On my break from AmeriCorps training the other day, I walked in the rain to get lunch and made my first Baltimore photos in many years. Just with my phone, but it reminds me that when you try, you know, sometimes something happens.
Baltimore
To Serve and Protect
This happened today
Guess it’s now official enough to post about: I am an AmeriCorps member.
I won’t say I got a ‘job’, they call it service. For the next year, my service will be as a full-time artist-in-residence with the Community Arts Collective, which is funded by AmeriCorps and hosted in Baltimore at the Maryland Institute College of Art, which I got a nice tour of today.
No, I’m not working at MICA per se, though I get some staff privileges, hence the badge. MICA will serve mainly as a kind of home base, my actual program assignment is the Refugee Youth Project that operates at a few local schools.
(A lot of layers to this, makes your head spin… I’m even leaving one layer out).
Basically I’ll be helping refugee kids through after-school arts programming, teaching them photography and visual literacy in my Crandall-verse way and supporting them more generally. I’m still in training mode for a few weeks, we’ll see exactly what they need and how it will go.
All of it will be an extreme honor. I told a friend not long ago, when I was first back from Kenya, that what I really wanted to do was community service through the arts. To be a community arts warrior, take my photo teaching from the classroom to the community, build community and resilience through the arts.
And that’s what I found, kind of a miracle. There are many battles to wage right now, happy this is mine for a while. Standing with refugees, in the way that I know how.
To be honest, as a DC native I’m excited to dive into Baltimore’s arts landscape, which is extensive and quite different than DC’s, in some ways deeper. Will be a nice change of scenery. Bit of a drive every day, yeah, but I like Baltimore, though my last real experience there was more years ago than I care to count. Here are some cityscapes from a Baltimore body of work I was building at one point:
NYC Transit Art by Petr Sís
Speaking of Czech connections and 9/11 (see post below), I was just in NYC on the subway yesterday, wish I had seen this by the wonderful Czech artist/author/illustrator Petr Sís. It’s worth zooming in on. On social media today, he posted it with ‘From ashes we rise’.
Minsk, Belarus, 9/11/2001 (photo by Karel Cudlin)
On 9/11, I Was In Minsk
In a way, what I remember most is that I wasn’t in the US for 9/11.
25 years ago on that day, I was with the Czech photographer Karel Cudlin for our joint exhibit ‘The Seeing-Eye’ in Belarus. On a gray afternoon in Minsk - a clear blue morning in NYC local time - I was talking to the vaguely distracted US cultural attache at the opening when an aide whispered something in his ear. The attache politely excused himself and a minute later I looked out the window and saw him sprinting from the building.
Later, after watching the towers fall on a nearby restaurant TV, we went with friends to a call center (this was 2001 Minsk, there was barely internet) to phone my wife in Dakar.
My Belarusian friends told me later they already knew at the opening but didn’t want to spoil it for me. The Czech cultural attache took care of that: ‘Mr Crandall maybe it is good that you are not at home because planes are crashing into buildings’.
I remember how kind and concerned the Belarusians were.
At the time I said now you will see who we are. Which of course ended up being true in both good ways and bad.
Ida (2013). Art Film Club NBO has been a series of small, in-person gatherings in Nairobi. Film as human, storytelling nourishment and a long-form antidote to attention drift. We have watched and discussed Werckmeister Harmonies, No Country for Old Men, Ida, Let the Right One In, A Hard Day's Night, The Secret of Kells, and Do the Right Thing.
Art Film Club NBO
Over the last several weeks I’ve been hosting a small art-film club in our house in Nairobi. While only a handful of friends, it’s been a surprisingly deep and revelatory experience.
We’ve discussed this new thing that some people can’t even sit through an entire film anymore. Not just an art film, but any film. At least not without being on their phone at the same time. We know books have fallen to the scourge of screens, but movies?? I even saw somewhere that scripts now factor in that lack of full attention by repeating the plot at regular intervals so people can keep up. And that even many film students literally can’t get through, you know, a film.
One film club attendee, a good Indian-Kenyan friend of ours, went to see The Odyssey in the cinema recently and was gobsmacked that one woman was on her phone the whole time.
Our little club (the NBO is Nairobi) - a mix of Kenyans and expats including a documentary filmmaker, a DJ, a writer, a curator, a nurse, and a photographer - was designed as an antidote to the devaluing of cinema, along with so much of our culture. And in fact we’ve discovered firsthand how interconnected films are to other mediums and to the pursuit of art in general.
Just in our short series we’ve watched:
The austere Polish film Ida, that I used to screen for my photography students. Each shot is like a haunting, perfectly composed black and white photo with action unfolding in it. I would warn my students that the static shots might suggest one of those ‘slow’ art films but the brisk storyline hurtles forward from shot to shot.
A Hard Day’s Night, which holds up very well as an electric, cheeky, absurdist film that would have been at home in the French New Wave of the 60s. And of course the music, capturing the Beatles basically being themselves in their early prime. Bracing and energizing. Amazing how four lads elevated how so many people felt about the world.
The visual feast that is the animated The Secret of Kells, and its overriding theme of protecting art and beauty as a kind of light in dark, violent times. Packed with cool references to Irish history, mythology, and pre-Christian paganism.
Perhaps the greatest vampire film of all time: the subdued, nuanced, carefully crafted Let the Right One In. Aside from an ominous mood and a handful of shocking moments, it’s a masterclass in serene cinematography and unexpected narrative twists. It’s like the Twilight franchise but they’re 12 years old in a 1980s Stockholm suburb, the other one is the vampire, and it’s art.
All are examples of powerful and unconventional storytelling. All are examples of moral ambiguity, often with few pure ‘good guys’ vs ‘bad guys’, and endings that invite more questions than answers.
All respect your intelligence and attention. Ida has no music soundtrack to tell you how to feel or when something is important. You just have to watch. No Country for Old Men (from Colmac McCarthy’s book) builds to a showdown that never happens, and the ending is a vaguely poetic head-scratcher.
Maybe one of the most powerful was our first one, Bela Tarr’s incomparable Werckmeister Harmonies. I say incomparable because you really can’t compare it to anything. Except for his other films, like the seven-hour Satantango. WH is a 2.5-hour film with 39 shots, each a (long) masterpiece of movement, light and shadow, composition, and mood. As an auteur’s relentless vision, it’s not for everyone, certainly not these days. But if you have the openness - and the stomach - for it, it is a rich and even profound experience.
(For each of these, notice I’ve linked to their respective Film Club event pages here on my site, for capsule summaries and a selected review extract.)
The experience of watching together, quietly and intently on a good screen in a darkened room, has brought back the pleasures and rewards of cinema-going in microcosm. I dare say each film shifted us in its own way. Because we gave ourselves to each one fully.
My Indian-Kenyan friend was so moved that he rediscovered his dormant writing profession and has rededicated himself to the craft. He said film club saved him. The Kenyan curator said Ida in itself could be a photography masterclass. I told them how my Graphic Design teacher colleague showed The Secret of Kells to his students purely for the aesthetics.
Our last one before I head back to the US for a while is Spike Lee’s masterpiece Do the Right Thing, which is still hilarious, provocative and tragic, the police-brutality ending sadly all too relevant to today. For representation of the USA, one vivid Bed-Stuy block is a striking cultural contrast to No Country’s west Texas landscape. (Interestingly, they are both set in the 80s, though No Country was of course made later.)
I have to say all of these films feel relevant to the moment we’re facing. They are all incredibly human. And the act of watching these films, based not on Hollywood formulas but creative authorship, in-person, all the way through without a phone break, letting them do their work on us, felt incredibly human as well.
Vocal Takoma 4/26
Just a Sunday in Takoma Park, making community around art. Today Vocal Takoma gathered in the space in front of People's Book for a 'People's Poetry' open mic event. Good thing, since it was pretty packed over at our usual clock tower spot, where the Free DC folks were also holding court. I didn’t play today, it was a bit chilly for my acoustic guitar (I did do one song a cappella just to challenge myself), but I took pictures.
Ethical Tech, Website Changes, and Keeping Busy
I didn’t have a photo for this week so I’m posting this iPhone pano from a few weeks ago, before the weather turned recently. It’s an unremarkable photo of an unremarkable spot in my neighborhood. I often walk through here on days when I work out of the local library and need to head to downtown Takoma Park for lunch. I took the photo on one of those walks.
There’s some kind of energy pocket there, I’ve noticed it twice as I’ve passed through. Something in the mix of sound and geography and atmosphere triggers memories and a certain vibe I can’t describe. I wanted to see if I could capture it somehow (nope), see if some clue would emerge, or at least it could help me remember the feeling. Have you ever been in a place like that?
I literally stopped and looked around trying to figure it out. It’s not even close to the most attractive part of the town but for some reason it always gives me a feeling of ‘I love this place’ combined with deja vu.
I have to say, I really do love Takoma Park, more and more. Especially after such a topsy-turvy past couple of years bouncing around, I’m grateful to be where I can go deeper rather than farther.
Kind of a hodgepodge of updates today, sorry. A lot going on lately.
About a year ago I first wrote about Resistance Tech. Now I’m calling it ‘Ethical Tech’ which I think is more apt and approachable (if not as militant, though Ethical Tech is still a form of resistance). ‘Ethical’ meaning apps and platforms that help us get off the surveillance/data-harvesting model: a good balance of ease of use, data privacy, integrity of ownership, environmentally-minded, and ideally not based in the US to avoid government or corporate overreach.
I did a community workshop last week at our local library on all this stuff, and I’m doing it again this Wednesday. Went well, there seems to be interest. In an attempt to start putting resources and info together in one place I made a new Ethical Tech page on my website. Hope you’ll check it out, and let me know if I can help you stick it to our tech-bro overlords.
Getting set up (photo by Phil Shapiro)
I also added an Events page. Guess it’s an attempt to keep moving things off Meta and bring them here under one roof to my Squarespace. Though any event I’d post still needs to be shared to FB, so I dunno. You can drive yourself crazy :).
I reshuffled the site organization a bit to separate my main categories of photography, music, and tech. I didn’t really have a proper Music section at all before, my album was lumped together with my other projects.
Come on, Crandall, time to tighten your shoelaces since you’re getting out there more. Now at least I’ve got a little music bio and photos page in progress.
I don’t intend to say no to any paid gig at the moment (and I’m certainly doing plenty of unpaid). One recent paid one was at an assisted living place for St Patrick’s Day, so I learned like four Irish songs. Another one was a house party in VA, which sounded great until I got there and it was for like 2-3 families after their dinner. Then the kids had to get off to bed so it was an audience of like 5-6 people in the living room. I have to say it went well and they were lovely and attentive but um, yeah, felt a bit strange. Next up is a pool party in a couple weeks, glad I’ve been beefing up my covers list.
(Full circle, I think a pool party was one of my first band gigs when I was 14! Not sure if that’s good or pathetic…)
Recently I posted photos from our Sanctuary benefit show for CASA, which was standing-room only for our lineup of poets and singers. That was an offshoot of the Vocal Takoma popup thing we’ve been doing. Next up for VT is something we’re planning for outside People’s Book store, and we’ll be at the downtown clock tower on Sunday mornings in nice weather.
Photo freelancing is starting to show some signs of life, let me know if you need me. It’s actually been sort of energizing in a way to reassemble that former life of mine, get my ducks in a row.
I’ve got an idea for a zine.
Phew. It’s a lot, yeah. But with our family and job situations (IYKYK) still in flux I’m just pushing in every direction all at once with everything I know how to do.
Sanctuary
We did it! Here’s a little selection of shots (by the talented Nyle Leddy) of our ‘Sanctuary’ arts event Friday night in Takoma Park.
Sanctuary was conceived by my friend David Alberto Fernandez, currently the town’s official poet laureate, as an outgrowth of our Vocal Takoma efforts. VT, as you may recall from previous posts, was that popup thing we did last fall to bring poems and songs out into the public realm, to show artists activating, visibly doing something. Normally it would be just a few of us at the downtown Takoma clock tower on a Sunday morning near the farmers market. We’ll be started up again shortly. Sanctuary expanded to a mighty lineup and brought it to the community center auditorium stage, as a benefit for CASA, a immigration advocacy and assistance organization based in Maryland.
I helped organize but the heavy lift was thanks to David leveraging his laureate status to get the city to help us. With a few exceptions, generally he found local poets and I found musicians, mostly from Takoma Park. We wanted to nurture and add to the town’s long reputation as a creative, socially conscious hotbed, and make it a strong platform to showcase local creative expression. The city not only let us use the stage, they promoted the event, ran sound/lights, and recorded the show. Brendan Smith, the head of the arts commission, was a great ally as always.
In dangerous times, the idea was to create a sense of sanctuary through art, a kind of sacred space of community, safety, and solidarity.
It was kind of a speed-round format, each performer was given basically one song/poem - ok, a few pushed it a bit - and we had the performers on stage the whole time while waiting their turn. It created a nice feeling of the performers being together with each other, and with the audience. Los Locos provided between-act ‘bridge’ music.
David and I performed a little chunk of our recent experimental hybrid, merging one of my songs and his poetry. (We did an extended 20-minute version recently at Musica Viva, my neighbor’s long-running classical music house concert series in Takoma Park.)
I had been hearing it was going to be a full house and it was indeed! I think the capacity is 150 and some people were standing.
A shout out to all the amazing poets and musicians who donated their time. No one was getting paid.
Nyle, the event photographer, took my recent six-week photo workshop. He’s a thoughtful guy and tremendous emerging photo talent. Definitely consider him if you’re looking for event coverage, as you can see he did a great job at capturing the vibe. Looks like The Last Waltz or something! We agreed he would shoot in black and white. Thanks Nyle, great job.
They are coming for culture, fam. But we are at the barricades defending it, helping art do its work of bringing us together. Starting where we are. And this was the first one but won’t be the last!
Drawing by Sofia for New World Voyage album art
On Future-Music
What is future music, what do you mean, Bill?
Put simply, to me it’s music that carries us forward and helps us imagine a better future. Stories and ideas that look ahead more than back.
Music that doesn’t get trapped in the amber of various genres. I think genres are actually the enemy of future-music. Not because everything needs to be wildly experimental but overly revering any genre risks making it a kind of museum piece that you are simply mimicking.
I think the trick is to keep building on what has come before. My favorite music does that. I remember the first time hearing Sigur Ros, it was like they invented a new musical vocabulary where I didn’t always know where it was going but still felt richly rewarding. It evoked whole new landscapes in my mind.
Of course, future music will be different for everyone, music is so personal. Right now your inner voice might be piping up with the kinds of music you like. But it’s not so much about that per se, or music as comfort-food entertainment. Getting at the notion of future-music means learning to think about music differently. Being receptive to an artist’s vision and how it can crack you open to new possibilities, sort of like a good book does. Or photography, it totally ties in with how I teach photo ‘authorship’ based on personal vision.
These days we have the devaluation of music, creeping AI, and the general trend of music becoming simply a formulaic commodity. Too often artistry gets lost or overlooked.
So how can we expect music to carry us forward anymore? Who’s even doing it, what would that look like?
I had a great time exploring these questions on Thursday night, co-hosting a two-hour Takoma Radio show with the ‘Night Nurse’, Madona Tyler LeBlanc, and I performed a couple songs live in the studio at the end.
You can find it in the archives here if you’re so inclined. I’ll do a quick recap here while it’s fresh.
First we played and discussed samples from my own playlist, songs that feel like the future to me. Search ‘em up wherever you do music.
Dawning - Yasmin Williams
Yasmin is one of the most innovative and talented guitarists out there, a rising star (and she’s from the DC area!). In this track that virtuosity is put in service of a lovely spring-in-bloom sonic landscape. While she plays the likes of Newport Folk Festival, I would say she’s Exhibit A of future-folk, looking forward not backward.
Little Odessa - Eric Hilton (feat. The Infinite Daisy Chains)
Another DC stalwart, Eric is one of the co-founders of Thievery Corporation, who helped pioneer the lounge/electronica genre in the late 90s. So creating a new genre certainly puts you in the future-music category. But even within their electronica there was world-building going on, a cinematic international stew. As a solo artist Eric has been equally prolific. This track is just one example of his continued formidable vibe-conjuring prowess, this time in collab with fellow DMV-ers The Infinite Daisy Chains, who clearly can hold their own in the future-vibe department.
The Great Big Warehouse in the Sky - Petur Ben
Petur Ben, a fixture in the Reykjavik indie music scene, on one hand is just a guy with an acoustic guitar. But his finger-picking style is dynamic and unusual, as is his voice and songwriting. This song springs from his time in Ukraine, a poetic anthem of sorts for Ukrainian youth he met who use their underground club culture as a sanctuary from decades of crisis after crisis that cloud their future. It’s a good example of how a song can be topical yet not didactic or preachy.
Habibi (A Clear Black Line) - Loney Dear
Loney Dear is a Swedish singer-songwriter named Emil Svanängen, often dubbed Sweden’s Brian Wilson. In contrast with his more layered arrangements, this track is minimalistic, totally stripped down to his voice and piano. Voice bone-dry, no reverb, almost painfully intimate. Feels like a live take in a living room, which likely what it is. What really sets it apart is that it’s a song for immigrants, a plaintive call for more mercy and decency in how we welcome them. It’s a protest-song-as-lullaby, taking us forward by showing us how to get a point across and engage people in new ways.
There Are Several Alberts Here - Loney Dear
I including this one too as an example of his fuller arrangements. It leads off with random steampunk bleeps and blurbs. As it continues, with low chords swelling and mysterious reverb-drenched cracks and snaps in the distance, what emerges with the melody and chords is more like a power pop song in disguise, buried in the fog. Melancholic but quite catchy and astonishingly inventive.
Others that we didn’t get to but you might want to check out:
Fighter - ISAK (“women on the move, we fight for each other”)
Like Real People Do - Hozier (nature version)
Open the Light - Boards of Canada (the sonic equivalent of waking up in the future with a mix of hope and disorientation)
In the second hour we discussed my 2016 concept album New World Voyage, which I’m super proud of, as an example of future music of my own. In this case it’s literally *about* the future, the first humans to leave Earth forever for Mars. The sequence of tracks and album art suggests a loose story about what happens to them.
Images from the New World Voyage digital booklet
I generally think of my songs as future-folk, in this case the songs of the journey itself from the perspective of the crew. We played three tracks - Love Again, Echoes, and Feel - and talked about their roles in the narrative.
We ran short on time but I played two songs live. Feel, to show how I rearranged it for solo acoustic. And Heavenly, a song I wrote years ago in a band I was in but now fits well in my Mars suite.
The joke is that the world went to shit when David Bowie died, but there’s some truth to it. He was a good example of someone always pointing the way forward, toward something better, in interesting and humanistic ways. I don’t think we have enough of that now, and we’re hurting as a result.
More future-music might at least help us believe in the future again.
The Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night
Shelter from the Storm
“What does courage look like inside systems that punish it?”
I was forwarded that question from someone who was developing a film series on resilience in fascist times. What a great prompt.
I had been thinking recently about the films I used to show my former photo students and how they could be useful now. Those were the before-times but in addition to the aspects I was hoping to convey to them in photo class - empathy, critical thinking, careful attention, eye for composition, and understanding unconventional narrative structures - I see how some of those films could offer answers to the question above. Or at least good followup questions.
Such films challenge the viewer. They are certainly not necessarily happy-happy or even obviously hopeful to the casual viewer. A few are even quite dark. But none are banal, none are formulaic, each is enriching and ultimately hopeful. Or if not hopeful at least grounded in real humanity and to me that counts for a lot. Some center on the power of art, music, beauty, nature, knowledge, or simply the act of maintaining courage in the face of fear and hopeless times.
I’ll give you a recent example to set this up a bit more. I went to see the new 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple the other day. I’ve followed the whole franchise and I’d heard good things about this one, even compared to its predecessor last year. (By the way, on the way there I noticed a small sign for a doctor’s office, a Dr. Kelson, who, if you don’t know, figures prominently in the film. What are the odds?)
I sat through the previews, which were the usual fare - depressing, brainless reminders of how assembly-line so many movies are these days. When you see the prevalence of violence, nihilism, anti-humanism (also overly sugar-coated kitsch, a kind of fake humanism), gender stereotypes, etc, plus the utter lack of critical thinking they require, it starts to make more sense where we find ourselves these days.
Anyway, then came the main attraction. Ok, yes, it’s quite brutally violent early on. I mean Bone Temple IS a zombie horror film. But soon it made me understand it was necessary to first be nauseated by the violence in order to counteract it. And in this film the worst violence is by broken people, not the infected.
Without giving anything away, I would argue the film gradually and subtly reinforces humanism for the viewer on several levels. Even the humanity of some villains and zombies themselves. I can’t describe the ending itself without spoiling it, but its unexpected poignance took my breath for a minute. There’s also a clever throwaway line about fascism and examples of empathy near the end which will surely be decried as woke. Lord help us.
The point is: what we watch matters, it shapes our outlook. It matters that we watch critically and carefully for what a good film can offer, and that hope and humanity can arrive in surprising forms if we’re open to it. Amid the gore and apocalyptic setting, Bone Temple offers more human values in its own way than any Disney film.
I left feeling a bit changed, always a good sign.
Which brings me to a short list of films I’m going to recommend in that spirit. I’m planning in-person community viewing and discussion events for these films, so if you’re local stay tuned. Or maybe we can add an online component, I’ll work on that. I’m not going to embed trailers here, for one thing they don’t work well in this newsletter format, but I will link the titles. You’ll have to look around to see where to stream them. Most of these I own and have watched many times.
All are ultimately about beauty and courage. In our systems that increasingly punish both.
If you’ve never seen it, it’s time. Joyful, electric, exuberant, funny, and of course great music in what was a somewhat dismal period in early 60s post-war England (ok, as opposed to the dismal 70s-80s Thatcher years, or the faux-sunniness of Tony Blair’s ‘Cool Brittania’, or Boris Johnson’s hair, or the ten minutes Liz Truss was in there, BUT I DIGRESS). It’s actually a quite avant-garde piece of filmmaking, more in line with the French new wave of the time. Punctures the burgeoning world of marketing to teenagers in an iconic, absurdist scene with George Harrison and an ad exec (with lines like “The new thing is to care passionately and be right-wing”). Takes aim at authority, inertia, and class throughout, and shows how to create a more exciting reality amid stasis. It’s four guys that made virtually everyone feel differently about the world. THAT ENERGY.
A short, gorgeously-animated film that is not really for kids (though I’d say suitable for any age 7+). Centered on the making of the first illustrated bible, the real-life Book of Kells, in a fortified village in medieval Ireland during a period of rampant Viking raids, it’s really about the power of art and beauty in existential times. Even when - especially when - you’re losing. It weaves in a lot of historical layers, especially around the tension between paganism and the newer arrival of Christianity. Truly incredible visuals in service of brisk storytelling. Spoiler: the battle is indeed lost but beauty and humanity still win the war.
A profound documentary, by director Wim Wenders, on the late Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado. After a lifetime covering tragedy and suffering on a global scale, Salgado is worn down, sick. He turns to making images of nature’s power, and he and his wife retreat to his family farm where they oversee an astonishing revitalization of land ravaged by climate change. A stunning example of how individuals can make a difference. Salgado himself is a deep, enigmatic, monk-like presence, and his photography and Wenders’ sensitive vision are top-notch.
A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks
Finally, the first excellent documentary about one of the greatest, larger-than-life photo warriors of modern times. A big element of the film’s power is the historical sweep from the civil rights era to the modern day and its focus on the younger generation of African-American photographers taking their inspiration from Parks. And it shows what an incredible renaissance man he was. (Yeah, it’s HBO, but it’s also on Amazon and Kanopy.)
This one might seem an odd choice for a list of hope-films. While maybe the most accessible work by the late Hungarian auteur Bela Tarr (compared to, say, his seven-hour Satantango), WH is not for the faint of heart. A desolate town falls into madness with the ominous arrival of a ranting but unseen demagogue and a strange ‘circus’ comprised of a single attraction: a giant stuffed whale in a trailer truck. Brooding MAGA-types gather in the town square, and eventually explode in mindless violence that culminates in one of the most astonishing sequences in cinema. The main character is a kind of ‘holy fool’, both simple and seemingly the only one with both sanity and compassion. The film is also not for the short attention-ed, it takes its time letting things unfold. Tarr is famous for extremely long, uncut shots, a refusal to offer traditional comforts to the viewer, and heavy themes. He’s in his gear and you have to get there too. But the imagery is astonishingly beautiful, if bleak, and a few moments are even darkly funny (especially the opening scene). If you’ve got the stomach to hang in there, it will pull you in and work its spell, even if you don’t quite know what to make of it all. Things don’t end well but even in that there is a certain empathy to be found.
Tarr pushed the boundaries of cinema like no other, especially the penchant for long shots. Two and a half hours, only 39 shots!
I’ll add one more, the latest from Wim Wenders. I finally watched Perfect Days recently. It's a pretty special film, so sweet yet mysterious, as with most of Wenders’ work it does so much with so little. The protagonist doesn't talk much. There's no real plot, at first mainly just observing a Tokyo toilet cleaner's daily routines and habits. Little by little more layers are revealed through a few interactions, like with his colleague and when his young niece shows up. Along the way the man’s eye for life's everyday beauty begins to mix with pathos, but the overriding 'vibe' of the film is definitely a certain empathetic equanimity woven into everything.
Stay safe in the storm (in all senses). Hope you enjoy these if you’re hunkering down.
By the way, after my recent bout of flu my guest spot on Takoma Radio has been rescheduled to this Thursday from 7-9pm EST. With host the ‘night nurse’ Madona Tyler LeBlanc we’ll be trading songs and discussing the idea of ‘future music’ in the first hour. In the second hour we’ll talk about how to make such music, with some tracks from my New World Voyage album and I’ll play a few songs live. Hope you’ll tune in!
A Few Updates
Has it been almost a month since I last posted a newsletter?? I guess I should be used to the swings by now, some weeks the ideas and words flow more than others.
It’s not like there hasn’t been stuff going on. Let me at least play catch up this week.
(This is actually the 2.0 version of this post. Squarespace glitched when I tried to save my first finished draft, lost everything. Which was awesome.)
Music
We managed one more Vocal Takoma popup song/poem circle recently before the weather turned too cold. This time with an actual PA, thanks to a battery generator the city bought for us. It made a huge difference in, you know, people *hearing* us.
David Alberto Fernández
Caleb Wissoker-Cohen
Bill Crandall
Bill Crandall and David Alberto Fernández
Deniz (of Magic Carpet)
Luther Jett
David Camero
Vocal Takoma is not really a group, there’s a small core but it’s more like whoever shows up. And anyone with a song or poem can step up (as they have). My partner-in-art David Alberto Fernandez is using his poet laureate status to try to expand what poetry is and what it can do, especially in this moment we’re in. The idea is putting art where people already are, sort of soapbox-style, helping artists be more seen/heard/vocal. Now we’re moving the model indoors for the winter, figuring out what that might look like.
Some exciting possibilities, stay tuned. I actually believe the revolution starts with stuff like this. See the Czechs' playwright president or the the Singing Revolution in the Baltics.
Photography
I’m part of a group show with the Takoma Artery collective that’s opening at our local community center on Friday. I’ll have 2-3 photos from my Nairobi body of work, one made the lead in our local newspaper.
Freelancing
Since I do have to start making some money asap, I’ve been gearing up for photo freelancing again. Even though I did it for so many years, I don’t really know what freelancing means anymore or what the prospects are. Guess we’ll see. I’m starting a portrait service out of my art-garage studio for starters, and I’ve added some portraits and events photo samples to my site. More soon.
Let me know if you’re looking for:
a new headshot
creative documentation of you, your project/event/band/book, business, etc
photo mentoring or consulting
a quick workshop on getting better photos with your phone, or a more advanced one on being a ‘photo author’
copy photos of your artwork
I offer discounts for the needy. Like fired federal workers, of which there are thousands in these parts. In our small neighborhood alone - one small pocket of one small town right outside DC - a neighbor told me he knew of maybe a dozen families with one or both breadwinners thrown out of work. With mortgages and kids at university.
You can also support me by buying prints from this site for your holiday shopping, take a look here and see what strikes you. With a few clicks you can have high-quality framed photos delivered, as I’m doing for my Takoma Artery show prints.
I guess one common thread in all this is starting where you are. I love where I live, and I’m still happy to be reconnecting and figuring out the path forward since living overseas. I’ve been trying to walk more and I got a Capital Bikeshare membership, the e-bikes help me get around this hilly town. Fit I am not.
Another thread is how in times like these it’s important to attach yourself to groups to leverage your efforts. Don’t always try to go it alone. Even my new garage studio I’m planning to use as a community art-hub.
Power on, people. The horrors are daily and the hope can seem like slim pickings, but focus on those moments when it feels like just maybe things are starting to tip back towards sanity and light, and give it a little flap of the proverbial butterfly’s wing. On other (worse) days, make some art, it helps. Talk to you soon.
Introducing Vocal Takoma
Well that was a fun Sunday.
No newsletter this morning as I was getting ready for a full creative day today. This afternoon was the second session of my six-week in-person photo workshop, See For Yourself. Sorry, I was too locked-in teaching it to take photos, but it’s an awesome group and a great way to inaugurate my garage studio space. Next time I’ll try to take some BTS pics.
This morning before the workshop though was a new collab with some neighbors in Takoma Park. Vocal Takoma (aka VT) is like a pop-up song and poetry circle - or maybe a group busk but not for money - held in active public space. So for starters that meant near our Sunday morning farmers’ market.
VT was conceived by myself and my friend David Alberto Fernandez, who is the new poet laureate of Takoma Park. Yes, we have not only the coolest community radio station around, but a town poet laureate. We wanted a way for artists to come together and to show people art is still kicking. Instead of a venue we take it to where people already are. We want them to see and hear us, and take note that artists are activating, doing something a bit unexpected. Maybe a song/poem/spoken word circle sounds like kumbaya but I have to say while it’s fun there’s a steeliness to it as well.
The idea is a rotating, inclusive ensemble that will have some core participants but change from week to week and even have an open-mic component. We had a lot of interest from other local singers/musicians and poets but due to various conflicts the launch was just three poets - David, Claudia Gary, and Alan Abrams - plus me playing songs. It went very well and it was great to get it going. We did it totally acoustic, no amplification. Soapbox style. Which was a challenge to project but had a certain integrity and intimacy. Still, we’ll hopefully have a battery generator by next time so we can use a little amp, especially those with quieter voices.
While in a way VT is an art action for the times, it’s not directly or overly political. We feel like art doesn’t need to be - and maybe shouldn’t be - political to do its job. Sure, there’s some protest in there as well. Though via songs, poems, and spoken word, it’s just a way of asserting our voices - being Vocal - in support of life, art, our values, and our community. And a model for starting where we are.
A few beautiful moments happened along the way. The shop owner nearby brought out a portrait of her mother, who was a Turkish poet.
David Camero was in jester garb entertaining the kiddos near the spot we were using at the clock tower. We didn’t realize he was also a tremendous local artist and poet, he ended up shifting gears and taking a couple of turns with us.
Come by and check it out some Sunday (we may move to indoor spots as the weather turns). Or, better yet, bring a song or poem of your own.
One song I did was Fortune and Glory, written long ago by an old friend and a band I was in (The Mondays) recorded it. It’s among a batch of such ‘legacy songs’ I’ve been resurrecting, I think it translates well to our moment:
I know a thing or two
Yeah me and you
We just want the truth
And need much more
Than fortune and glory too
I think you can see
What you mean to me
In a world not free
Baby you're worth more
Than fortune and glory too
Right from the start
We knew we had understanding
The hardest part
Is knowing that our day will come
So don't lose heart
The Tumblr Edition
Greetings from Nairobi.
If asked, I don’t really know how to describe what I generally post about. Sometimes it’s personal musings or updates, sometimes on photography in various ways, sometimes my music endeavors and various resistance-tech fixations. All are me trying to process life and ideas and share it out in ways that are hopefully interesting, relevant, and that respect your intelligence. To me, all have an undertow of mindful, art-based resistance, even if it’s not explicit.
Who knows if I’m doing it ‘right’? Maybe I should stay more focused. Or, maybe I need to mix it up more.
How would it look if I collected a couple weeks worth of stuff I’d normally post on social media and put it here? (That’s sort of what I was doing with my former Viaduct Arts newsletter, for those that subscribed to that. Viaduct was usually a compilation/digest of recent FB posts with a note from me at the top.)
What if you didn’t have to doomscroll on whatever platform to come across each individual post randomly, instead it all plopped as a bundle into your email on a Sunday morning?
It’s not a perfect experiment. Images seem to work best. I’m already discovering what wouldn’t work well in this space, like links, reels, anything not ‘evergreen’ enough to last more than a day. And of course it means you can’t comment or like the individual items.
There’s not as much to choose from since I like many others don’t post that much anymore, though FB is one of the few places I do. I barely look at Instagram, though it’s the only way to keep up with my Kenyan photographer friends. I dipped back into Threads the other day and it’s still way livelier discourse than Bluesky, which to my chagrin I’m beginning to give up on but I’ll leave that for another post.
In general I think the model of sharing broadly with strangers may be nearing a close. If there was a better way to share with friends and family that didn’t require wading through FB’s dreary AI slop or IG’s reels I’d sign up in a second. Otherwise I’m feeling a bit done. Anyone feel the same?
I’m more interested these days in what I’ve heard called the ‘cozy web’ - newsletters, groups, blogs. I’m liking good ol’ email, highly recommend Proton for the encryption. I’ve tried leaning into corresponding more substantively with a few friends via Signal, it’s been good. We’re so used to messaging being for quick hits, why not think of it like writing a more thoughtful letter or postcard?
Of course, I think many people are starting to remember that nothing beats in-person, real life interaction. And that might just be what saves us.
While on the subject of platforms, this is required reading about Substack. While it’s a place for valuable and interesting independent voices, it’s also a Nazi bar of sorts, comfortable enabling various creepy-crawlies:
Substack’s extremist ecosystem is flourishing
How about more Tumblr-style? Just throw things out there. I know times are dire but maybe we are feeding the beast by focusing on it to the exclusion of all else. There has to be more to life than Wordle results and end-times fascism (aka ‘political’) news. Which I guess eliminates much of what I (and probably you) post on FB. Let me see what else I got.
A better idea than the real thing, though there are certain people I wouldn’t mind being flung into actual space.
Remember magazines? The late Stockholm New was an amazing once-yearly (!) culture/art/fashion mag that I used to collect in the before-times. Didn’t know there was a ‘best of’ book. (Though I’ll admit that cover image sure lands more toxically these days…)
It had beautiful minimalist design that I used in my Publication Design class. I sent it recently as inspo to a Kenyan friend who I’m helping develop a Nairobi art magazine.
I think mags like Kinfolk and Cereal were pretty heavily influenced by Stockholm New.
“I’m onboard with ‘clanker’ as a slur for robots and AI.”
Cool micro art shop in Haworth, England. All work by the artist-owner (no I didn’t take this pic, just came across it).
Samples from my World Landscapes print gallery.
“Wet Leg. Hell of a band (and band name). New album Moisturizer is the finest rock record I’ve heard in a while.”
“I had been reading good things about Superman. Ok, I saw it in French, which didn’t help. A lot I didn’t like but mainly methinks the director took the ‘let’s up the stakes by making him vulnerable’ thing too far. He spends the whole movie getting his ass kicked or crawling out from under the big thing that landed on him.”
"Personally I am very pessimistic. But when, for instance, one of my staff has a baby you can't help but bless them for a good future. Because I can't tell that child, 'Oh, you shouldn't have come into this life.' And yet I know the world is heading in a bad direction. So with those conflicting thoughts in mind, I think about what kind of films I should be making." - Hayao Miyazaki
This just in before I hit publish today, I’ll leave you with Robert Reich’s thoughts on Vaclav Havel and not letting the times suffocate us:
Havel had become politically active as poet, playwright, and dissident after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 — which put him under the surveillance of the secret police. He was repeatedly jailed, the longest from 1979 to 1983. (In 1989, his Civic Forum party played a major part in the Velvet Revolution that ended Soviet dominance, and he was elected president shortly thereafter.)
While in jail, Havel wrote something that seems particularly relevant for us in these very dark times:
“The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.
Hope is a not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”
Paris Songwriters Club, photo by Jean-François Bellier
On the Move Again
Sorry no newsletter the last two weeks. I found myself with nothing in particular to say and my bandwidth in Paris was taken up by a swirl of pending changes.
Time to go, for now, visa deadlines loom. By the time you’re reading this, I’ll be back in Nairobi for a bit. If you can believe it, VOA’s final fate is still not resolved but nonetheless we expect to be home in the US soon enough, and we’re happy about that.
There are many things that I liked about Paris, maybe more than I used to.
The city seems to be doing great, pulsing with life and variety. There’s a better mood than I’ve sometimes found in the past. I even noticed the French people are a bit friendlier than I remember. Amazing how it’s become a biking city.
Believe it or not I didn’t come across much anti-American sentiment, or outrage about what’s going on in the US. They do ask about Trvmp, and occasionally Mvsk, but they are not nearly as obsessed as Americans are.
The French people I’ve interacted with seemed pretty chill, open, and interested in talking to an American (granted I do try to be a good brand-ambassador). I still sensed a respect for American culture, and maybe a desire for the US brand to not collapse entirely.
The young guy working at a cafe in our suburb came over and chatted me up in earnest for a good while and was profusely shaking my hand by the end.
The immigrant running the local pizza place said he once studied in DC and was quick to tell me he prefers life in the US.
On my way home after playing an open mic in Belleville, a young French-Arab-African (his description) guy across from me on the Metro started asking about my guitar and where I was from, we had a great three-station chat about music and life.
Waiting around before playing at the Paris Songwriters Club in Montmartre (see top photo), I overheard a French singer-songwriter say (non-sarcastically, I think) ‘oh shit, there are Americans here, I hope my songs are good enough’.
At our local cineplex, Superman was packed but I also went to well-attended one-off screenings of the original Blade Runner and Jaws.
At least some of the US soft power legacy seems to be holding for the moment.
No, in the end I didn’t take many photos. Never found my hook, and our daily life was much more in the burbs, not central Paris. For me personally the gift of time was a chance to work on music, almost like a self-residency. I think I got somewhere new, especially with my live performance fitness and confidence. I’m grateful for the chance to grow and for a lot of positive response. People seemed to care, many told me what I was doing resonated with them. Can’t ask for much more. The open mics - often several a week - were also a way of discovering cool parts of the city I didn’t really know before.
Just the other day I came across some great new pics of the one I played on a canal barge in Stalingrad in early July. Here are a few by their own photographer (as marked) plus a couple of mine to set the scene. Just a wonderful space and vibe.
It’s remarkable how art and culture are woven into the fabric of Paris life. A bit scary to think France is one of the only countries with global influence and power - even nukes - that still sees itself as a bastion of culture, design, ideas, and human values. There are dark rumblings and thugs on the march across Europe too, and the world’s biggest countries are all sort of a lost cause at the moment. It has occurred to me we may need France to carry the torch of idealism if the US falls further under the boot.
At my performances in Paris, I often started off by introducing myself as being from the US, along with some variation of:
“Rough times in America.” Then only half-jokingly, “We’re counting on you, France!”
A Love Letter in Times of Chaos
I was considering this image for my Postcards from America, and it got me thinking. What DO you love?
Your loved ones, family, friends, your home of course. Your dreams and imaginings. Your work if you’re lucky. Your neighbors if you’re really lucky (as I am). For me, photography is about love. I can’t photograph what I hate, my shutter finger won’t activate.
I love a lot of things in other countries. Many places have quite lovely architecture and sensible social support systems. I’ve often felt I could live happily in this or that country. Kenya is tempting. Finland is a great place, must be nice if you’re Finnish. But as a visitor something is deeply lacking that is becoming more clear to me as I get older: it’s not home and never could be. Especially when you reach a certain age and home is so deeply embedded with life already lived.
Granted I’ve been living abroad, I’ve only been back a few weeks so I might be a bit misty. But in our budding spring I am reminded of a notion of love that is closer at hand.
I’m going to make an outrageous statement: I love this country, more than ever.
Even with everything going on. Because of everything going on. Yes it’s under siege from within. That makes me disgusted with those doing the siege-ing, not the place.
Yes these are deeply disturbing times. Yes I am still deeply critical of a long list of things, as I always have been. As a true American should be. Name a ‘great American’ who wasn’t on some level a contrarian.
In this country it's easy to forget the love part when there is much that repulses. But as we grow angry we also become indifferent or callous to our true bounty and potential.
How can you love a place where the soul-crushing never seems to end? This country can kill you, or let you die, without remorse. The people it rewards are so often the wrong ones, even the grotesque ones. The worst impulses are too often allowed to run amok. Freedom? In so many ways, this is not freedom. Quality of life? The US will never be, I dunno... Denmark. A country that has its basic act together for its people without huge pendulum swings.
But I love it anyway. I didn’t used to say that. Maybe now because it’s under such unique threat. Maybe it’s defiance talking, because it’s mine and I’m not letting these people destroy it. I’m not going to let the bastards take both the country AND my feelings about it. I’m not giving up on what it can be. That day might come but it’s not here yet.
I’m not talking about baseball or national parks or Hollywood. The things that have moved me after returning have been more everyday, local, and connected to my memories.
Sometimes just by going outside and moving around.
The cacophony of birds. My god. But not just the birds, generally - that one mockingbird (hey, he’s back as I write this) that reminds me of the baby mockingbirds we once found and built a little fort for in our yard. The mother would swoop down and feed them, until they disappeared after a few days.
The astonishing tree canopy. Not everywhere is so blessed. But not just trees generally - the ones we planted in our yard several years ago. We prepared the soil for a year before planting. Moving dirt around will bring you closer to your own patch of Earth. Ok, yeah, at the moment it’s a mess (hey, I’ve been away).
The woods nearby. Especially the area of the woods where we buried our dear departed guinea pig Seydi.
My childhood house that I passed recently with my mother. On its own it contains countless life moments.
The cool ‘hippo rocks’ I had to cross everyday on the way to school, that now feel like a shrine.
It helps that I like where I live now.
One night last week I was out for a walk. Passing a local music school after dark, the lights were on, it was open mic night and a good turnout at that. Great vibe.
(Speaking of open mics, I was part of a local Open Mic for Democracy event last week.)
photos by Eric Bond
Circling around a shabby house across the street that is a celebrated DIY art venue, I peeked in as an art-rock band in what was once a living room is nailing it for about a dozen people in what was once a dining room.
Down a darkened street in the historic district, lights emanated from the old, deeply American houses.
Over at the bookstore another night, an author talk about Ukraine. Where, oddly, I met a lovely family of Latvians living here. Talking about my time in Riga in the 90s, they actually knew one of the friends I made there. Wild.
Next door is the music store on one side and the funky local radio station on the other, next to a great recording studio. Music store > bookstore > radio station > recording studio. Damn. What a lineup for any town. If revolution breaks out, put the barricades there.
America is both an actual place and an imagined one we carry around in our heads.
Things in this country I usually carry in my own America-bubble: proper bagels, public libraries, Martin guitars, East Coast autumn, endlessly varied nature, everyday friendliness of people, indie coffeeshops.
When I dream forward I sometimes think of the Hudson Valley.
Of course there’s music and culture. Beyond the stars and obvious pop culture names, plenty are out there that still make America cool: Andre 3000, Beach House, Kishi Bashi, Patti Smith, Thievery Corporation. A radiant Tracy Chapman’s surprise 2024 Grammy appearance with Luke Combs still stirs.
Younger up and coming artists like Jesse Welles (that United Health song guy) and the DMV’s own Yasmin Williams (a new kind of guitar hero for this generation).
Author and commentator Rebecca Solnit has done much to buoy us in these times, and I’ve been discovering new independent voices like Marisa Kabas and Joan Westenberg. Our cinematic canon can still claim the Coen brothers, Spike Lee, and Jim Jarmusch.
This is just a small sampling. Your list will of course vary. I humbly suggest that you take a meditative moment to recall what you do love.
In these perilous times, you already know what you’re against. You will only truly fight for what you love. (Ask Ukraine.)
To be clear, I don’t forgive those who brought us to this dangerous point. My love is not about that.
It’s a weapon to defeat them.
Rovaniemi, Finland was largely destroyed by retreating Nazis at the end of WWII.
Bring on the Moomins Revolution
It’s said that some photographers photograph the world as it is, and some as they wish it could be. I tend to fall somewhat more into the latter category. I believe in being a truth-teller but I do follow my enchantments.
During a month-long artist residency in northern Finland some years ago, I was charmed not just by the magical, nonstop midsummer light of late June. My enchantment was also due to finding myself in the land of certain storybook heroes.
As I wrote back then about the photos I made along the way:
I am always most interested in the undercurrents of a place. In Finland I encountered subtle contrasts of dream and reality, past and present, modern and rustic, warm and cold, and shadow and light. The light has a primal effect on both the psyche and physiology, with a dizzying vitality and presence of its own. Yet it seems to never fully banish the blue palette of the Great North. The pervasive blue is like the menacing Groke in Tove Jansson’s lyrical tales, a reminder that winter’s cold will soon return.
Who? If you didn’t grow up in northern Europe, Russia, or Japan, there’s a good chance you haven’t heard of Tove Jansson - or the Moomins.
Tove Jansson was a Swedish-Finnish artist and children’s book author in the early-mid 20th century. For me, discovering her universe of Moomins characters was like opening a previously unseen door to a unknown way of being.
The famous storybooks and picture books were ostensibly for kids, but I’d say barely. I found them when my daughter was young and, while she loved the characters and we still bond over Moomins now that she’s in her teens, I was utterly hooked by the slightly thorny Nordic melancholy in the stories and artwork. Maybe my favorite character was Snufkin, a bohemian wanderer and Moomin’s best friend.
Both of these guys reminded me a bit of Snufkin:
Jansson was first and foremost an artist, and besides being a painter she illustrated covers for anti-fascist magazines during the rise of Hitler. She was also somewhat of a sexual libertine, in same-sex relationships when that was illegal in Finland.
The Moomins’ world she created was in part her artistic response as war darkened life in Finland — an idealistic, even utopian antidote to despair and thugs on the march. Sound familiar?
It was a quirky, idiosyncratic vision but a humanistic one. Strange and even unsettling things happen, but in the mostly reassuring world of Moominvalley, friends are friends, adventures are to be had, true predators are few (sometimes there are slight jerks), songs matter, respect and kindness (but not necessarily over-sentimentality, this is Finland after all) are valued, and you can always find another bed in your house for an unexpected guest, even an odd one.
The stories are often infused with nature’s raw power that can turn surprisingly dark: a comet headed for Moominvalley, storms, and floods. And encroaching winter, personified by the menacing (but ultimately just lonely) character Groke, who freezes the ground she walks on.
Is the Groke coming?
I’ve long been fascinated by Tove Jansson and think about her example - making complex but joyful art as a rebuttal to dark times - often in our own times.
Looking back now on my pictures from Finland, ten years later, I can see more clearly the semi-conscious references I was making, maybe channeling my inner Moominvalley. At the time I wasn’t really sure what I was doing, I was just shooting and responding intuitively in a new place. I pulled a few selections for this post, though I can’t explain exactly why they feel Moomin-ish to me. They just do.
They are definitely a different style compared to my usual. First of all the color (I usually work in black and white) but also they are very quiet and unassuming. Not trying too hard, content to be little mood-fragments. Which is also very Finnish, that notion of equanimity — “don’t go thinking you’re better than others”.
And that light!
If you bundled the personal qualities of Tove Jansson herself and the world she created for the Moomins — tolerance, solidarity, egalitarianism, respect for nature and all creatures, anti-materialism, imagination, creativity — this free spirit from another time would make a perfect art-warrior in the face of our contemporary problems.
It would even be a quite fine new religion: Moominism!
But since religion and various -isms often seem to cause as many problems as they solve, let’s at least call Moominism more of a secular thing, like humanism.
Either way, count me in. If we could all be a little more like her, and them, the world would be just fine.
Let the Moomins Revolution begin — inspired by a mid-century painter-turned-children’s-author and carried forward by artists, writers, poets, dreamers, nonconformists, and humanists everywhere.
• • •
[Originally published November 28, 2023 on Medium]
Thievery Corporation video shoot, ESL, 1999
On Czech Photography, DC Cool, and Icelandic Indie Music
It’s fascinating how different cultures produce specific art in certain times/places. Think the blues, the British Invasion, or Bollywood. Art has the soft-power potential to shape and steer the world around it, at least for a period of time, by electrifying and shaping the perceptions of each of us. And shaping the art that follows - the British Invasion wouldn’t have happened without the blues.
Even on a grand scale, art can shift history by inspiring countless individuals. Ask yourself how someone behind the Iron Curtain must have felt when they heard jazz, Bob Dylan, or the Beatles. Like life was worth living, even amid the gray stasis of Soviet-bloc communism, because amazing things were happening out there in the West. Somewhere beyond the visible, beyond the mundane, life vibrated not just with freedom but with mysterious and exciting frequencies (hope they’re not too disappointed now, but that’s another story). The fall of the Berlin Wall must have felt in part like pounding down the door to get to it.
As a child of the Cold War I went the other way, West-to-East. In post-1989 Prague I discovered a love for Czech documentary photography, which may sound pretty niche until you begin to appreciate the Czechs’ photo tradition: a unique brew of surrealism/magic realism, non-sentimentality, anti-kitsch, dark humor, and respect for humble people in the face of oppressive situations. Pretty useful traits in these times. It put a stamp on me as a person and a photographer, that continues to this day in both my photography and teaching. I still quote a Czech photo mentor to my students.
Art can transform the landscape at the local level. In the late 90s, DC’s famed music group Thievery Corporation almost single-handedly created a cultural vibe that didn’t exist, in the nation’s capital or anywhere, of lounges and trippy electronica music with an international worldview. TC is still going, and the scene around them - a kind of empire encompassing newsletters, graphic artists, photographers, singers who worked in local cafes, DJ happenings, and backroom recording studios - lasted maybe 10–15 years. Faded now but a good run. It made life itself feel different in DC. In those days I know people who said they felt more comfortable moving to the normally buttoned-down, “boring” capital because of the cool factor that Thievery birthed. Photographing in post-war Kosovo, I met people whose first question was: “You’re from DC, you know those guys?”
Years before that, DC had a legendary DIY/activist punk scene that still reverberates in a plethora of recent documentaries. For people who were there and part of it, it’s not an exaggeration to say it has defined the arc of their lives.
What even constitutes an arts/culture movement at the moment? I can’t think of much… K-Pop?
For me, most recently was the wave of innovative music from Reykjavik, primarily 2000s-2010s bands like Sigur Ros and Of Monsters and Men, but stretching further backward and forward with other lesser-known Icelandic artists. Entirely new musical vocabularies and creative approaches, evoking inner and outer landscapes, from a tiny cultural ecosystem with a mind-boggling ratio of artists per capita. The Icelandic capital’s population could mostly fit into a large college football stadium or two, yet they have both mega-stars like Bjork and Sigur Ros and a thriving and super-creative indie scene. As a whole, this movement infused my brain with new synapses and life with new wonder. And I wasn’t alone.
I feel like we’re due for something to hit. Where might it come from? The Russian underground, a new samizdat? An unlikely Israeli-Palestinian collab for peace? A post-hurricane Asheville, NC underground that leads an art revolt in the southern US (Athens, GA did it)? Hungarian artists spark popular sentiment against Orban, that topples wannabe fascists there and beyond, a new Eastern European revolution? Dare to dream. Fervently rooting for an artist mobilization around climate and, since the US election, antifascism.
Or maybe it’s something else, here already, waiting to be discovered? Or waiting on you to create something. Large or small, we sure could use it.
• • •
[Updated - originally posted Nov 17, 2023 on Medium]