GOING NOWHERE WELL

consider this creative mantra offered by Joe Williams and Barry Stone

In the early ‘00s, Bob Warner and Barry Stone and I played music together for many glorious afternoons full of their American Spirits, generously shared, and a six pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon that we always finished. These days, often times a Sunday, began with Bob and Barry’s analysis of the NY Times and sometimes were accompanied by a pan of cucumbers and tomatoes that Bob would slice up and serve with Italian dressing. The result of these Brooklyn days was two lifelong friendships and an album, fully conceptualized and produced by Barry, and created and recorded by the three of us together plus mastering genius Paul Stautinger. Watch the Years Gather came out on vinyl officially, almost twenty years after we first recorded it, which is so apt for the title and also for the mantra revealed in Barry’s ongoing art project: Porch Swing Orchestra, earlier this week.

Not to downplay Barry’s musicianship but guitar playing is his second gig. He’s more notably a visual artist whose photographs come into the world with their own pristine quality, as if he’s barely had to touch them for the pictures to go from internal to external. They are always made with absolute integrity to the image as a precursor to the artist. He is also, not incidentally, a dad and a husband as well as a lyricist, an entrepreneur, a technologist and an overall person of gold. 

During the early days of quarantine, Barry sent invitations to both Bob and I to compose pieces of music in response to guitar lines he had recorded. Then he put these two lines together and streamed them on top of an image of his own making. I sent him a poem and a recording of me speaking it; a piece of writing lifted straight from my journals. This is just one little example of how artists can save your life, can pull you from the depths, can break you out of an officially ordained isolation.

Porch Swing Orchestra works are performed and recorded, in part, on Barry’s front porch in Austin, Texas and Barry has continued to release ambient, relaxing and melodic work either as a solo performance or in partnership with other players. This past week Barry layered field recordings with the guitar licks of an accomplished musician, Joe Williams, who said, of the pairing:

The ambient and street sounds really make it something special for me. It all adds up to "going nowhere well." That's something I've been attempting to do on and off my whole creative life.

A paradox! As an intention! CONSIDER that!

The word: fidelity comes to mind when I think about just what this kind of artist statement implies. I think it’s not coincidental that this word comes up, with all my recent writing about marriage and also music. But the word captures something I really believe about how a piece of art arrives fully formed and that it’s my job as a writer to use words to describe it as accurately as possible. Of course there are days when I want something from work. I want it to make me money or bring me friends or fame or a sushi dinner. But on the best days it’s more like a chatty voice and I do it justice not by trying to make it something that it’s not but just by recording what it actually is. Which isn’t to say I can’t be ambitious about my own willingness to show up. A friend of mine recently said that I’d been really pushing the pieces out lately, and while I agreed with her in the moment: I had definitely been more committed to achieving an actual goal of two published essays twice a week, no matter what, I thought later, no. I have just no longer been shoving them down, or drowning them out, or dulling them to the point that they could not take shape no matter how hard I tried. 

This kind of commitment to showing up while simultaneously being available for whatever comes my way is not something that comes naturally to me. Instead I swing widely between two extremes: a kind of robotically programmed mission to achieve, full of striving and lists and check marks and numbers, and an aimless creativity, open to all kinds of surprises but summoned during sessions held mostly in secret—in coffee shops, journals, phone conversations, and even in fiction. To sit in between the two, while feeling them both drawing me toward them—to resist being at either end, is always where all the best writing lies. 

In truth I might actually do best with the mantra: going somewhere badly, as an antidote to both perfection and paralysis. All writers rely on tricks of some kind to convince them to keep going when every reasonable person would say it was time to stop, to get serious already, to get back to life, to make something else of themselves. 

There are many days when the process is entirely different: there’s no chatty voice but instead there’s a topic that I’m holding in my mind along with a nagging sense that the voice needs my help to come all the way through. These days it feels more like my job is to dissolve the material around the thing: like it’s some kind of kid’s toy where a shape of an animal is revealed to be inside a block of goo, but only when you put the whole thing in a sink of hot water. I’m the hot water. I am the animal. On these days I need absolute silence to see the shape of a story and often I fail. I fail to capture the thing that felt so essential. I fail to see its full shape—to give it the attention it really deserves. Parenting is such a good practice for this kind of failure because it’s an unrelating demand. It doesn’t matter how badly you did it yesterday when today rolls around.