“Lost in Music”
“We're lost in music / Caught in a trap / No turnin' back / We're lost in music.” -Sister Sledge (In Memoriam for Meg)
Georgia O’Keefe once said: "Interest is the most important thing in life; happiness is temporary, but interest is continuous."
Even in the midst of frustration, temporary setbacks, or even great sadness, there are always fascinating things to regard or create in this world.
Last Spring, as I spent enough time in the Boston suburbs to watch three ducklings in my Father’s pond grow up over a period of months, while he was in and out of medical facilities, I was still working on the Spring and Summer cocktail list for my job at the time, and a list of Dessert cocktails that never came to fruition.
I’ve written about cocktail list creation before from a more analytical angle, but I was completely engaged in creative process for a couple of months, just about a year ago, and nourished by what the late, great public speaker Peter Gomes once referred to in a lecture as “The Life of The Mind.”
Circumstances were unusual, but when I wasn’t engaged in abetting my Dad’s recovery, I was engaged in thinking about what makes classic cocktails work, and simultaneously how to upend those assumptions. I was absorbed in thinking about classic flavor combinations, and flavor combinations that haven’t ever happened in a glass, and lost in abstruse concerns such as the variations in Yemeni spice mixes and the line between appreciating other cuisines, and appropriating them in liquid form.
These are concerns that might only plague a chef or a bartender, and largely outside the purview of the concerns of the rest of the world, but they were absorbing concerns for me, a source of interest and process in the midst of what was sometimes too much reality.
2.
As I finished collage number fifty one a couple of weeks ago, I felt like I’d turned a corner.
I had figured I’d keep making collages for loved ones until I had found a steady enough voice to just make a collage— for its own sake, and when I started to to colorize my own photographs and photographs of found and written text for a collage I was making for a member of my family who is also an artist, something finally just clicked.
I felt I had to deepen my visual language to make something genuinely meaningful for her, and while journaling, I had started to write down what I thought I’d discovered I could do in this new medium, and asking myself honestly what was just kitsch or adornment in my earlier work, and what juxtaposition of image and text had an integrity beyond its parts, or even the shadow of an identity.
3.
My collaging practice started with the desire to produce just one very specific collage for my best friend as we simultaneously navigated two very difficult situations, but it soon became a means for me to sit down and concentrate on just one thing for a long period of time, rather than falling into compulsive tidying or doom scrolling.
Pieces made for artist friends always felt tighter, right from the start, but it seems that somewhere between collages number 42 and 51, I started to feel a degree of fluency in my my own made-up visual language.
Taking photographs and writing poetry during quarantine, and writing here afterwards, sharpened my faculties visually and editorially, but my absolutely guileless initial approach to making these collages, and odd assurance with the first ones started to beg a very Carrie Bradshaw type question as I kept making them, was I engaged in an artistic endeavor or just scrapbooking?
I decided it didn’t matter.
One of the best collages I ever saw was one a friend made on shirt cardboard in High School. I found it recently, and it still has two of the most desirable qualities in an abstract work: movement and dialogue between its parts
When I prepare to work, I like to lay out everything to the side of whatever I’m working on, and long pieces of cut up text especially, so I can ask the canvas (in this case the cardboard bottom of a case of Far Niente Chardonnay) where it wants the information. I usually work over the period of a few days, and use the purple glue drag queens use to glue down their eyebrows, as it bonds without being hard to remove, and sometimes what looks great in a flow state looks less so on next glance.
Not everything ends up going into the stew, but everything that speaks to whatever initial intention is available for inclusion—it’s a form of pre-editing.
The above images have text screenshots from the New York Times App and Instagram, pictures of flyers, actual drink orders, a misplaced sealed package of California dispensary weed I found in front of our building, pictures taken at Jewel (cakes) and Michael’s (death), and a leftover cocktail napkin from a wedding at the Hotel I worked at two years ago, among other things. The rest of the cocktail napkins were distributed to people tripping at Electric Forest by my friend M.
Our neighbor likes to put out free notebooks amid other ephemera in boxes in the street. One notebook leaf in the above photos is from Paris, the other from Singapore
4.
Once again, as my Father is almost back to form, I find myself creating against a backdrop of life at its worst this particular week.
Collaging in the face of tragedy, on the face of it, seems akin to weaving macrame in a burning building, but it is a way to organize information I can control in some way, rather than just sitting in a silo of devastation.
There is always interest and process, even when we are hanging by the skin of our teeth.
The world, to different degrees, in different moments, is always going to be both wonderful and terrible for all of us in a myriad of different ways.
There is the miracle of a giraffe’s birth, and there are the depths of cruelty and stupidity we human animals are capable of, and the heights of majesty too—human hearts and imagination produced the Giotto chapel, the novel and jazz, among many other wonderful things in this world.
There is pain and loss in this world, and there is also Joni Mitchell’s “Hejira,” and many kinds of camels. The existence of the bad stuff does not negate the good stuff, they just uneasily coexist, and we must uneasily coexist with them as well, to try to survive and create, as Toni Morrison said in an interview, even “if we just survive in part.” She refers to this attempt as “the grandeur” of the human experience.
When the grandeur of this human experience seems lacking, we still need to put one foot in front of the other, and attempt to cope.
Artistic endeavor cannot heal the world, but in either appreciation or creation, there is still interest. And interest is giving, and sustaining, and necessary.