The Gym No. 5: Space
Heya, you still there?
My experiment continues: I’m picking this bitty letter back up. It’ll be a little different. I can’t say for sure all the ways how, but for one, I’m not a working critic anymore. Nevertheless, The Gym will still be, as I wrote in No. 1 almost exactly and impossibly three years ago,
a metonym for the exercise of working things out . . . a third place headspace . . . between the practices of responding to art and of approaching art, between being an individual and being a member of a community and a family.
Going forward, I might push explorations into the realms of engagement, strategy, and experience design—all stuff I’ve been doing in what I no longer call my day job over the past few years, and that I’m interested in applying in arts contexts. I might at times zero in on the words, the cadences, the em dashes themselves. If unknowns aren’t your inbox bag, please unsubscribe (easy link down below) or just let me know—no hard feelings.
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Space—physical, metaphysical, structural, aural—is top of mind in my household lately. There’s not enough of it, everyone is competing for it, we scheme ways to get more of it. When some of us leave home to grant the others more space, we all feel too tethered. Inevitably, too soon, too tightly, the bungee will snap us back home together again.
Not only do we have no “third place,” that physical and theoretical space between home and school or work that grounds people in their communities, but we also have no school or work place. Even with engrossing and connected remote work, virtual happy hours, supportive Insta-friends, and robust Minecraft worlds, home is the only real context we have for framing our identities. For a period last summer, I felt squishy and uncontained, as though I’d lost my exoskeleton.
“In a world in which every road runs into the desert or the Interstate or the Rocky Mountains, people develop a pretty precarious sense of their place in the larger scheme,“ writes Joan Didion in a 1979 review of Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, republished in the NYTBR last week with a bunch of other pivotal reviews. She’s explaining the state of mind of the American West, underrepresented in literature, she says, because “to truly know the West is to lack all will to write it down.” As a child of the West myself, having grown up with unfenced property lines and the freedom to get lost in the woods, I’ll claim this allowance; I lack the will to explicate Didion’s statement and its paradox. But I can vouch for its truth and suggest that it also seems to work in the inverse, when all roads lead back to the same postage stamp of land and modest collection of rooms.
But there are antidotes, and here's but one:
It’s thrilling to know that the urban spaces are there waiting for us, sustained by skeleton crews, waiting for us to crawl back into them. I read Robert Faires’ Chronicle cover story on the new KMFA headquarters with glee. It’s a huge deal that Austin still has a classical radio station and a huge deal that Austinites funded the new building and a huge deal that it has a community gallery and a concert space. And it’s a smashup, heartbreaking, iloveyousomuch deal that the performance space is named not after a corporate donor or its actual individual benefactors but after Draylen Mason, the talented Black teen musician senselessly killed by a package bomb in 2018.
Thanks to the Chronicle coverage—also a huge deal—our space-deprived household tuned into an opening-weekend virtual concert that took us from Liszt to Clara Schumann to Gershwin to Piazzolla to an interactive installation by instrument inventor, sound designer, and mind blower Steve Parker with can’t-stop-won’t-stop dancer Alexa Capareda doing the interacting. Austin’s still out there. It helps, and we're here for it.
