northern lights up there.

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Local food – Hooray for the Basques

I travel a lot and eat alone by myself too often. When you get to a certain point of time on the road, you start looking for what you know. All too often, this devolves into some chain restaurant that’s at least predictable (Chili’s, Applebees, whatever). It’s pretty boring after awhile. So I try to eat local. The problem with local is, unless you get a great recommendation, it can be pretty uneven.

But it’s still worth the effort. I was reminded of this last week when I was in Gardnerville, Nevada, driving around at supper time, looking at a full array of national chains. I didn’t want one more Oriental chicken salad. There was a Thai restaurant – usually a pretty good choice. But it was a choice I’d made a half dozen times in the last two weeks. Thai is local, I guess, but I wanted something else.

Driving through the town, the sky darkening, my stomach grumbling, I saw a Basque restaurant – J.T. Basque Bar and Grille. Definitely local (a national chain of Basque restaurants? – not this time around on the planet) You can find them in small towns throughout the mountain West – those Basque shepherds showed up and stayed and are a pretty crusty lot. And they brought their food and culture with them. Hoping for the best, afraid of the worst, I pulled into the parking lot. When I peeked in the window, I saw people at a dozen tables. That’s a good sign for a small town – especially on a Monday night. Once you walk into a restaurant, it’s hard to walk out, but I needed to eat and was committed. I didn’t have a cowboy hat to pull down over my eyes (reminding me of a Gary Snyder poem), but I hitched up my pants and walked in.

If you don’t know about Basque restaurants, here’s the deal – it’s working people’s food, and there’s a lot of it. You pay a fixed price and they start to bring you plates of stuff. It’s all served family style, which means they put one big platter of food on the table after another and everyone serves themselves. If you need more, they’ll bring you some. Up until last week, I’d only eaten at Basque restaurants with large groups of people, and midway through the meal, there were about thirty plates of food on the table with no end in sight. Now it was just my lonesome.

It’s peasant food. Bean soup. Potatoes (lotsa potatoes). More beans. Some salad. Some rice dish with some kind of meat – like paella, I guess. And then, meat. Lamb. Or mutton (when was the last time you had mutton?) Or cowboy steaks. Or pork chops. I think maybe some kind of tripe or something unidentifiable. Some more potatoes, probably more beans and dessert, too.

Wine is included in the meal. It comes in an opened beer bottle. Hmm. Drawn from some cask in the basement. Cheap red wine and more where it came from, if you need it. I was reminded of a time when I was in Italy and bought wine from a corner store – the store owner filled a recycled two liter plastic Coke bottle from a cask with a nozzle from a gas pump. Shut the pump off at 10,000 lira, willya? We’re not talking Chateau Lafitte-Rothschild.

There at the Basque restaurant, I wanted to just sit at the bar so I could watch the football game, but if I was going to eat, I was directed to the dining room.

I was wondering if I was going to get the same family style service since it was just me. Maybe there would be small plates of everything.

Nope. The whole enchilada, so to speak.

Once I ordered the main course (sirloin steak – I skipped the lamb and mutton, and apologized to the vegetarian side of me that was offered the main course of vegetables) the plates started arriving. A whole tureen of bean soup. Really good bean soup, by the way. I stopped at two bowls. A platter of house salad. The recycled beer bottle of mountain wine. I looked around to see if there was anyone to share the food with, but they were all busy with their own cornucopia. The paella (or whatever Basques call it) was spicy and good – comfort food from the northwestern corner of the Iberian peninsula. I tried to save room for the steak, but I wouldn’t have eaten it all even if that was all I ordered. It was a big piece.

This isn’t me, but it sure looks like my table.

The music on the house system was Basque. Accordions and guitars and clear, impassioned, untrained, unprocessed voices. I had no idea what they were saying, and I loved it. Something about sheep, maybe?

I was somewhere else. This is Nevada? This is the good ol’ USA? I was at home somewhere else.

I say this because my favorite local restaurants are a couple of Portuguese places in East Providence, Rhode Island, close to home. It’s peasant food (a little more fish on the menu) with no pretense. Cheap Iberian wine. Open on Monday nights with fado music (Portuguese music of unrequited love) – when I go on those nights (or almost anytime) I’m the only one that doesn’t speak Portuguese. The waitress smiles and yells at me. I feel lucky to be there.

That’s what the Basque restaurant felt like to me. I asked the manager about the music playing, and he wrote down the names of the musicians – there were a lot of “x”’s in it. He said it’s usually busier, and someone often brings an accordion in – a customer – and wanders around the room singing. We talked for a while and he told me about the family that owned the place, and where he came from (LA – wouldn’t you know?).

I left full. And not so lonely.

Better than Applebee’s for sure.

Here’s to the Basques and local food. And wine in beer bottles.

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