For days, or maybe weeks, I have retreated into watching music documentaries every evening. First I watched "No Direction Home" the Bob Dylan documentary, then I watched "Woodstock" a new variation on the old documentary, then I watched "Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young," Then "Jazz" the Ken Burns 8 episode history of Jazz. Last of all, I watched "Madonna" and they all did exactly as I had hoped, they gave me music and insight into the music and took my mind off everything else.
An observation about the "Jazz" documentary that I felt very strongly, was that the peoples' music, the Blues, Gospel, Folk, got taken over by ego centered artists who really didn't care about communicating with their audience anymore. They were into their instruments and what they could get from them and they were into breaking all the structures that had come before but which to them felt like barriers, fences, to their individual creative expression. As they got more abstract, during the period of 'Bird' and Charlie Parker, and Thelonius Monk, they gathered some adoring adherents who studied them and wrote about their experiments and breakthroughs, but they left most people behind. The Blues appealed to everyone, spoke to us, asked us to join in. It struck me as sad when in the end of the Jazz documentary, dead serious musicians played as though they were alone, on a stage littered with signs admonishing people not to dance, or clap or tap their feet. Well, they could hardly tap their feet anyhow since the musicians had attempted to escape from all patterned beats. The people stopped buying their records, coming to their concerts and Rock and Roll hijacked the popular music world BECAUSE Rock and Roll was about all of us together, not just the solo artist exploring himself and his instrument.
It seems to me a very similar thing happened to the art world. I grew up in a Norman Rockwell world where his Saturday Evening Post covers were designed to tell a story to people, a story about themselves, their lives, their experiences. We could ALL read the story in the paintings. But when the world of Jackson Pollack exploded, the artists weren't talking to us anymore, they were only talking to themselves, each other, and their materials. We, the viewer, the audience, were wiped out of the equation. And again, although some critics worshipped at the high altar of exultant individuality, the rest of the public got left behind. We hadn't followed the careers or the thinking processes or the context of these new artists and their works, so we didn't get it. There was no 'tourist' map for the viewer, we were irrelevant. Only the wealthy collectors mattered and the critics who could sell the experiments to these collectors, and so art became more and more detached from our ordinary existences. Art left us and we left it.
Solitude - To my joy, reading the magazine section of the Sunday New York Times, which was devoted to the exploration of what the writers were thinking during the "Lock Down" - isolation - "Shelter In Place" of the past two or three months. Happily I found that I was not alone in my loneliness not alone in my falling back into addiction (smoking), or eating forbidden foods like cookies and ice cream. The writers too had abandoned their exercise regimens. All of us had fallen into a kind of mindful stupefaction, watching birds, watching the sky change color, watching grass grow.
One particularly touching essay spoke of British officers confined to a concentration camp in Germany during the last 4 years of the war. Apparently it wasn't anywhere near the usual torturous and brutal regimen of deprivation because they took to bird watching and kept copious, detailed notes on the birds they watched. One of them escaped with the notebooks of the bird watchers wrapped in a shirt turned into a rucksack. He became, later in his life, head of a conservation group devoted to birds. So apparently they had access to such luxury materials as pencils and notebooks in that camp.
But the way they transferred their attention from their own confinement and misery to the freedom and the ordinary beautiful daily habits of birds, was enlightening to me, as to the author of the essay.
Sadly, I haven't done any of the things I had hoped I would do, at least not yet, but it isn't over yet, and I may in time pull myself from this quick sand of lethargy and get back to work on my beloved projects. Meanwhile, still writing, reading and thinking!
And still blogging to you!
Happy Trails, inside or out!
Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com
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