Leave Me Alone!

(Photo by Renee Allen)

I love living alone. I love my spiky spindly plant in the window, my too-late-in-the-year pumpkins on the sill, the horn always out on its stand gently nudging me to think about practicing. I love that if a spiky spindly leaf falls off my spiky spindly plant, I am the only one to blame. If I cook a delicious pot of soup, I can let it spill into the bowl without regard to sharing. If dripping hot wax on my bathtub in a delightful mid-afternoon bath makes my bathroom look like a cartoon crime scene, well, that’s my problem. And I take full responsibility for changing the light bulbs in my ceiling fixture, even if it means to a night passerby the strange silhouette of a not-so-tall girl standing on a table pulled to the middle of the room, wrench in hand and wobbling. I know it’s on me to wait out the bumps in the night – to face the creaking floorboard, and the possibility of a monster under my bed. It’s okay! I know I’m a match for it, and a tiny monster heart can be quickly overpowered by the fierce pride I harbor in mine for making a new life and a new home.

As artists, whether we live by ourselves or not, it is imperative that we make room somehow in our daily routine to be truly alone, and to have the space to hear and feel the waves of creative thoughts and emotions that regularly flood our existence. For many of us, life has a way of feeling like a constant storm, with our sensitivity to what’s happening around us bringing turbulence and stirring calls to action. We aren’t just sympathetic – we are empathetic – for some reason even situations that are worlds apart from our own experience can cause us to resonate the same pain or the same joy. We are told we are too sensitive but we cannot turn it off; every day ideas and images and intrusions crash upon us and we can be beaten down if we are not careful. We cannot create if we are clinging to a board in the midst of the ocean, but we can turn turmoil into provocative commentary and transform the frothy spittle of the high seas into beauty safe to behold – if we can just find our way into the eye of the hurricane.

That glimpse of calm in the center – that sunlight and clear sky before the storm rolls in again – it’s our job to get there, and if Buddhist thought and numerous other spiritual teachings can point the way, it would seem that the eye of the hurricane is to be found simply by stopping and sitting still. We stop, and we sit still, and we find we are utterly alone. This is not easy, for it is not long before our thoughts can resume eating up all of our energy, but we strive to practice it, so that even as the storm swirls around us, we are still there, still sitting, still breathing in and out, and simply observing quietly as it goes by.

Whether we do the hardest work of facing ourselves directly through sitting or engage in taking time for oneself in other ways such as sneaking off to read, commandeering a swing at the playground, or disappearing from our usual routine, the biggest obstacle it seems we face is guilt. In a society hyper-focused on the production of tangible size extremes – larger house, larger car, smaller waist, smaller dog – taking time away that doesn’t appear to produce is a capital offense. Pick up many self-help tomes, and the focus is on soothing our feelings when someone doesn’t want to spend time with us. We treat alone time as the most personal insult to our attractiveness and desirability, but it is as essential to our well being as sleeping and eating. We have to get over the guilt and steal away from the commotion.

All of what I’ve attempted to process in this post I think is important to everyone, not just artists. However, most people in our society attempt to live in a smaller emotional realm. Whether by simple avoidance, over-reliance on medications, caffeine or other stimulants and intoxicants, the emotional spectrum of joy and pain for what would be considered a “normal” person in our society on an average day could possibly be described as sandwiched between Disneyland and going to the dentist. Creative types certainly are known to medicate themselves in many, often illicit ways, throughout the ages, to try to experience a more “normal” existence. But the reality for most of us is that while our neighbor over there is mentally at Disneyland, we might be climbing the clouds on top of Everest, and while he/she is screaming “root canal!”, we are in the coldest regions of the Arctic, without a coat or even socks, and definitely with none of them cute penguins.

So how to quell the guilt within the confines of our society? Well, it seems like we just need to acknowledge all the traveling that we do, and travel is something that our society seems to respect as a means to produce. Need to turn down an invitation to a holiday cookie-swap? How about, “I’m sorry, but I’m doing a teleconference with a team of Sherpas for my Himalayan climb later this month.” Looking to bow out of weekly coffee with friends? “I’d love to, but this week I’m practicing retaining body heat at subzero temperatures and studying the effects of Hollywood documentaries on penguin self-esteem in preparation for my trip to the Arctic”. You’ll sound impressive, and of course so super-productive, no one will dare to question you. Go ahead and pack your suitcase, and be sure to bring your galoshes and a gale-proof umbrella. Just don’t leave your apartment.

Of Fear and Resignation

I am resurrecting this blog after a year of silence -and oh what a year! I write this on a flight from NYC to Los Angeles, as fitting a setting as I could possibly find for this topic, for I’m terrified of flying. Once, when an insensitive flight attendant went on and on during boarding about how turbulent her arriving flight from Chicago was, due to storms that I would surely being going through myself on my way there, I got visibly upset and she said they didn’t want someone like me on the plane. I walked off and took another flight, humiliated. But now, here I am. It’s not an uncommon fear, and I’ve worked it out – careful focusing on my breathing, lavender oil, ginger and rooibos tea, and a tiny notebook to write in have lent me a quiet dignity about the whole thing. I don’t want to be here, but I know that I can be, and that’s enough.

I’ve been thinking a lot about fear and resignation. This time last year, around the time that I began writing this blog, I was in a grieving process. I was a professional jazz alto saxophonist and composer yet I was living in the woods, far from any sense of community, far from my band, far from the heart of the creative improvisational music scene – I was full of music but shouting at the wind. In my isolation, I began to feel it was time to compromise my dreams, to erase some of the flourishes around the edges, the bright and shiny things, the daring goals that kept me wide-eyed with possibility. I had begun to resign myself to my dreams being the dreams of Hallmark cards and Hollywood pictures – big, puffy cumulus clouds that I could reach out and touch but never hold. Pretty dreams, captivating as they sailed across glorious sunny skies – but at the moment I connected with their center, it would become clear that they were made up of simply air and water, and already evaporating.

Resignation is horrible. It ages you, drags down your spirit. And it isn’t acceptance. It’s a kind of limbo that invites inertia and stifles creativity. Fortunately, I’m stubborn as hell, and at some point, grief turned into anger and the spell was broken. For me, that meant total upheaval of my life – and moving out of the woods to New York City on April 1st.

I don’t mean to seem New York centric here, and to say that New York is the only place one can thrive as an artist – but for me, as a performing artist primarily in the jazz medium, it is unequivocally the right place. Where I was before, I had to fight tooth and nail to maintain my identity as a saxophonist, a dualistic practice that never let me be me. Here, by simply getting up every day and doing what I do amongst my peers, my identity is without question. After what it took me to get here, I know that it doesn’t matter how I make my money to survive, it doesn’t matter if I don’t get a specific grant or a gig falls through – I will never stop playing and writing and working towards being the best musician I can be – and I will never lose that aspect of myself. We can’t always tightly control our art, nor should we. And if we are secure in ourselves, we can blunder and trip our way into orchestrating the kinds of disasters that lead to brilliance.

Fear and resignation. As a skeptic of feel good advice columns and best selling missives that mete out drams of sugar coated “wisdom” cleverly arranged to pre-sell you on the next volume, I want to tell it like it is. Letting go of the resignation and facing the fear was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and I’m still learning. Fear begets fear, and for every fear I faced another would crop up. As I cast aside my particular set of obstacles to getting to New York, fear of isolation as a musician in the small town morphed into fear of the massive levels of talent in NYC, fear of living in a place where most people you see every day are strangers, and most of all fear that choosing to put my music first would leave me artistically fulfilled, but alone.

This all sounds rather bleak, but in truth, I’m happier than I’ve ever been. I’ve had help this past year from a wide variety of sources, and finding that help is critical. It’s come in odd forms, unexpectedly, sometimes in the dead of night (after all, I am a jazz musician). Lou Reed’s “Magic and Loss”, Joseph Campbell’s “A Hero With A Thousand Faces”, lingering over Oolong tea at a table for one at Sacred Chow, mooning about the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. There was that time I saw myself holding a white rose in a reflection in the window of a subway train – an optical illusion due to the college aged guy in front of me holding the rose – but I really did leave with it, though I had never said a word to the guy and his friends who later offered it to me awkwardly. There was my tiny glass lucky cat called Marble due to her missing limbs, who stayed in my pocket for nearly eight months and became the namesake of a new tune. Busking underground in the Village when I just needed to face the horn straight on, running in Riverside Park with music blaring on my headphones, yoga, cupcakes with new friends and of course checking out amazing live music – all of these things kept me on my journey, and keep me still.

It would be easy to assume that one’s artistic endeavors would naturally be an ally in facing one’s fears, but that has not always been my experience, especially when one’s fears have to do with one’s art! While I was fighting for my identity from the outside and not assuming it, my ability to use my music as catharsis was limited. I could experience things profoundly, but translating them directly to playing or composing was not easy for me. Over the last eight months I’ve found that that too has shifted. As artists we are so lucky to have such an outlet – to turn heartbreak into tunes, suffering into long tones, extreme joy into wild improvisation – it is a gift many do not have, and we should use it well.

I don’t know each of your individual stories – where you are stuck, what you have left behind and where you may be going – but I hope that my own struggle offers some empathy along the way.

The Seesaw

While I was trying to fall asleep last night, I pondered the ups and downs of the artistic life and the image of a seesaw popped into my head along with the question, “Why can’t I just stay balanced in the middle?” Art can be such a serious pursuit, so in the interest of some levity I thought I’d explore the metaphor a bit more. While I’m typing this, “The Doctor” (see blog header) is bent on licking the blinds of the window right in front of my computer for no apparent reason, providing some humor on his own except for the fact that every time I pull him away and set him down on the floor, he hops back up again. Come on kitty, have some dignity! Sheesh.

Anyway, while thinking of seesaws, I was reminded that when I was a child and frequently visited the playground, I was afraid of them. My dad or some other adult, two or three times my weight, would inevitably be sitting on the other end and so I was hoisted all the way up into the air with the sense I might not ever be allowed to come down. (Note to parents: are those exclamations from your kids at the playground squeals of delight, or squeals of terror? Don’t always assume the former). The boards that made up the seesaw were always painted some bright color like blue or green or orange, but were weathered and faded like an old wooden boat. They inspired as much confidence in the safety of the seesaw as the swing sets whose feeble metal poles rose out of the ground a few inches when you pumped your legs really hard and jerked on the chains.

The business of art and music is very much like hanging out at a creepy playground at dusk. You know, the kind of playground you see in movies where death is represented by the empty swing, moving back and forth in an eerie breeze. The kind of playground where an old newspaper blows up against your leg, significantly, and you realize it’s a paper from fifty years ago, when the park first opened. You hear the sounds of children playing all around you, but when you look, no one is there. The bells of an ice cream truck ring out, but when you cross the lawn to the vehicle on the corner you realize it’s just an unmarked white van, and the bell sound came from a crow pecking at some garbage. That sort of playground.

When you enter the playground with your portfolio or your album or your manuscript, you sit down on the seesaw and wait. Maybe you are meeting a record producer there, an art collector, or a magazine editor. Sometimes no one comes to meet you at all, even if you’ve exchanged a multitude of emails and they’ve expressed enthusiasm for your work. If you are lucky, the figure that meets you will sit down on the other end of the seesaw and calmly elevate you into the air, praising your work and offering an opportunity of publication, or a gallery show, or a performance at a well known venue. When the meeting is over, they’ll gently let you down and you’ll head back to the studio, quietly optimistic.

Many times, however, you will find that your meeting is spent with the industry figure tilted towards the skies, and with every proclamation they make about how important they are, how little they will offer you for your work, and how happy you should be to license everything to them for that elusive promise of “exposure”, your side of the seesaw will dig further and further into the ground. When you are thoroughly mired in the mud, they’ll hop off and run merrily away to the next artist, and you’ll be stuck with the dilemma of how to balance the need to create with the very real prospect of losing your sanity.

Perhaps the most dangerous seesaw encounter you can have at this proverbial playground, is a meeting with someone who brings extraordinary news. They dash towards you, leaping onto the seesaw with such aplomb that you go flying off into the air. Everything about this figure signifies the “big break” you’ve been looking for – an agent that will eliminate your need to book yourself, a curator paying an amount for a painting equivalent to a year’s rent, a critic trumpeting a great review of your work in a national magazine. It is possible that the “big break” can change your career permanently for the better, but in your quick ascent there is a certain vulnerability. The likelihood is that you’ll have to come down. Will there be someone in the industry to catch you? Or will you find yourself tumbling, dazed, back to the same place you started?

So how to, as I wondered last night, “stay balanced in the middle?” It seems to me that every time you bring your art out into the world to be judged, every time you visit the creepy playground where dreams are uplifted and shattered with indifferent regularity, you need to also bring a friend. An imaginary friend, just like when you were a kid. Your imaginary friend needs to be the pragmatic counter to your wild optimism, or the exuberance to your despondence, depending on your mood, depending on the day. No matter who you meet down at the playground seesaw within the larger teeters and totters of your career, your imaginary friend must climb on too. Shifting their weight while straddling the middle, they’ll be the ballast that ensures that your feet will never be far from the ground, allowing you to walk right back into your studio at the end of the day, to close the door to the business, and get back to the art.

The Audacity of Being An Artist

A quick google of the word audacity immediately pops up “audacity of hope” in the most common search terms, referring to President Elect Barack Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (Vintage) . In a society where pessimism – or in the online world, “snarkiness” – sells newspapers and keeps eyes glued to television or computer screen, hope and positivity aren’t popular and can border on the outrageous. Who hasn’t found a moment to scorn the latest self-help book, or heard about a new age guru who is so cheery we want to smack him and tell him what life is really like. Just witness the hidden personal tragedies of the motivational speaker as portrayed in the movie Little Miss Sunshine. As viewers, we revel in the irony of the broken man behind such a sunny facade.

Artists can be snarky too; in fact, how many of us feel we have a pessimistic world view? We often see ourselves as public Eeyores with an eye for sharp social commentary, but I think that in reality being an artist is an act full of hope and optimism. We may not paint pretty pictures or write music that is calming or even pleasing to most ears, but even our representations of the utmost ugliness are a kind of transformation. Sometimes our work draws attention to the beauty in sadness or anger, and other times our depictions of all that is wrong in the world is jarring enough to inspire people to change themselves or the world around them. We persevere through all sorts of conditions to create these works, and believe we have something to say. Is that not also extremely audacious?

With the election of Barack Obama, the United States has turned away from the darkness of the last eight years – a darkness we have all experienced as Americans, regardless of political party. This isn’t a political blog, but there is no denying that politics affects the artist. To see so many people inspired by Obama’s positive message and call for individuals to take responsibility for making the world a better place is possibly the most significant event I have witnessed in my lifetime. In the campaign season, we haven’t heard much said about the connection between the arts and our electoral choices. I was surprised and pleased to see that documentary filmmaker Michael Moore had this to say about Obama’s election and the arts:

We may, just possibly, also see a time of refreshing openness, enlightenment and creativity. The arts and the artists will not be seen as the enemy. Perhaps art will be explored in order to discover the greater truths. When FDR was ushered in with his landslide in 1932, what followed was Frank Capra and Preston Sturgis, Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck, Dorothea Lange and Orson Welles.

I would argue that in times of growth in our country, art simply becomes more visible to the public – the artists are always there no matter what political climate – although certainly a government that values art helps more work come to fruition through government funding and the encouragement of the support of art by the private sector. But I do think that Moore is onto something – the “sea change” in politics as described by the media with this election also bodes well for the celebration of artistic expression.

After I watched Obama speak on Election night with a group of volunteers and townsfolk who gathered at the local tavern, I found myself strolling the sidewalks of the city where I live. Though it was past midnight, people were in the streets celebrating, honking their horns at intersections, skipping and dancing. A Church bell rang out in victory – a surreal experience at once marking history in the making and reminiscent of past events of monumental importance.

Throughout his speech, it was clear that Barack Obama is a man who has fought his way through many obstacles with grace and integrity when it would have been easy to become bitter or vengeful. As we go to work in our studios, darkrooms, practice spaces and quiet coffeehouse corners in the coming months, perhaps we can learn from his approach. By embracing the idea that our art is deep down borne of optimism and hope, we can more often find the strength to grapple with the difficult issues and conflicting pressures of being an artist, spurring creativity and bringing a new depth and focus to our work.

Art as a Vocation – Ammunition for the Holidays

It’s coming time for the holidays again. For many people, that means a gathering of relatives and friends that you may only see once a year, if that. These are the folks that saw you first beating on the furniture when you were six, later followed by you beating on the drums in high school marching band, and who shared stories of their own experiences with music lessons. These same relatives might have dutifully filed into the school musical when you were going to be a movie star, laughing politely at poorly written jokes in the script and trying not to laugh at the sometimes abysmal acting. While I was growing up, they were the patient listeners to my passionate teenage saxophone wailing which was often accompanied by the family dog’s howling – a greater delight for the crowd, I suspect, than hearing me play.

For many family gatherings over the years, keen interest in your artistic pursuits continues. Who doesn’t say admiringly, “my cousin plays a mean saxophone”, or “little Susie sure has gotten good at playing those bongos!”. Remember when you sold Girl Scout Cookies or wrapping paper in elementary school and it didn’t seem too tough to make a sale? These are the same folks that are the first to buy your debut album, or your painting no one else likes, or to get tickets to a show. Your relatives and friends become your first fans, and their encouragement helps you buckle down and pursue your art.

Except, one day, it isn’t cute anymore. You’ve finished school, or you can’t get away with describing yourself as a “twenty something”, or all your friends have settled down into a life of steady jobs – maybe even with babies in tow. But there you are, still doing your art. You might be known in your field, having had a few showings at choice galleries, or some reviews in national magazines, or even had your name on the Grammy ballot. But you weren’t nominated, not yet, and that piece of art you sold for a couple thousand, once, didn’t get you into a nicer apartment, or pay off your student loans. Not famous, not rich, not even “comfortable”. What are you?

If you are lucky, you’ll still have folks that support you among your family, and have made the kind of friends who don’t care if you follow an accepted path of existence for adults, even if they don’t really quite understand why you would rather sit home practicing long tones than be able to buy a pair of new shoes. I’m lucky enough that my immediate family still believes in my music. My parents are still often the first ones to call about show tickets, and they don’t ever ask to be on the guest list of comp tickets. This doesn’t mean that around the edges of their “suspension of disbelief”, as I like to call it, there isn’t a little bit of wondering at what point I’ll be a little more practical.

If you haven’t heard them yet, you might start to hear some whisperings at these holiday gatherings, or even some outright questions. “Why don’t you become an art teacher”, for example, or “I’ve heard (such and such day job) pays well – and you can still do your music on weekends!”. You might also get some sighs of “you’ve got it so easy – like I’ll ever have time to do xyz, ha!” – if it happens to come out that, by working for yourself, your schedule allows you to take time to do something during the day like taking a walk, or sitting in the sun reading a book. For those who question your artistic pursuits at these times, you need a little ammunition. You may not change anyone’s mind, and that’s not even important. What’s important is not letting other people’s mindsets affect your will to pursue your art.

That’s why I consider the pursuit of art a vocation – something I am called to do, a service to others, if you will, something beyond myself. Just like a calling to the priesthood, to be an aid worker, or a community organizer, a calling to the “arthood” begins with the belief that you can help others with your talent, and that sharing this ability outweighs any financial gain. As much as I love music, I don’t play music solely for the love of it. I play because I’m driven to play, because I feel it is how I can make my best contribution to society, because I have a gift that would be wrong not to share.

Sound egotistical? If this was about ego, I’d have given up the trying and uncertain life of an artist long ago for my fifteen minutes of You Tube fame (The Little Lady Saxophonist and Her Howling Dogs!), gone on reality television, or traded my saxophone for a shiny new pair of shoes so I could swagger into the next holiday gathering. Think about your own artistic life. Would you really have endured all the criticism, the hard work, the self-scrutiny, and the tough financial times if art weren’t a vocation? This year, when you walk into the room of relatives and friends and face awkward questions about what you do with your time, remind yourself what the word “vocation” means, and don’t let it get to you.

Fighting Artistic Obscurity: Where’s My Telephone Booth?

It’s been about two weeks now since I last played a show with my band. Since I chose to live in the woods and not in NYC, the expected locale of just about every jazz musician serious about their art (something with which I strongly disagree, and will write about in the future), it’s inevitable that I see the band less often than many musicians see their peers, and thus I often feel like an outsider in my own career.

For many of the people I perform with, life as a sideperson is just part of a regular workday where set breaks in a show mean snack time and free time in the tour schedule allows for napping. Alas, as a bandleader who doesn’t really work unless I do my own booking, publicity, management and production, I’m a bit more involved in the logistics than I would like. Instead of thinking naps and food at set breaks, I’m wondering where the players disappeared to so quickly and if they’ll make it back in time for the next set, or how to negotiate (and by that, I mean not lose my temper) with the club owner who has just told me that for some strange reason, they can’t pay me tonight, can I wait a few days?

In short, when the band leaves, I can feel quite alone, aware that I’m solely responsible for making sure I can perform again soon. Does a saxophonist and composer living in the woods without a band to bring her music to life exist? Are my inquiries through cyberspace planning future performances or grant applications sent furtively in the dead of night from the automated postage machine at the P.O. going to a person who will read them, or simply evaporating? I am absolutely certain my neighbors can hear me practicing, so I guess that’s something! But many a day the phone may not ring and my email inbox may not make its happy whoosh noise announcing new mail (instead, making that, cold, tinny, bumping noise, like someone beating their head against the wall). Who am I then?

This is why a telephone booth is so important. Like Superman, artists need a proverbial place to transform from struggling everyday souls into creative beings who, if not saving the world exactly, can bring beauty to the world, or challenge people to do something about the world’s ugliness. I’m not sayin’ I’m seeking a blue spangled silly suit in my future or anything, but the booth, itself, I could live with. That way each day when I wake in between shows, Sarah the questionably productive citizen (in a strictly capitalistic sense) could be transformed into Sarah the Saxophonist, fighting adversity with an ear-opening hodge-podge of shockingly dissonant chords and mildly pleasing melodies.

Do you have a telephone booth? Please feel free to share yours in comments. I’m still looking for mine…