It started as a short film that I wrote and I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it. I was just working through my own experience. We ended up making the short. People were excited about it and starting to ask if we were going to make a feature version, and I was like, “[I] have not thought about that.” It was not a goal to make this a feature beforehand, but two things happened. One, we got into The Short to Feature Lab, which is run by Benjamin Wiessner and Jim Cummings. And then two, there was this fundraising competition on Seed&Spark called Hometown Heroes that the Duplass brothers were running.

The short takes place during college. I was like, “I can shoot this after school in the summer. I like that version of this story. I like seeing Jane in the warm blanket of her summer home.” The Short to Feature Lab helped me start looking at it like a full feature and how to achieve everything from getting the story there to distribution.

What was the biggest thing you learned from that experience that you applied to Disfluency?

I was not planning on directing it or I was deciding if I was going to direct it. I had written and produced the short film. I have a lot of imposter syndrome around directing. My thesis in college was directing, so I knew to an extent what I was doing, but I was talking to them, and Ben and Jim and Danny Madden, who was also there were just very… They were like, “Anna, of course, you can direct this. Just direct it.” I know that sounds like a little thing, but it was so important for me to hear that I could direct from other people.

The other big thing that I learned is that indie films are businesses. Indie films are like startup companies. You get your LLC. You get your investors. There’s contracts. There’s follow-through, It really is like starting up a little company every single time you do it, which when it comes to short filmmaking, you’re probably not going to get your money back. It’s for the love of the game.

You write, you produce, you direct—do you find it difficult to balance all of that? Or does it come naturally?

I would say it’s always a challenge to wear multiple hats. In some ways, that chaos is my comfort zone. In short film worlds, I’ve produced most of the things I’ve directed and written, so I’ve worn all the hats at once. When it came to this feature, Danny was really good about the week we were about to shoot. He was great about pushing me out and saying, “Hey, you’re a director now. I’m going to do the rest of this. You don’t need to look at your emails. You don’t need to be worrying about this.”

Another great gift he gave me was he made sure I got eight hours of sleep every night, which was… A lot of people are very affected by sleep, and famously, people don’t get sleep on indie projects. But him taking the reins and me handing my hat to him, basically, my producer hat, and him taking over and having that clear line once everything started was great.

I read that you were able to tailor the script for Libe [Barer, who plays Jane] and her sister, Ariela. Did you find it easier to craft the dialogue and aspects of the film to their strengths or what was that collaboration process like?

I had worked with Libe as a producer on the short. It was helpful to know that Libe was in the lead role and to be writing a role for her sister, who I’d met a couple of times, but I didn’t know Ariela super well at the time. I do find that if you have… If you’re just writing a script on spec, if you put certain talent, certain actors in your head, like celebrities, whoever it is, it can really help you find specificities a little bit easier. The short answer is yes, it was really helpful to know those two were playing those characters and write to their strengths.

What was the most rewarding part about making Disfluency or even the reception to it so far?

Making your first feature, I expected it to feel like I was totally out of my element and didn’t know what I was doing, but if a short’s a sprint, a feature’s a marathon, and it’s all running. I learned to trust myself. I think all of the knowledge that I’ve gained throughout this process, I feel like I have a whole skill set and I’m excited to share it with filmmakers who haven’t made their first feature. Mentorship is a really big thing to me, but there’s so many things that have come out of Disfluency.

We didn’t have a huge budget. We weren’t wooing people with big paychecks or anything like that. People were truly on this for the story. To have crew members who’ve read the script, cast who’ve read this script and say, “I want to tell this story with you, whatever it takes,” or “I read this and I cried, I want to be a part of this. How can I be a part of this?” People looking at me and believing in my story and believing in this work was so wonderful. I want to now give that to other creatives and other survivors too. That was the most validating, cathartic feeling for me in the world, was to put a version of my story on paper and have it be received so beautifully and supportively.

You’ve mentioned growing up in Michigan. Were there films or even shows that led you to know you wanted to make your own or know you wanted to write? What was that artistic journey for you growing up?

I watched a lot more TV than I did movies growing up. My family is a Catholic Midwest family. I wasn’t allowed to watch a lot of PG-13 or R, even in high school, so it was limiting and limiting to what I could sneak watch on TV. Kiki’s Delivery Service [and] Princess Bride were two of my all-time favorites, but I also grew up watching a lot of SpongeBob and Powerpuff Girls, so those for sure. Big Fish is a big one for me too. Those are the movies that made me want to tell stories.

There are definitely films that have been made in Michigan. They weren’t the most influential when I was younger. I graduated in 2015. The few years prior to that, Michigan had I think the best film incentives in the country, so a lot of film projects were coming there. Five-Year Engagement, Love and Honor, there was a Batman movie that shot here. Ryan Gosling shot his first movie here. Lost River is what I’m thinking of and Ides of March.

We had a robust film community starting and that was so cool to see. By the time I had graduated, they had gone from the best film incentives to no film incentives. That forced everyone to figure other things out. If you weren’t working in commercials, which Detroit still has a pretty good commercial market, you had to move. I moved out to LA. I love Michigan so much and I still want to continue filming there. It’s just hard to convince folks sometimes because you don’t have the same financial or vendor resources you do in other states.

What piece of advice would you give to someone who’s just starting in the industry or even to your younger self?

This is an industry where the word networking comes up a lot. Networking events, “I have to go network,” all of this stuff. The truth is it’s making friends. It’s finding people that you click with and work well with. It’s connecting with people that are at your level. It’s like all ships rise as opposed to, “I need to get a meeting with this fancy person, or if I talk to the head of the network, I’m going to get a job.” It’s meeting the people that are at your level and building your community. It’s community building. It’s creating real formative connections because I just feel like building your Rolodex feels so daunting and people… Reframing your mind around that and really reaching out to people that you admire and want to learn from is always helpful. It never hurts to ask, I don’t think. I also want to tell my younger self to chill out a little bit and trust myself and my work.

I can’t imagine LA and networking.

It’s just a lot. There’s opportunity for it and knowing that you don’t have to do everything, but when you do go out, putting your all into it, and really trying to form those genuine connections and make friends and talk about your favorite movies and TV shows. That’s why we’re all here, the love of the game.

Do you have a daily routine at all that helps you maintain focus?

I’m looking for one because I’ve been traveling so much to go to screenings, film festivals, [and] conferences. We’ve been doing a school tour with the movie. I just started contacting Title IX departments at universities and saying, “Hey, do you want to bring in this movie and me as a speaker?” I went to 15 universities last year around the country. All of that to say is, I’m looking forward to being in one place for more than two weeks and settling more into a routine. Something helpful for me is communicating with friends and setting goals and telling them what I’m going to do. I’m in a writer’s group, so I do have deadlines for my features, so that’s been helpful. In terms of a daily routine, it’s a little different in every hotel room that I’m in.

I would say not having too high of expectations of myself. What I mean by that is I’ll go to new cities and I want to explore and go see this and that, but I know that I really need to get to bed by this time and I really don’t need a cocktail and I just need to focus up on keeping my health a priority has been really big. Somehow, going from Michigan to Salt Lake City for Sundance to New York, back to Michigan, to Oklahoma City, to LA, I have not gotten sick, so I am grateful for that. I will say it is a challenge, but just fitting in work where I can. I work well at airports, which is nice. And having partners who are flexible, business partners, and willing to be on the fly with me.

Is there a moment or a memory even at any point in your career, whether it’s Disfluency or something else that you’re the most proud of so far?

Oh, what a lovely question. I am the most proud of Disfluency. I am most proud of the people I’ve surrounded myself with. It’s so weird to talk about a film and say my film or my movie or whatever it is, because it’s not, it’s ours. A hundred plus people have touched this film at this point in its creation. There’s no way I could have done this on my own, nor would I have wanted to, and I’m so proud of everyone on my team. Pride and gratitude go hand in hand for me, so that’s where that lies.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Lexi Lane.

I didn’t. It was never something that crossed my mind. So many people were like, “Oh, you should become an artist. You should be a singer, you should write songs.” Not because I was writing, but just because they were like, “You should just do that.”

I’m the type of person that thinks just because you’re good at something, it doesn’t mean you have to pursue it. I stood by that. You could be good at something and not enjoy it. The process of becoming an artist and the dedication it required in order to be one didn’t really appeal to me. I didn’t love it that much, but then it happened.

But was there a moment where you kind of knew you had a voice?

I think it was “What if I Took It off for You?” because that was the first song I wrote. I think it wasn’t me writing it. I hated it, I would say, until it came out. Every woman of every race, every religion was like, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” and they all related to it in an entirely different way. I didn’t even tell them what it was about. I realized that that was just the first thing that came to mind to write about. I was like, “If this many people are relating and saying that this is something that needed to be done, I can’t imagine the types of songs I could write if I really tapped into the emotions and the things that I was feeling.”

Honestly, I’m an activist at heart and I love doing things for the sake of other people. I think the honest truth is I started making music for other people. I personally love the song three years after I wrote it, once it finally came out, because then people that look like me were really like, “Oh, you ate with that one.” I knew I was good at poetry and I knew I could do it deep down, so I just started writing songs. I’ m kind of mad I didn’t start sooner, but I think everything happens for a reason.

Do you recall what inspired you to write that song?

At that point, I think I had been wearing the hijab for about 13 years? It was just a recurring thing that I kept asking myself. There were so many moments in my life where I really wanted to do something, and my hijab was what was preventing me from doing it. It wasn’t like my parents or the actual hijab. It was just a question in the back of my mind that I kept asking myself.

It happens in music. It happened after October when I was dropped by my label and everything, and I saw a lot of other Palestinian artists that weren’t necessarily dropped or were still able to get investors or get things. Really, the make it or break it point between me and many other Palestinian artists is I am the only hijabi Palestinian (in the music industry). If I took it off, I do think life would be so much easier to navigate. Of course, there’s anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian (people), but then there’s also Islamophobia and anti-hijab, which is another thing. There’s layers to it. It’s a question that reoccurs.

Being somebody who is visibly Muslim, would you consider that to be something that you find could be an obstacle sometimes?

I don’t think it’s as much of an obstacle because I’ve been wearing it for 20 years now, and I’m very aware, and I’m comfortable and confident. I think what’s harder is when there’s a moment in time where something isn’t fair or I’m being treated differently and people say that it’s in my head or that I’m overthinking it. I think that’s what makes it harder.

Would you consider that to be your biggest obstacle in the music industry?

Yes. When I would do press after “What if I Took It off for You?,” and my first EP, everyone was saying, “Muslim hijabi artist, Nemahsis.” I always said, “No, that’s obvious, you can see I’m Muslim. How about we put something like Palestinian?” Chass, my manager was always so confused why I put Palestinian first. This is a conversation we had at the end of 2021 where I was like, “Let’s normalize Palestinian in the headline.”

To be a Muslim hijabi 10-20 years ago was as taboo and as hush-hush as vocalizing that you’re Palestinian in the title now. I do think hijab has been one of my biggest setbacks. To be Palestinian in the now versus before 2021 is so hard. Add hijab to that and it’s a nightmare. Genuinely, I wouldn’t wish this upon my biggest nemesis.

I have to do things 10 times harder as a hijabi to get the attention of someone that’s giving 10 percent and I’m giving 100 percent. I have to work even harder than I did before 2023. It’s tiring. I thought resubmitting applications, getting shadow-banned or suppressed was hard. Every day I’m doing something different like trying to get my website back up because it’s been targeted. Being a hijabi, especially a hijabi-Palestinian, has been the biggest setback of every job I’ve ever had, but especially this one in the public light.

Right now, what do you think is holding you together and guiding you?

I think it’s that in turn, I am the only hijabi Palestinian-Muslim artist, especially in pop music. I think if I leave, it will set an example that it worked. So now I’m kind of stuck in it. I thought I would just spend the next three months with my head up, and then have everything kind of flop, and I fizzle out because they forced me out. But I’m still standing strong. I can still move tickets. I can still sort of break even with music. I can’t be the one to let go.

Going back to your previous label situation, they dropped you given your identity. The album was done right?

Yeah, I was signing to kind of get it all polished and finished.

At what point did you realize, “It’s going to be a difficult decision, but I have to go forth and release this independently”?

I think it was when I was in Palestine. When I went back to Palestine for Ramadan, at the end of March/beginning of April. I didn’t listen to any music because I was really on a full cleanse where I was just there with my family. I wasn’t really on my phone. I wasn’t uploading on social media the first 20 days. I wanted to see if I missed music. There were maybe three days left of Ramadan or four days, and I finally was like, “I feel ready to listen to music again. I want to see if my album still sounds good.” I sat down and listened to my album start to finish, and the fourth song in, I texted my manager and I was like, “Yeah, let’s release this. If this is the last thing we do, I’m really proud of this.”

He was like, “Okay, let’s go, I’ll meet you in LA. We’ll find an indie label that will sign us and help fund it.” Then I shot “Stick of Gum.” Two days after that I went to LA, went to meet with that label that told me to fly there, and they got cold feet. I think me being in Palestine just restarted everything in October. When the label was like, “Yeah, it’s not a good idea.” I picked a date.

Do you think it’s important to continue creating despite being in distress or feeling like you’re not being heard out fairly?

I actually can’t create when I’m in distress. I get really sad and overwhelmed. It doesn’t mean I don’t have anything to write about.

The average person waits to be in a moment like this to write a gut-wrenching song. I can’t afford that because I’m very, very emotional and a little bit petty. So it’s better that I kind of get through the storm and then reflect on what I went through.

But do you see importance in looking back and using that as a way to move forward?

100 percent. I move a lot on emotion but I’m a logical person. I try to stay away from everyone, stay off social media when I’m emotional. The only time I really acted on emotion was when I made the cover of [“Team” by Lorde.] I had just gotten dropped. I remember being like, “Okay, F them. If they’re going to drop me because I’m Palestinian, I might as well educate.” It really gave me ammunition to be like, “Let me use this voice to clear the narrative of Palestinians, especially in Gaza.” I knew it was going to go viral because it was exactly what the world needed.

I was glad I acted on emotion, because it was reaching hundreds of millions of people. And until this day, I still get DMs of people saying that it’s what changed their mind. It’s what made them look into the truth.

Have you learned anything about yourself during this process?

My gut has never let me down. Without a label, I had to find friends and people that I could— I have trust issues, of course, as a hijabi. We know people are all talk and then they never follow through. I think after October, a lot of people leaned in to help, a lot of allies that I now call friends, and coworkers, and acquaintances that reached out to offer services and help for free. Before October, I was someone that took a lot of pride in doing all the work myself, and that’s why I wanted a label, so that they could just give me the money and I could execute everything.

I think when people are volunteering their time, there’s a level of trust where you actually let them even have creative control. I don’t think I would’ve ever trusted other people’s creative input if I was with a label, because I don’t trust labels. I don’t think labels have the resources to help artists, especially artists like me. They just have the money. And I’m grateful that that did happen because I learned how to trust other creatives again.

I’m really thankful for the people that have come in since. I lost a lot and I gained way more, and the quality is even better with the people that have come in.

Has your approach to your craft also changed over time?

I think I sit more with things. I think before, I’d be like, “Oh, this song’s really good. I’m going to make a music video and then put it out there and just hope for the best.” Now, I’ll have a really good song and I need to make sure that I love it so much that I’m going to make a music video. I’m going to make TikToks. I should be proud enough to plug it in to show someone.

Speaking of music videos, your gorgeous video for “Stick of Gum” was shot in your hometown of Jericho. It also features your friends and family. How important it was to pay tribute to your roots and have that footage?

I’m going to be honest, it was sticking one up to everyone, and I was so detached from the Western world and the industry that I’m in when I was there, that I was like, “Nothing matters. I got these guys [family] behind me!” I was like, “What type of video could we do that they would hate?” It’s Palestinians liberated, smiling, having a good time with each other, having each other’s company with almost nothing.

It really just was us capturing a document of what living there was actually like, is actually like. Even if the video doesn’t work out, I got really good footage for my kids to look back on and I’ll send some footage to my grandma. Documenting moments is very normal in Palestine. I really just took it from them. Then, Aram (Sabbah) made the music video.

The video did garner a great response online with your community and supporters. What can you tell us about building a genuine community online in this era of algorithmic art?

I tried so hard to connect with my audience and people through TikTok and stuff. I really wanted a community. There were moments I was too Muslim for the industry and I was too liberal for the Muslim community. I was really sitting on the fence of awkwardness and I couldn’t really win the hearts of either. The moment I thought my career was over and I stopped performing and pumping out the content that I thought would work, was the first time the world started to fall in love and understand me. I genuinely thought my career was over. I still think—fuck it, it doesn’t matter. I don’t think about what I post anymore.

I’ve found a pocket of community that feels similarly to me in the West that is Muslim, that is proud, that is about liberation, and not just Palestinians I’m talking about, I touched the authentic hearts in every community that is there. I don’t think I was able to do that until I was honest with my presentation online and with what I was showcasing online. That was when I said, “Fuck everything I have. Fuck a multimillion-dollar deal, free Palestine!” Then I doubled down and I kept going.

All the people that I support till now, there’s a story. There was a moment I found them that made me love them. There was some moment in their timeline where I found some fact about them or something that they went through. Suddenly their music made so much sense to me. It was right there and I was looking outside the box. It’s just authenticity. Going against the grain. That’s what’s authentic, when it scares you, when you think it’s the wrong move. It’s when you’re kind of just making content, posting it, and it almost cringes you out. I think that’s when it’s good.

What would you like people to take away from your art?

I feel like everything is so cliche, especially in the world of toxic positivity and therapy talk and stuff like that. What should they take away from my music? I think that the most important people were once underdogs. I just think when we look at the names that even we know way past beyond their deaths, they were underdogs and hated at one point.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sun Noor.

New Zealand’s Pacific connection with the United States is “more important than ever”, says Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters after rounding up the Hawai’i leg of his Pacific trip.

Peters said common strategic interests of the US and New Zealand were underlined while in the state.

“Our Pacific links with the United States are more important than ever,” Peters said.

• READ MORE: Other Indo-Pacific reports

“New Zealand’s partnership with the United States remains one of our most long standing and important, particularly when seen in the light of our joint interests in the Pacific and the evolving security environment.”

The Deputy Prime Minister has led a delegation made up of cross-party MPs, who are heading to Fiji for a brief overnight stop, before heading to Vanuatu.

Peters said the stop in Honolulu allowed for an exchange of ideas and the role New Zealand can play in working with regional partners in the region.

“We have long advocated for the importance of an active and engaged United States in the Indo-Pacific, and this time in Honolulu allowed us to continue to make that case.”

Approaching Trump ‘right way’
The delegation met with Hawai’i’s Governor Josh Green, who confirmed with him that New Zealand was approaching US President Donald Trump in the “right way”.

“The fact is, this is a massively Democrat state. But nevertheless, they deal with Washington very, very well, and privately, we have got an inside confirmation that our approach is right.

“Be very careful, these things are very important, words matter and be ultra-cautious. All those things were confirmed by the governor.”

Governor Green told reporters he had spent time with Trump and talked to the US administration all the time.

“I can’t guarantee that they will bend their policies, but I try to be very rational for the good of our state, in our region, and it seems to be so far working,” he said.

He said the US and New Zealand were close allies.

“So having these additional connections with the political leadership and people from the community and business leaders, it helps us, because as we move forward in somewhat uncertain times, having more friends helps.”

At the East-West Center in Honolulu, Peters said New Zealand and the United States had not always seen eye-to-eye and “US Presidents have not always been popular back home”.

“My view of the strategic partnership between New Zealand and the United States is this: we each have the right, indeed the imperative, to pursue our own foreign policies, driven by our own sense of national interest.”

The delegation also met the commander of US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Samuel Paparo, the interim president of the East-West Center Dr James Scott, and Hawai’i-based representatives for Palau, Federated States of Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

New Zealand’s Pacific connection with the United States is “more important than ever”, says Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters after rounding up the Hawai’i leg of his Pacific trip.

Peters said common strategic interests of the US and New Zealand were underlined while in the state.

“Our Pacific links with the United States are more important than ever,” Peters said.

• READ MORE: Other Indo-Pacific reports

“New Zealand’s partnership with the United States remains one of our most long standing and important, particularly when seen in the light of our joint interests in the Pacific and the evolving security environment.”

The Deputy Prime Minister has led a delegation made up of cross-party MPs, who are heading to Fiji for a brief overnight stop, before heading to Vanuatu.

Peters said the stop in Honolulu allowed for an exchange of ideas and the role New Zealand can play in working with regional partners in the region.

“We have long advocated for the importance of an active and engaged United States in the Indo-Pacific, and this time in Honolulu allowed us to continue to make that case.”

Approaching Trump ‘right way’
The delegation met with Hawai’i’s Governor Josh Green, who confirmed with him that New Zealand was approaching US President Donald Trump in the “right way”.

“The fact is, this is a massively Democrat state. But nevertheless, they deal with Washington very, very well, and privately, we have got an inside confirmation that our approach is right.

“Be very careful, these things are very important, words matter and be ultra-cautious. All those things were confirmed by the governor.”

Governor Green told reporters he had spent time with Trump and talked to the US administration all the time.

“I can’t guarantee that they will bend their policies, but I try to be very rational for the good of our state, in our region, and it seems to be so far working,” he said.

He said the US and New Zealand were close allies.

“So having these additional connections with the political leadership and people from the community and business leaders, it helps us, because as we move forward in somewhat uncertain times, having more friends helps.”

At the East-West Center in Honolulu, Peters said New Zealand and the United States had not always seen eye-to-eye and “US Presidents have not always been popular back home”.

“My view of the strategic partnership between New Zealand and the United States is this: we each have the right, indeed the imperative, to pursue our own foreign policies, driven by our own sense of national interest.”

The delegation also met the commander of US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Samuel Paparo, the interim president of the East-West Center Dr James Scott, and Hawai’i-based representatives for Palau, Federated States of Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

His meeting with his counterpart, Cho Tae-yul, comes at a time of political flux, with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol facing impeachment after an unsuccessful attempt to declare martial law and the U.S. a week away from the inauguration of a new president.

“I believe trilateral cooperation will continue under the Trump administration,” Cho said Monday, according to Reuters, while Iwaya said he would raise the issue with the incoming U.S. administration, saying the three-way relationship was more important than ever considering the global situation.

But Donald Trump’s return to the White House has caused concern in some quarters about America’s security commitment to the two U.S. allies, which both host U.S. forces on their soil.

During Trump’s first term, he unsuccessfully pushed Japan to quadruple its funding for the 50,000 American troops based there, making similar demands on South Korea for the nearly 30,000 American forces stationed there.

In the end, Trump didn’t follow through with threats to cut the U.S. troop presence in the two countries, although he has hinted recently he may pick up where he left off.

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Trump may also resume attempts to defuse the regional threat from North Korea by holding another round of talks with its leader, Kim Jong Un. In spite of three meetings between the two during Trump’s first term, the U.S. president failed to get commitments from Kim to abandon his nuclear and missile programs.

(Evan Vucci/AP)

The Biden administration did not engage with the North Korean leader who has increased his saber rattling recently.

Over the past year Kim has abandoned plans for North-South reunification, threatened Seoul with annihilation, fired missiles into the Sea of Japan, and forged closer ties with Russia.

Kim’s June 2024 meeting with President Vladimir Putin, raised concerns that Moscow would provide Pyongyang with technology for its missiles, which can strike U.S. cities, in return for the North sending troops to help Russia fight Ukraine.

North Korea has ramped up its weapon testing program in the days leading up to Trump’s inauguration. Last week, it launched what it called a new hypersonic missile as outgoing U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Seoul.

Another Kim-Trump meeting may be on the cards this year, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported on Monday. South Korea’s spy agency the National Intelligence Service said a “small agreement” on Pyongyang’s nuclear policy was possible if the incoming U.S. president reopens talks.

“There is a possibility that Trump could seek dialogue with Kim as Trump himself views his previous summits with Kim as major achievements during his first administration,” the National Intelligence Service said, according to South Korean lawmakers, who attended an agency briefing.

Seoul and Tokyo are keen to ensure Washington takes their views into consideration when the new U.S. administration finalizes its foreign policy objectives.

Japan’s foreign minister will attend Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20 and try to arrange a meeting between the U.S. president and Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba the following month in order to “build a relationship of trust” Iwaya said on Saturday on state broadcaster NHK.

(Saul Loeb/AFP)

Ishiba, Joe Biden and South Korean President Yoon met on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Peru in November, announcing a trilateral secretariat to focus on economic and defense cooperation.

In his final week in office, Biden is still pushing his Indo-Pacific policy.

The U.S. president, Japan’s Ishiba and Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. focused in a Sunday telephone call on maritime security and “China’s dangerous and unlawful behavior in the South China Sea,” the White House said.

Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Staff.

That’s my first love. I owe my entire life to it. I would be a completely different person if I didn’t start skating when I was young. I got interested in photography in a roundabout way. When high school came, I wanted to do a creative elective. I was like, man, I’m just so bad at drawing. Some of my friends were really good at drawing and painting, it kind of discouraged me. I wanted to try something I knew nothing about, it made it more exciting. So I was like, oh, there’s a photography class, let’s give it a try.

I got hooked. At the start I was shooting photos of my friends skating. I was okay at skating, but some of the kids in the scene in South Florida were amazing, phenomenal talent. We’d be going to spots where I’m like, “I have no business skating this thing,” this big rail or stairs. I’m like, “I’m not good enough for that,” but I can bring the camera and now I have a reason to be here other than just being the homie on the session. Now it was like, let’s do something with this.

You became the de facto photographer.

I got decent at it. People would make a point to say, “oh, you should come. I want to do this hard trick. I want to get a photo of it.” When I was young, I saw that as my path forward. Later in life I did an internship in California for a skateboarding magazine. I realized I didn’t want to do it anymore, the skate thing, but wanted to stay with photography. I left, went straight to photo school and started learning anything I could. That’s how my trajectory changed.

Skating was the foundation of work ethic for me. You work really hard and fail a lot. You’re always eating shit, you’re going to fail every single time you go out. You’re not going to land all your tricks first try. You’re constantly working at it, trying to evolve and push yourself. There’s a little bit of madness to that repetitive nature. That reflects how I approach my work now and how I pushed my career forward, always accepting failure and learning from it.

What lessons stayed with you?

When you’re shooting skateboarding, you have no control over your situation. You might not be allowed to skate there, usually you’re not. You have to make decisions quickly. You have to go through an instinctual process: how can I make them look good? How can I make the trick look exciting? You might get five or ten minutes, then you get kicked out. That idea connects to my career now, shooting an editorial where someone says, “okay, you’re going to shoot a celebrity and you have five minutes.” You need to make this look really good with the limited time that you have. It’s kind of the same thing. You’re like, I don’t have a lot of control, so let me try to make the control I do have super dialed, make decisions on the fly when things change and lean into that confidence of making those decisions.

What changed when you went back to school?

I was going to a community college with a great photo program. I always joke with my wife because she went to Parsons and her facilities were the same as mine, even though I paid nothing. I was hyper-focused on this niche thing, skate photography. It was so niche that I had no expanded world of photography outside of that. I didn’t know classic photographers. I didn’t know the history of photography. I was a blank canvas. School is a hard place to learn technical stuff that applies to a career later, at least in photography.

The biggest thing was getting access to a photo library and seeing other students trying different avenues of photography that I never even thought about. I never considered what a fashion shoot looks like. There was a kid in our school who was super into architecture. I didn’t know that’s an entire industry.

You also started taking portraits of musicians early on.

Growing up I was always a big admirer of music, no music talent in my body at all, but a big admirer of it. A bunch of my friends in college were musicians, I loved to go to shows. Some friends would be like, “oh, hey, I need a press photo, would you take it?” I didn’t know I liked portraiture until then.

Which is now something you are hired for regularly.

It’s super weird how I had no intention of that and then was like, oh, not only am I getting pretty good at this, but I actually really enjoy it. I always liked connecting with people regardless, but then I also got an excuse to be in their world for a little bit. I get a hall pass where a lot of people don’t get access.

You’ve described yourself as a reactionary photographer. What does that mean for you?

There’s two main disciplines. You’re the sculptor or the painter where you’re concepting an idea and executing exactly what you have envisioned in your mind. Then you’re the hunter. Your street photographers, documentary people, the photojournalist. People out there looking for the picture. They’re not trying to create the picture themselves.

There’s a Venn diagram. You can be a little bit of both. I fall somewhere in the middle where I don’t like sculpting an entire scene to make it perfect because my mind doesn’t work that way. I like to work in a broad concept and not into the granular like, “I need this person to move their head two inches this way otherwise the photo is terrible.” I’m not like that. I like to have a collaborative experience with the person that I’m working with. If it’s not a person, a landscape or something, I want it to give me what it wants to give me and then I react to it. For a hypothetical portrait setting, I come over, I’m shooting someone in their home and I find a room, a corner or a scene in their home that I’m attracted to, whether it be the light, the layout, whatever. Then I place them in there and see what we can make within it as opposed to thinking of the exact pose they need to make ahead of time and seeing what that person brings themselves.

That ownership of posing and getting them into a specific thing comes to me, but I still like to observe them while we’re working. A lot of times people do beautiful, nuanced facial expressions or poses they’re not even thinking about. I see that and I react to it. I’m trying to capture those in-between moments as much as I can. It becomes less formulaic. I need to be as present as I can. That keeps me engaged with whoever I’m working with.

How do you build trust quickly with your subjects?

It depends on who it is and how you’re coming about it. With the person who’s never got their photo taken before you kind of have to treat it like when you go to the doctor and you’re kind of nervous. They’re telling you every single thing they’re doing, I do that. I’m like, “okay, we’re going to do this, and the reason why we’re going to do this is because of X, Y, and Z.” I try to be really explicit and have them feel like they’re in control and have a part of the process. Once it starts going, they usually feel a lot more comfortable. You have to keep the communication going. The more you talk to them, the more they forget that there’s a camera in their face. The more you sit in silence, the more their mind is going to drift on every imperfection about them. There’s nothing to actually worry about, but that’s where their mind is going. Sometimes even having another person with you, an assistant, they can have a conversation with them. That’s an easy trick that can help.

Is there a moment you can pinpoint where you realized you could support yourself entirely from your work?

After I dropped out of college, I moved to New York when I was 24 and the first job I got, I worked at a photo studio working in an equipment room. I worked there for a little over a year. After that I moved from working at that studio to becoming an assistant on set, working under a lot of photographers. That’s where I got all my technical chops. I was like, “oh, this is how you light something in a real, professional way.”

Also learning the soft skills. This is how a set works. This is how you talk to a client. This is how you talk to an art director and not be a fucking asshole. I saw a lot of failure as an assistant with no responsibility to any of it. I’d notice it and remember not to do those things. You can start understanding the dynamics. Not as much as when you’re in the hot seat yourself, but you get a good base. I assisted for about three years. That whole time I was building my portfolio. I had a lot of musician friends, those were the base of my portfolio. Then I started reaching out to magazines, newspapers, doing portfolio meetings, slowly working my way up. I remember in 2017 there was this moment where I transitioned. I said, “I’m not assisting anymore. I’m just shooting.” I was starting to get a lot of inquiries. It was a slow progression every year, making a little bit more money, shooting a little bit more, booking a few more jobs.

How do you balance personal projects with your client work?

Every project has three buckets you want to fill. There’s a financial bucket. If this gets filled I’m like, “I don’t care what we’re doing, we’re going to secure the bag, we’re going to do this even if it’s not the most glamorous shoot.” Like most working photographers out there, I shoot plenty of stuff that lives on a hard drive that no one’s ever going to see. People are going to see, but they’re not going to know it’s mine. There’s nothing wrong with that. When I was younger, I always thought like, “Oh man, look at this big photographer. I love their work. All they do is do cool shit.” Those people don’t always do cool shit. They do dumb stuff too, you just never see it.

Then there is a portfolio bucket. If a project is interesting and you have the potential to make something really good, then it’s worth doing regardless of the other buckets.

The third and final bucket is relationships. Maybe I don’t like this project, but it pays okay and I really like this art director’s work in general, then I want to do it because I want to work on the relationship. Maybe this isn’t the best shoot for me, but you never know where that person might end up, where there’s something perfect for you down the line. That’s happened to me a lot where I have worked with someone when they were more junior somewhere, whether it be a photo editor at a publication or a more junior art director, then they move on, become senior somewhere else, and then they hit me with one of the best projects I’ve ever done. That one’s a little bit more of a gamble, but it’s important. You have to recognize building relationships is the entire industry to a degree.

That goes back to skateboarding again where you are making a million decisions per moment.

Absolutely. The less decisions I have to make on set, the better work I get. Sometimes even on gritty stuff with budgets where it’s like, “Hey, we only want to have one assistant,” or something like that. I’m like, “No, I want two or three people or four people working with me because the more work that is put onto them for me not to think about, the more I can think about what to make the best version of this image is.”

Do you keep a consistent crew?

I try to work with the same people often. Consistency is important. Sometimes my first assistant’s free, but my go-to second or third assistant is not available. Then I’ll defer to my first like, “Hey, you hire who you want to hire because I’m going to be interacting with you as my first a lot more than I’m going to be working with the other people.” I’m not going to be communicating with them as much. The chain of command goes down kind of like a chef to a degree. If you’re a head chef and you work with your sous and the sous is barking orders to everybody else. Kind of works the same way. The head chef just needs the sous and them to be aligned, then everybody else can fall in line.

What do you do to get out of your comfort zone?

Something I’ve been doing to get me out of my own bubble over the past few years is digging into photo books a lot more. That’s been such a better way of gaining inspiration than going on Instagram or anywhere else. I love photo books. I always have, but I was always too poor to be able to afford buy them because they’re fucking expensive. Here in LA there’s Arcana books on the west side. It’s basically a library, their photo books section is huge. A great place for inspiration. When you look on Instagram and you see a shoot that someone’s done, you’re just seeing the very best of this little thing that someone did. When you’re looking at a photo book, it’s more like listening to an album where you’re listening to the record straight. You’re getting the whole picture of this artist’s point of view and what they’re trying to convey. It inspires me to think about work in a more complete way.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Jeffrey Silverstein.

“Just this week, my brother’s apartment building in Gaza was completely destroyed– the second time he lost his home, after our family house was obliterated in 2009,” said Ayman Nijim, a plaintiff in the case. “The U.S. is providing the bombs for this genocide. I have lost countless friends and neighbors, so many that I couldn’t know where to start to grieve. When will the courts uphold the law and stop the horror?”

If the Ninth Circuit grants the petition for en banc rehearing, the case would be heard by an eleven-judge en banc court. A case needs to meet at least one of two requirements for en banc review: it must involve a matter of “exceptional importance” or have resulted in inconsistency with other court rulings. The plaintiffs’ petition, filed on their behalf by the Center for Constitutional Rights and Van Der Hout LLP, argues that their case fulfills both.

One indication of the case’s “exceptional importance,” the petition says, is the scale of the ongoing violence. With unconditional U.S. support, Israel has killed about 40,000 Palestinians – injured more than 90,000, forcibly displaced 2 million, and pushed large segments of Gaza into famine. Israel’s actions, which followed numerous expressions of eliminationist intent by its leaders, have led many legal experts and scholars to conclude that it is committing genocide, the most serious human rights crime. In January, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel’s assault “plausibly” amounted to genocide and ordered it to take provisional measures to prevent further harm to civilians.

The following week, the federal judge in this case echoed the ICJ but ruled that the “political question” doctrine prevented courts from ruling on executive branch decisions that touch on foreign policy. Yet courts have repeatedly rejected the executive’s invocation of the political question doctrine when policy decisions cross over into violations of the law. From the founding-era to the post-9/11 “enemy combatant” cases, courts have determined whether foreign policy decisions violated domestic and international law. This failure to uphold Supreme Court precedent also qualifies the case for en banc review, the petition says.

“For almost eleven months we have witnessed the intentional destruction of the Palestinian people in Gaza made possible by these officials,” said Pam Spees, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. “With this ruling, the panel has said our courts are too small to do the job they were assigned at the founding – to be a co-equal branch in our government and a check and balance on presidential power. If the Ninth Circuit doesn’t course correct here, it will be giving this and future presidents license to violate the law at will in the realm of foreign relations.”

The lawsuit, filed in November, claims Biden, Secretary of State Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Austin violated international and federal law when they failed to prevent and were complicit in Israel’s genocide. It asked the court to enjoin the administration from supporting the assault on Gaza with weapons or other means. The case featured rare testimony from victims of the genocide, and plaintiff lawyers pointed to evidence of the massive current and historical U.S. support for Israel – including an affidavit from former State Department official Josh Paul – to make the case that Israel could not be committing genocide without its chief benefactor.

The three-judge panel consisted of Consuelo M. Callahan, Jacqueline H. Nguyen, and Daniel Aaron Bress. Judge Ryan Nelson was slated to be on the panel, but recused himself following the plaintiffs’ motion highlighting his participation in a World Jewish Congress delegation to Israel that was explicitly designed to influence U.S. judges’ opinions on the legality of Israeli military action against Palestinians. Alongside the en banc petition, plaintiffs are also filing an unopposed motion to disqualify Judge Patrick Bumatay and Judge Lawrence VanDyke from participating in any deliberation in the case because they participated in the same delegation to Israel.

The organizational plaintiffs in the case are Defense for Children International – Palestine and Al-Haq. The individual plaintiffs from Gaza are Dr. Omar Al-Najjar, Ahmed Abu Artema, and Mohammed Ahmed Abu Rokbeh; and Mohammad Monadel Herzallah, Laila Elhaddad, Waeil Elbhassi, Basim Elkarra, and Ayman Nijim, U.S. citizens with family in Gaza.

For more information, see the Center for Constitutional Rights’ case page.

The San Francisco law firm of Van Der Hout LLP is co-counsel in the case.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Richard Medhurst.

It’s likely that a few of these monikers will get retired, an honor bestowed upon particularly deadly, destructive storms whose reuse “on a different storm would be inappropriate for obvious reasons of sensitivity,” according to NOAA. This year’s season is predicted to be the busiest on record because of record-hot waters in the Atlantic, which can stir up stronger hurricanes, and the predicted shift from an El Niño climate pattern to a La Niña one whose weaker high-altitude winds make it easier for hurricanes to form. NOAA recently projected that 17 to 25 named storms will appear this year, with four to seven reaching the status of major hurricanes, Category 3 or higher.

The official naming of hurricanes dates back to 1953, when the U.S. Weather Bureau started labeling tropical storms to get the public’s attention, reduce confusion between storms, and indicate a level of severity (storms don’t make the cut unless their winds reach 39 miles per hour). The personality of hurricane names makes them memorable, but the practice comes with weird side effects, since names are loaded with cultural baggage that can affect how people talk about, or even prepare for, a storm barreling toward them. “Naming plays a huge impact in both how we view and respond to hazards,” said Liz Skilton, a historian at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the author of the book Tempest: Hurricane Naming and American Culture.

It works the other way around, too, with particularly bad hurricanes swaying what people name their babies. It’s well-documented that catastrophic storms resulted in fewer babies named Betsy (1965) and Harvey (2017), since most parents flinched at giving their kid a name associated with a catastrophe. Some even plan ahead: “Is it a bad idea to use an upcoming hurricane name?” one prospective parent asked on Reddit a couple years ago, worried the baby name they loved would be sullied. (The same names are rotated through every six years until they get retired by association with a terrible storm.) While the consensus on Reddit was that they were overthinking it, the hurricane association can cause problems for people with unique names. After Hurricane Katrina killed around 1,400 people in Louisiana and Mississippi in 2005, one trauma recovery psychologist who worked with survivors went by her initials, K.H., because introducing herself with her real name, Katrina, resulted in “a visceral reaction.”

Oddly enough, research suggests that baby names that sound similar to a much-talked hurricane tend to spike in its aftermath. One analysis found that names that began with A became 7 percent more common after Hurricane Andrew caused billions of dollars of damage in 1992, and those that started with K rose 9 percent after Hurricane Katrina. The researchers chalked it up to the influence of hearing those names so frequently, which altered what kind of names sounded good to people.

Before hurricanes got human names, they were christened haphazardly, often depending on when or where they struck, like the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926. The practice of naming hurricanes after women started with Clement Lindley Wragge, an Australian weather forecaster, in 1896. Wragge’s idea went on to inspire George R. Stewart’s hit novel in 1941, Storm, starring a meteorologist who secretly named hurricanes after girls he knew. The notion gradually caught on, and the Weather Bureau decided to test it out nationwide.

The devastating storms of the 1954 season, Carol, Edna, and Hazel, became known as “the Bad Girls of ’54.” Reporters clamored at the chance to write about storms as dramatic feminine characters, depicting them as howling, shrieking, and playing coy. “Hurricanes were not just female — they were exemplars of the worst kind of womanhood imaginable,” Skilton wrote in Tempest. There was pushback from the start, and it only intensified in the 1970s, with Roxcy Bolton leading the feminist charge. “I’m sick of reading headlines such as ‘[Hurricane] Camille Was No Lady,’” she told the press. 

Skilton, who researched the language used to talk about hurricanes in thousands of newspaper articles over the decades, found that when storms struck, local reporters used the most gender-specific language. For example, when Hurricane Diane made landfall in North Carolina in 1955, 18 percent of articles in the surrounding states referred to the storm as a woman, either using she/her pronouns or nouns like “lady,” twice as often as articles in the rest of the country. Similarly, when Hurricane Camille barreled into Mississippi in 1969, articles in Gulf Coast states were more than three times as likely as other areas to specify the storm’s gender. Naming a storm imbues it with imagined, humanlike qualities, providing a target for people to express their anger “towards this natural object that has caused so much damage or destruction” where they live, Skilton said.

In 1979, a new system alternated between men and women’s names, at the order of President Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of Commerce, Juanita Kreps. At the same time, control of the naming convention was handed to the World Meteorological Organization, which still maintains the list. The Atlantic storms started rotating between English, French, and Spanish names, reflecting the blend of ancestry in the hurricane-prone Gulf Coast. It’s common practice around the world to give storms names that reflect the ethnicities in the regions they affect, said Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami.

With names like Allen and Frederic thrown into the mix, hurricanes seemed to pick up more aggressive, even warlike personalities. Hurricane David, the first big storm in 1979, a period in which serial killers cast a shadow over the national mood, was called a “killer” that “ripped” and “razed” the coastline, diabolical and determined in “his” attack. These kinds of associations with names and gender can have real-world effects: A study in 2014 found that survey respondents perceived female-named storms as less deadly than their male counterparts, and, therefore, less worthy of evacuation. That correlation was reflected in historical death tolls, the authors found, with storms named after women causing more damage. The study received criticism, with some scholars raising questions about the methods, but Skilton said the research should lead people “to question whether the storm names are influencing us in a harmful way.”

As the climate changes, amping up hurricanes, floods, and heat waves, people are urging government agencies to give names to other kinds of severe weather, from “Winter Storm Archer” to “Heat Wave Zoe.” It’s opening up a new avenue in disaster communication — and, if history repeats itself, new complications.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Who’s afraid of Hurricane Debby? The peculiar importance of a storm’s name on Jun 4, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Kate Yoder.

It’s a real high-wire act, I think, when you’re not a straight white cisgendered male, to do anything autobiographical. As a feminist artist, everybody thinks everything I write is autobiographical, and that I don’t have a strategic lens.

I’m not a super calculated person. I’m new to writing a long-form thing—that’s definitely new to me. But in music, I’ve done tons of formal experimentation. It’s the same way painters do, the same way writers do, where I’ve started with a technical idea, and it’s a jigsaw puzzle I’m putting together. I don’t just come from this raw, emotional state.

And I think that’s where talking about having your life be a part of your work gets really tricky. A lot of the words that get written about me or my singing is that I’m “just screaming.” I’m “ranting.” They’re not positive words, and I actually have a lot of technique behind my singing, and I spend a lot of time doing vocal training.

People assume I just walk out and I’m just spewing my guts on the floor, but I’m not. I’m doing the same as almost all the other artists I know are doing, which is trying to find the right balance between the content and the technical. And to have them work together to make something that’s executed really well.

I’ve always been drawn to the experimentation with the first person in your songs—the places you’re able to go in that register, in that voice. But it is also something that can be misconstrued.

Yeah. And then when you talk about autobiography or autobiographical artwork of any kind, there’s a subject. As subjects, we’re constantly changing—our identities aren’t this solid, one-dimensional thing. We’re constantly taking in new information and putting out information. And so part of what I try to get across in my music has been writing in different voices and singing in different ways that kind of de-center the idea that I’m one authentic voice, that there’s one authentic place I’m coming from.

In the book, I talk about constantly being treated like I’m a fake musician. We were girls in a band, we didn’t know what we were doing, and we were supposed to have it all figured out before we presented our work to the world, to avoid the harsh criticism. I really have gotten to a place in my life where I just can’t function in opposition to people’s claims of me being inauthentic, because I don’t care about authenticity, and I never did.

I hope my book has a voice that people can relate to, and it is my voice. But I don’t think it’s super “authentic” or “real” or anything like that. I edited it. I made choices. I came up with funny titles. I made it.

There are a few points in the book where you talk about a lived experience as a “performance piece.” How have you been influenced by performance art strategies, and especially feminist performance art?

I was super influenced by Karen Finley, and by the magazine High Performance that I got in Olympia through the library. I would Xerox stuff out of it. I couldn’t wait for it to show up, and I would read about Lorraine O’Grady and so many of these feminist performance artists that I later got to see perform, or I’ve at least gotten to visit archives and watch their work.

For a lot of Bikini Kill especially, I didn’t really consider myself a musician for a very long time—I thought I was being a feminist performance artist. I just happened to be in a band. But I was really doing feminist performance art, and I was playing the role of a girl in a punk band.

It’s not like the band was dispensable and didn’t matter. I loved music and I always wanted to sing, clearly. But there was a part of it that was—I held back my own self. And I think it was a strategy that I used to keep myself safe, in a way. And then eventually I just got super into the music, and was like, “Oh, I’m a fucking musician, whatever.”

But I’ve always done what I call “private dancer” performances where I’ve done something weird to a person that I didn’t know very well, to see what happened to it. How did that story mutate and get back to me? And it was completely fake, it wouldn’t be a genuine thing, but I’d just do it to see what happened. Like an experiment, like putting baking soda and vinegar together. I like those kinds of moments because it’s also a way to be artists in our everyday life.

One of the features of the book is aligning lyrics from certain songs with certain experiences. A lot of the Bikini Kill lyrics are very concise, they’re very imagistic, and just very tightly organized choices of words. What was the composition approach early on, and how did it evolve?

I love coming up with titles for things, so I would just have pages and pages of titles, and not know what they were going to be, like “REVOLUTION GIRL STYLE NOW” was just in there amongst a bunch of other stuff. There were things that later became songs, like “New Radio,” that were just in a list of what I thought were cool titles.

So sometimes it would start with a title, but in the very, very, very, very beginning when it was just me, Tobi [Vail], and Kathi [Wilcox]; it started with poems that I wrote when I was 15 and 16 years old that I kept in a folder. I still have it, the gray folder. I used white-out to make X’s all over it, like, “Don’t look in this!” [laughs] I was in my very early 20s, so I was like, “Well, here’s material that I have left over, so let’s see what works.” I would start singing my poems over the music, and it wouldn’t work, so then I would start cutting, and editing, and then adding, until it was a song.

A lot of the early stuff, I was playing on this idea of going back to my childhood and taking it over. Because I was in a place where when I was 17, and I left my house and I lived on my own for the first time, I felt like I’d been dead my whole life, and just numb. Numbed-out just to get through life, and I really turned off my intuition, which led me into some pretty shitty, toxic relationships.

And I was starting to have these moments of clarity where I was meeting other people and being like, “Wait a minute, I’ve been robbed!” I really had this feeling of, “Oh my god, other people had childhoods where they were, like, kids, and they didn’t have to act like adults when they were four years old and keep the house together”—not like I did any cleaning, but I mean emotionally. I was still only 17, so I was like, “I’m going to take the last couple years before I’m 21 and really be a fucking child.”

I started remembering things from my childhood for the first time, and writing it all down. And so our early songs really reflected that, like, “double dare ya” or “I double dog dare ya” were things that were said on the playground. Even in Le Tigre I kept doing it—I was really obsessed with playground dynamics and how they move on into your later life. I would take some childhood taunt and then try to rework it as a call to action for young feminists.

Later, I started by singing gibberish words, because I saw Tobi and Kim Gordon doing it. I just would sing those blank lyrics to get the melody and the rhythm down. Eventually, when you sing the fake lyrics long enough, they start to have a shape to them and they start telling you, “This song is about this,” or “This song is about that.”

When you switched to that method, do you feel like it changed anything? Did your interests lyrically start to shift at that point?

Part of the thing that happened was I started not wanting to be a feminist performance artist fronting a band. I started wanting to be a musician, and I wanted the quality of what I was doing vocally, rhythmically, and melodically to have as much impact as the lyrics. The two I really remember are “New Radio” and “Demirep,” where I wrote the melodies first.

I actually started on tour. I would sing different lyrics every night, so I was making the song up as it went along. It’s weird, because I would never do that now, but maybe I should. We would basically write a bunch of material, and then we would tour it until we felt like we could go in the studio and just nail it. We did not have very much money, and we didn’t have the luxury to write in the studio. I was always like, “What? Who does that?”

We were in England, and I think we recorded “Demirep” on a [BBC Radio 1] Peel Session before we recorded it with Joan Jett in Seattle at Avast! studios. I had to have lyrics nailed in the next day, so I went to a coffee shop and took my cassette Walkman with these little foam headphones, the kind you get on the airplane. I listened to the live version of it and tried to decipher what I had sung the night before, and then I made up the lyrics from there.

I liked how that song came out, and I really liked “New Radio.” I didn’t feel like it diluted anything. But I have been experimenting these days when I’m making music. I was writing poetry again, and I was like, “Oh, I’m going to use a bunch of it,” and then my computer crashed, and I lost seven years of poetry! [laughs] It was probably all terrible, so it was like a blessing in disguise. But I do want to go back to starting with written material, just to see what it’s like, because I haven’t done it in 30 years.

When you’re doing creative projects now, how do you work through obstacles?

The most successful strategy that I’ve found in terms of practice or whatever is to have three projects going at once. And then they all finish around the same time.

In Bikini Kill in the beginning, I would be making flyers for our band and for other people’s bands. I made the album covers and most of the visual stuff, like t-shirts and stickers. I’d be working on that, then I’d be working on the fanzine, and then I’d be working on the music. When I got bored of working on the music or the lyrics, I would have the fanzine to work on. If I got bored of that, I would work on graphics for the band.

My graphic design stuff is really the party. It’s almost always the party place. If I don’t feel like doing music, and I can’t look at the book for a while, I will always go on Photoshop and start making things. With each project, when I start to get bored of what I’m doing and it feels empty, I wait until I’m chomping at the bit like a horse at the rodeo, and then I go back to the other project with this renewed excitement.

When I get stuck and I’m like really stuck, sometimes I like to look at my life from outside and pretend it’s a movie. I’m somebody who talks during movies and TV shows constantly, and so I think, “If I was in a movie theater, what would I be screaming?” You know in a horror movie or whatever, you’re like, “Don’t go to the corner! Don’t follow the fucking blood trail! Get out of that house!” [laughs] Somehow, when I am able to step back and look at my life like a movie that somebody else is watching, or that I’m another person and I’m watching it, I just start writing it down: what would I be yelling at the screen? It gives me a lot of information.

Going back to talking about content and technique, how do you approach new music that has an activist mission?

Well, there’s this band Problem Patterns from Ireland that I really like. I guess people would say that they’re political, but the thing I find most interesting about them is that they’re really weird, genuinely weird. I love Lambrini Girls because they have a total sense of humor about misogyny that’s really refreshing. I just think we can’t survive late-stage capitalism without having a sense of humor.

Sometimes music that isn’t overtly political can feel very political to me. It can be that the makeup of the band isn’t a traditional makeup. It can be that the instrumentation isn’t traditional. It can be that I am feeling overwhelmed by what’s going on in the world, and I need a break, and their music gives me a break. That can feel like a political act in itself, to say, “I deserve a break.”

I’m not always looking to a who’s-the-new-Public-Enemy kind of thing because they’re one of my all-time favorite groups who mix… almost like edutainment, one of the early proponents of extremely effective edutainment, but that has really good music, that is really smart and really funny. Just some of Chuck D’s lyrics are so tongue-in-cheek. And I don’t agree with every single thing he’s ever said or done his life, as I’m sure most people wouldn’t agree with everything I’ve ever said and done. But that was a group in my formative years that really, really affected me. I was like, “God, if I could just make a record that’s half, one-eighth as good!” But these days I love this band Glass Spells that’s this minimalist goth band. I love Sweeping Promises—the lead singer’s voice is just totally great. This band Gustaf I really like. I like this band ALT BLK ERA from Nottingham. A lot of stuff.

I don’t really like bands that sound like any bands I’ve ever been in. It’s not that I don’t like my own bands, it’s just like I’ve heard that enough, you know? I’ve always been into older stuff from England, whether it’s more traditional punk that has verse-chorus, like The Adverts, or Stiff Little Fingers from Ireland, or the Mo-dettes or Au Pairs, or bands like Ut or the Raincoats that are off-kilter and sound like they’re falling apart, and it’s not completely based on a Western formula of pop music.

Right, where the sound can be dislocating and disruptive in itself, and then it can be taken in further directions lyrically.

There was a question we got asked a lot in the beginning of Le Tigre that I found really… I want to say intriguing, but I think really the correct word is weird. People would say—and they would act like they already knew the answer, and it was a very common question—”Aren’t you upset that people are just coming to see you because they like the music?” It was really strange, and I was like, “Oh, it’s interesting that there’s still this lingering idea that at some point in time, politics and art got a divorce and they hate each other.” I thought it’d be great if people just came for the music.

The Style Council’s a band that I love that has super melodic, amazing songs, and I didn’t realize how political the lyrics were until many years after I started listening to them, talking a lot about class. It’s almost like advertising or something. Advertising is usually just horrible, but they’re ideas that are trying to pull you in and get you to buy a product. But with The Style Council, it’s being brought in by this beautiful thing, and then being like, “Oh, these people are smart, too.” You don’t have to be one thing or the other. You’re not just a hedonist or an activist. You can have both of those elements in your personality, or the way that you make art.

But then some people just say the thing by the disruptive way they use instruments. And then you have your George Michael moments where you just want to listen to “Father Figure” over and over. Probably not that song. It’s “Cowboys and Angels,” but, you know. [laughs]

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Emma Ingrisani.

The post The Importance of Independent Journalism in Fighting Censorship and Countering Corporate Media Propaganda appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

A characteristic of the hegemonic political and media culture of the United States is the near invisibility of social class as a major determinant of power. Race and gender have finally started to attract attention in the political and media establishments, but social class appears either ignored or silenced. The dominant establishments depict the U.S. as if it is a classless society, where because of ample opportunities and a large degree of social and vertical mobility, it is possible for everyone to rise from the bottom of society to the top. The evidence, however, shows that the United States has social classes (with a social class structure not dissimilar to the ones that exist in most countries on both sides of the North Atlantic, which, incidentally, have more extensive social mobility than in the U.S.). Moreover, there is plenty of evidence that each social class in the U.S. has its own economic, social, and cultural interests, expressed and promoted through their influence over the U.S. political institutions, advancing those policies that increase or reduce, for example, the huge social class health and quality of life inequalities that exist in this country, the largest among developed capitalist countries. Class health inequalities in the U.S. are also larger than race and gender inequalities, a reality that rarely appears in the dominant political and media discourse.

Another reality is that there are not only social classes, but there has also been an increased polarization of the class structure of the U.S. with a growing concentration of economic, political, and social power wielded by the dominant and upper class (known in the U.S. as the corporate class) at the cost of disempowering the popular classes, particularly the working class and the lower echelons of the middle class. What is also interesting (but rarely mentioned in the major media) is that, according to the most detailed study of popular perceptions of class in the U.S., the majority of people in the U.S. are and define themselves as belonging to the working class (for further elaboration of these points, see Vicente Navarro, What is happening in the United States; How social classes influence the political life of the country and its health and quality of life.

International Journal of Social Determinants of Health and Health Services, April 51(2), 2021).

The widely reproduced perception that the majority of the working population is middle class, as even President Biden mentioned in his State of the Union address, is inaccurate and is based on a biased survey that asked people to define themselves either as upper, middle, or lower class. The term lower class is derogatory and insulting, and very few people choose to define themselves as lower class. The occupational groups used by the General Social Survey (GSS) give an idea of classes in the U.S.: The corporate class includes corporate owners and managers; the middle class is comprised of professionals and technicians, business middle class and executives, self-employed shopkeepers, craftsmen and artisans; and the working class (the largest social class) includes manual workers, service workers, clerical and sales workers, and farm workers.

HOW THE CURRENT SOCIAL CLASS POWER RELATIONS PRODUCES AND REPRODUCES RACISM IN THE U.S.

As mentioned before, there are other categories of power, such as race and gender, that also have enormous importance in shaping the distribution of power in the U.S. and that are currently the center of attention in health equity circles. I consider these developments extraordinarily positive and necessary. However, not much attention has been given in those same circles to the category of social class, which is regrettable for many reasons. It is impossible, for example, to eliminate racism in the United States without understanding how racism is produced and reproduced in the country and the role it plays in dividing and weakening the working class in the defense of their interests, frequently in conflict with the corporate class. It is not by chance that the most ultra-right-wing parties, who actively promote the interests of the corporate class, also promote the most racist ideologies.

On the other hand, the relationship between the civil rights movement and the labor movement in the U.S. is precisely based on their commonality of interests. It was none other than Martin Luther King who, one week before being assassinated and while he was supporting a worker’s strike, said that the “class conflict was the critical conflict in the U.S.” (cited in, D. J. Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King; Penguin Books, 1981). Martin Luther King had been extremely critical of many labor laws, such as the profoundly anti-worker “right to work” laws that make it extremely difficult to establish a union. They were adopted in many states in the 1950s to stop the civil and labor rights movements that were growing at that time. In 1961, Martin Luther King defined such legislation as “a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights, to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and the working conditions of everyone. Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer, and there are no civil rights” (cited in Daryl Newman, President of the Detroit AFL-CIO, Remembering the racist history of right to work laws, Portside, February 28, 2024). It shows the enormous power of the corporate class that such a racist and anti-labor law was in place in Michigan (historically one of the most industrialized states) for 60 years until it was finally repealed this year, just a few weeks ago (February 13). Because racism is continuously and fundamentally used to divide the working class, the elimination of racism would benefit most of the population. The overwhelming power of the corporate class is based on the weakness of the working class, facilitated and reproduced by the lack of class solidarity and the existence of racism.

THE ENORMOUS AND URGENT NEED TO ESTABLISH CLASS-BASED ALLIANCES AND COALITIONS

It is because of this reality that there has always been a need for all the groups that are exploited and discriminated against (by race, gender, age, nationality, and other categories) to work together in common cause for the elimination of injustice. This is what occurred in the 1980s with the establishment of the Rainbow Coalition, which was created under the leadership of one of the disciples of Martin Luther King, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, to whom I was health advisor in his 1984 and 1988 campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination. Jesse Jackson ran as the voice of the minorities in 1984 (his slogan was “Our time has come”).

However, after the establishment of the Rainbow Coalition, he ran as the “voice of the working people” of all colors, black, brown, yellow, white, and whatever color, identity, and sensitivities.

The coalition included the civil rights movement, the trade union movement, the feminist movement, and the elderly movement, among others, making proposals to reduce and eliminate injustice and exploitation. An element that facilitated the establishment of such a coalition is that the majority of African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities, women, and the elderly are members of the working class, which also includes those echelons of the middle class that have been proletarianized with the increased dominance of for-profit corporations in sectors, like health and medicine, that were previously non-profit oriented. Therefore, social class became a connecting link among diverse groups.

In this strategy, race, for example, was not replaced by class, but rather, it was enriched by adding the category of class to race. The class solidarity needed by the different components of the coalition to reach their objectives was (and continues to be) incompatible with the existence of racism. In summary, social movements need a coalition that strengthens the possibility of obtaining their goals. This is what the Rainbow Coalition intended in 1988, and it succeeded. It introduced proposals that considerably impacted the country’s political debate. In the health sector, one of their most important proposals was for the establishment of a National Health Program, a universal program that would guarantee access to health care to all citizens and residents in the country in the same way, for example, that Medicare guarantees health care to all the elderly. (In the current terminology, the phrase Medicare for All is a demand for that right to universality.) The impact of Jesse Jackson’s proposals, like the one for a National Health Program, was enormous and mobilized many sectors of the working population. Jesse Jackson almost won the Democratic primary in 1988, shaking up the Democratic Party apparatus that was surprised and afraid of that movement.

THE OVERWHELMING POLITICAL POWER OF THE CORPORATE CLASS IS AN OBSTACLE TO SOLVING SOME OF THE U.S.’S MAJOR HEALTH INEQUITIES.

In the 1992 presidential election, Bill Clinton prominently included a proposal in his Democratic primary campaign for changes in the health sector, trying to capitalize on the interest in the subject that had been awakened in the late 1980s by the Rainbow Coalition’s advocacy for a National Health Program. He later established a Commission presided over by Hillary Clinton to make proposals to improve access to health care. However, he completely excluded the possibility of establishing a National Health Program, which is why Reverend Jackson, President of the Rainbow Coalition, Dennis Rivera, the President of 1199 SEIU, the most important union of healthcare workers in the U.S., and myself, health advisor to the Rainbow Coalition, went tosee Hillary Clinton to complain about that absence. Reverend Jackson asked that I be included in their Task Force, so for a year, I worked in the White House as part of that Task Force without having any influence. It was clear from the beginning that there was no chance that a National Health Program could even be considered despite being favored by most of the population. A key condition of the White House Task Force was that their proposals needed to be approved by the Senate and the House Health Committees. But many members of those and other especially relevant committees received campaign funding from corporate interests dominant in the health sector (from insurance companies to pharmaceutical companies, among many others) who put profits above human needs. In this context, a National Health Program was not even allowed to be considered. That complete rejection was a clear example of corporate class dominance of the political process. Consequently, the U.S. is one of the few countries on both sides of the North Atlantic that does not guarantee access to health care for citizens or residents.

THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF HEALTH INEQUITY AND THE RISE OF FOR-PROFIT HEALTHCARE IN THE AFTERMATH OF WORLD WAR II

Corporate dominance of the health sector was legally established in the U.S. immediately after World War II. That war was among the few popular wars the U.S. government has ever fought.

It was a war against fascism and Nazism (maximum expressions of classism, racism, and sexism) led by an immensely popular and progressive president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Furthermore, the popular classes played a crucial role in that war. As a consequence, the demands from the majority of the population were very high after the war, with calls for significant changes such as the nationalization of banking and, in the health sector, the establishment of a National Health Program (as happened later on in Canada when the Social

Democratic Party established a universal health care system in a western province where it governed, which was later on expanded to the whole country). In the U.S., the rising demand for change, including in the health sector, frightened the dominant corporate class, which mobilized to stop reforms that would affect their interests. The corporate class, through the Republican party and the right-wing racist members of the Southern Democratic Party, united to pass the Taft-Harley Act (despite President Truman’s veto), which included a measure that weakened the labor movement by outlawing sympathy strikes. In other words, the unions could not function as class agents but were required to limit their organizing to their sectors and places of work. A blue-collar workers union, for example, could not strike in support of a service workers union. This was a way of dividing the working class, disallowing them to work together.

In other words, class solidarity was forbidden. The federal government of the U.S. is one of the few governments among developed democratic countries that prohibits sympathy strikes. In contrast, general strikes that paralyzed the whole economy occurred in several European countries during the tumultuous years of the Great Recession. The enormous power of the corporate class at the expense of the working class (the majority of the population in the U.S.) is one of the major causes of the dramatic underdevelopment of social and health rights in this country. The data clearly shows that on both sides of the North Atlantic, those countries where political parties have been historically rooted in the working class or labor parties, have much better equity and health indicators than those with very weak or no labor parties, like the U.S.Plenty of evidence supports this statement (Vicente Navarro and Leiyu Shi The Political Context of Social Inequalities and Health Inequalities Social Science and Medicine, Vol 52, 2001).

It is important to note that this same law, the Taft-Hartley Act that weakened and undermined the labor movement in the U.S., was also the law that established the regressive and fragmented basis for the funding of health care in the U.S., leading to the inevitable rise of inequities in access to health care. Instead of establishing a National Health Program (as Canada would later), the U.S. federal government promoted employers’ voluntary purchase of private health insurance plans, making people’s access to care dependent on their employer’s willingness and ability to provide coverage. In other words, when a worker is fired, they not only lose their salary but also their (and their family members’) medical care benefits. This form of control over employees is unknown in most other countries on both sides of the North Atlantic. It also explains why the number of working days lost because of strikes in the U.S. is among the lowest.

Not only did the Taft-Hartley Act strengthen the corporate class’s control over the labor force in each workplace, but it also promoted the rapid privatization of healthcare, expanding enormously the for-profit health sector, which became dominant in major areas like insurance and pharmaceuticals, prioritizing the optimization of profits over human needs. The system also became highly inefficient, with enormous administrative costs. Again, it was for the benefit of corporate interests at the expense of most of the population. Thus, the same law that thwarted the labor movement established the foundation for enormous inequities and injustice in the U.S. healthcare system.

Based on all these facts, it should be evident that social class is a critical variable in understanding what has been happening in the U.S. The enormous limitations of social rights and labor rights, as well as the very limited democracy in their representative institutions, are based primarily on the immense power of the corporate class, much greater than in any other major democratic country, and the overwhelming weakness of the working class, the weakest in any major democratic country. The lack of attention to this reality in the political media and academic institutions is precisely a consequence of their dominance by the corporate class.

The post The Importance of Social Class as a Power Category Besides Race and Gender to Understand What is Going on in the US appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Vicente Navarro.

I’m most productive in the mornings before I’m awake enough to start second-guessing myself, so I try to get to my desk as soon as possible on the days I write. My routine has changed a little bit over the last few years since getting my dog. Before, I used to wake up and go to the desk straight away. Now, my husband and I take Pancho to the dog park first, but I try and push off doing everything else that I can until after I get my writing hours in. Taking a shower, exercise, responding to emails, all of that can happen later in the day.

Another thing that I’ve learned is that I don’t work well if I have a whole day to write. For me, it’s much more about touching the work every day. That focused time is so much more important than having hours and hours to spend.

Sometimes you can get lost in all of that time.

Yes. Exactly. When I would try and write all day I’d often end up ruining what I’d done in the morning by overthinking it in the afternoon and then have to go back and fix it again the next day. Now my process is much more about slow and steady work.

You grew up in Australia, and both of your parents were artists: your mother is a painter and your father a musician. You are also a songwriter and a musician; you started recording and performing music in your late teens. How did that inform your turn toward fiction writing?

Growing up, my parents made me feel like a fellow artist, even as a child. Creativity wasn’t just encouraged, it was normalized, and so I think it was only natural that I would find ways to express myself in that environment.

My father would sing to me every night, and he would also read to me before I went to sleep. What I learned from that is that writing is also a kind of performance. In some ways, I don’t think of my writing and music as being separate pursuits. I’ve always felt that my songs and my stories came from the same emotional place. That said, my music was much more about pure self-expression, and when I began to write fiction, the biggest challenge was facing all these questions about narrative and plot and character. You can get away with being much more abstract in a song.

What has being a musician taught you about finding an audience and building a career?

When my first book came out earlier this year, it seemed like there was a purpose to all of those years I spent visiting community radio stations and giving local press interviews when I was playing in bands. It gave me a comfort level with that kind of publicity activity that perhaps a lot of writers don’t come to naturally. Because of my music background, I see the promotion of my work as being part of my job. It’s easy to be cynical about publicity and “building an audience” but I really think that it’s also an opportunity to meet other minds and have conversations like this with other creative people. Genuine points of connection can come through that experience.

What did you study as an undergraduate?

I originally enrolled as a journalism student. I was not shy, but the form of journalism that they were teaching seemed quite aggressive to me. If I had been able to read people like Joan Didion, who talked about how being quiet or accommodating could actually be a way to get the story… I don’t know. But all this is to say that I’m a journalism dropout. After a semester, I switched into what my university in Sydney called Writing and Cultural Studies. It was the closest thing we had to a creative writing degree.

In your 20s, you decided to come to New York and to earn a graduate degree in creative writing at Columbia. What was that like?

It was mainly just really exciting. It was something that I always wanted to do but didn’t think would ever be possible for me, so I was sort of pinching myself the whole time. Having had to come such a long way from Australia, and being on a scholarship, also made me conscious of not taking the opportunity for granted. I came into the MFA with a desire to make work and have something to show for it. I couldn’t be blasé. I was determined to make it a positive, generative experience.

What was the process of writing your novel like? It began as a short story, and I’m curious as to how it evolved into a longer work.

I wrote the original short story in the last year of my undergraduate degree, when I was still in Sydney. At the time, I was satisfied with it as it was. The three main characters in the novel are the narrator; her older boyfriend, Jude; and their dog, King, and they were there from the very beginning. After I moved to New York, I kept finding myself wanting to go back to that story. I’m not sure what it was, but it felt like there was more to say about those people, about their relationship. I just kept finding myself drawn back there.

As you know, I’m a big fan of linked short story collections like Cities I’ve Never Lived In by Sara Majka, Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, and Alice Munroe’s Runaway. I had my heart set on making a book like that. I wrote more stories over the years when I was doing my MFA, but I was trying to tie everything up too neatly into these little parcels, almost. I was using the form to let myself pivot out of moments of tension rather than forcing myself to stay in a scene and linger in those moments of discomfort.

I had maybe four stories when I realized that there was one arc, which followed the course of this relationship. I was very intimidated by the form of the novel. I came to writing as someone that loved short fiction. That’s mainly what I read. I have such a high respect for the short story as an art form, but I also think that I felt like I wasn’t capable of making a longer work. That I didn’t have the stamina for it or was maybe second-guessing myself, like, Do I have enough to say? I had to find my way into the novel almost sideways.

And when did you realize?

It was after I finished the MFA. I was working on short stories that whole time. And then in my third year when I was a teaching fellow and I was working on my thesis, I started again from the beginning with the intention of writing a novel. I don’t know if I could have seen that possibility while I was in the middle of that workshop process of having to turn in work in such quick succession. In the space of the MFA, I had this very fixed idea of the project that I was making. Once I got some distance from that, that urgency went away and I could find a form that felt more intuitive to me.

The feedback that you get in an MFA program can be so valuable, but there’s also a certain point where you need to be alone with the work and learn to trust your own vision. Now I’m pretty careful about who I share my writing with in those early stages, and when, because I can get very confused by having too many voices in my head.

So who are your early readers now? Who do you share the work with?

Really only Robert, my husband. He reads everything that I write. Before I wrote the novel and I was still figuring out my process, I would show him bits and pieces a lot earlier because I had such a strong desire for validation and needed the encouragement. I trust his mind as a reader and he knows me so well, so he understands what I’m trying to do and where I’m coming from, even if the work is rough. Now I try and wait until I have a finished draft before giving it to him. Mainly for his benefit, because it’s less chaotic than seeing three different disjointed paragraphs, but I think I’ve also grown more confident in my own judgement of what’s working and what isn’t. These days I’ll share it with him and my agent and really that’s all.

And what does the editing or revision process look like for you?

For me, all writing is very much rewriting and with my fiction, I can get obsessive about revising things down to the sentence level. When I was in grad school, I was lucky enough to study with Deborah Eisenberg, and she told us about how, in the days of typewriters, if you wanted to make a change in a story, you would have to go back and retype everything again from the beginning, but in the process you would inevitably change other little things along the way. That might be how I first came to this way of working, where I literally retype paragraphs from the previous day from a printed, marked-up draft before I lay down any new material. Sometimes those paragraphs will stay the same, but more often than not I’ll make additional little tweaks and refinements. It also helps me warm up, get back into the rhythm and the voice of what I’m working on. It’s almost like practicing scales on an instrument.

Are there any writing habits or tendencies that you have to work against?

I’m trying to learn when to leave things alone, when you’ve gotten them as good as they can be on a sentence level, on a book level.

There was a version of Thirst for Salt that I edited with too much of a heavy hand and ended up stepping on a lot of the mystery and ambiguity because I was afraid of letting any ugliness into the prose. I wanted it to be really chiseled and neat and perfect. Part of that might’ve been coming from a background in short fiction, because a short story is a little bit more contained. I thought if I applied that same sensibility to a novel, then wouldn’t the novel then be perfect? But it didn’t work that way.

If I remember correctly, you mentioned that Robert said a novel “needs a little fat.”

Yes, exactly. I love works that are very slim and fragmentary but that’s a different kind of shape to work with than a more traditional novel. In a more traditional novel, I think you need to allow the reader a bit of breathing room. Otherwise, it would be like an album where every song was a single. Those albums exist and they can be great but I feel like a novel is more like a concept album. You need to have an instrumental song in the middle just to give people a break.

How do you think about plot and momentum?

I joke with other writer friends that I’m part of the school of “no plot, all vibes.” So, a part of me wants to say I don’t care about plot, but I also don’t know if that’s true. What I’m really interested in is story, and I think of them as being separate things. When I think of plot, I think of series of dramatic events. When I think of story, I think of something larger and more difficult to pin down. It’s easier for me to think, “What’s the story of these two people?” than “What’s the plot of this novel?” In my head, a plot always seems to involve these big cataclysmic events, but that doesn’t often feel true to the day-to-day experience of being alive. Yes, our lives are marked by turning points, but the day-to-day shifts of feeling are a lot more subtle. Given the right attention, the small choices we make can be as revealing as the big ones.

More than plot, I think about revelation. What will this piece of writing reveal to a reader? What kind of intimacy will they get from spending time with these people?

What is your reading practice like? What do you value in fiction?

When I’m working on a specific project, I try to read in the vein of what I’m trying to make. I’ve heard people say that they don’t want to read while they’re writing because they’re afraid of being influenced, but I want to be influenced. I want to invite that in and I enjoy that sense of porousness.

In terms of what I value in fiction, it’s a certain kind of voice that draws me in: a voice that seems to promise intimacy. Having worked for NOON for eight years now, attention to language and sentence-level writing are also very important to me, but there has to be a sense that there is skin in the game.

How do you define success?

For me, what I am aiming for the most is to just be able to continue to write and continue to live.

In artistic terms, success to me means feeling like I’ve expressed something in the truest way possible and that I haven’t compromised on that for reasons that are outside of the art itself, that I’ve made the thing that I wanted to make.

How do you replenish your energy and enthusiasm for writing?

One of the strange things about publishing your first book is that your writing becomes public in a new way. You meet all different kinds of reactions to it, which can be equally exciting and disorientating, and in the short term that can feel like it changes the stakes of what you’re doing or the reasons why you do it. As any writer knows, there’s no instant validation in the writing process, but when you’re at the height of the publicity cycle and you’re getting reviews or you’re doing interviews, or seeing people posting about your book on Instagram, it’s easy to get addicted to the rush of feedback.

I wasn’t really expecting that to get into my head in the way that it did, so as things settle, this time has been about reclaiming writing for myself as something that I have always loved to do and trying to let the noise of the rest of it fade away. For me, that looks like reading for pleasure and not for work. Just being more intuitive about it. Spending time in nature. Spending time with my family and with my dog. Doing all of those things that are good for you anyway. Taking breaks from being online. Trying to get back to that slower, quieter place.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Cara Blue Adams.

I did this during lockdown pretty much. I’m usually doing something for a particular project. I’ll write songs thinking about that album usually. Writing for Dino, I would always think about what the other guys could play or not play. Limitations would be in my mind. When I’m writing for myself, I don’t think that. I don’t have the limitations if I’m writing for myself, except for the solo albums I’m trying to keep it acoustic as much as possible. But I sort of failed.

Why the push for acoustic?

Because I think that I’ll go out and play it alone.

So, functionality.

Yeah. But then as I went along, I liked drums, so I put drums on everything and I was bored of the…The first few solo albums, I tried to play leads on acoustic and now I’ve just gotten sick of it. So I didn’t even bother trying. It’s a weird combo of things, and then my friend’s playing piano on most of the songs. So it seems like maybe I should have a band to play live, but I don’t. I guess I’ll just try to play the songs solo, still, see what they sound like.

What I’ve tried in the past is to have the opening band learn some of the songs and that turned out good. That could work maybe, but it’s also not that easy.

The last time I saw you play was in 2016 at Le Guess Who Festival in Utrecht, in the Netherlands.

I mostly remember the canals of Utrecht going outside.

It’s so beautiful. I know you’re a big cyclist, and that’s such a cycling culture.

Yeah, I’ve definitely biked there. They don’t mess around. You have to jump in the flow there.

When did cycling become a focus for you? I would imagine cycling around while you’re on tour, creating that habit must be so great for your brain and your mental space.

I’d say maybe 10 years ago. I was just trying to figure out some way to exercise that I could stand, I guess.

For some reason I can’t imagine you doing CrossFit.

Yeah, right. Or just going to the gym. I can’t stand it.

Do you feel like you use your bicycle as more than exercise or is it simply functional for getting your body moving?

I think it helps just to get outside, too. I think it makes me less depressed overall.

I’ve always read about your devotion to your hometown of Amherst. I’m projecting, but there can be this spiritual bond that comes from your roots, where every corner you turn you have a memory there.

I guess we call it you’re a townie if you just stay in a town where you’re born. Maybe I just have that townie kind of mentality.

Would you recommend visiting Amherst?

I can’t recommend it, but go ahead. I never recommend it because I don’t want to be held responsible. [laughs]

I mean, you’re like the town mascot.

I’m not, even. Charles [Thompson, aka Black Francis] from the Pixies lives on my street. So I’m not even the biggest rock guy on my street, forget the town.

Do you guys know each other well? Do you hang out?

I know him. We don’t really hang out much. Everybody seems to be so busy all the time though.

Are you someone who likes to keep a packed schedule? Are you one to always be busy or do you have to make sure that you have downtime?

It’s interestingly both. I can’t stand doing nothing, so I like to have something to do and I like to travel. That makes me able to stay. I couldn’t stay here if I didn’t leave a lot, I guess. And my wife’s from Berlin, so I’ve dragged her here, which is strange, but she wants to get back to Berlin a lot so that we can stay there, too.

Are you able to write as you travel?

Not really. It’s more of a home thing, writing.

Besides being at home, what do you need? Do you need complete isolation? Do you need a snack? What’s the scenario?

I just like to sit in the kitchen and watch TV shows on the computer and play the guitar. Lately, I’ve been watching Shameless, the US version. I watched the whole English one. I bought the DVDs years ago. I liked that shit. I didn’t know if I wanted to watch the American one, and now I finally am. I feel like I miss the main guy in the English show, I think he has a cooler vibe than the main guy in the American show.

When you started out as a teen with Deep Wound, did you have any conception that this was going to be it? That music was going to work out?

Oh no. I was just a kid and I was into punk rock. All the records I liked you had to mail order and they only would make a thousand. The hardcore scene wasn’t really about making any money or doing anything, but once I got out of it and started Dino, I’d see these bands that would tour, the SST bands, Meat Puppets, and that’s just what I wanted to do. I was hoping it would work out just to not work at McDonald’s, to make enough money playing, touring, or something.

As you pushed further in that direction, how did you hone your technical skill as a guitarist? Was it starting Dinosaur and playing with other talented musicians or was it just by the fact of playing all the time?

Yeah, just from playing. I didn’t even care. We didn’t really care to be accomplished. Initially we wanted to be good enough to get our ideas across. And I played drums so I thought I could probably teach somebody how to play drums because I had a lot of lessons and stuff. I got better on guitar just through touring, playing. Just from touring I can play faster than I ever needed to or wanted to play. Just from playing so much all of a sudden you can play better.

With drums I wanted to play faster and faster and practiced a lot. But guitar, I just never approached it as practicing. I would just write songs and stuff, and it never mattered to me that technically I was getting to play really fast.

And now you’re identified with your instrument. There is something incredible about being known as an iconic guitarist. I doubt you care deeply about how the world perceives you, but isn’t it wild that the thing that you use as a mode to write songs has become this symbol for you as a person?

Yeah. I just played a gig last night, the band I played drums in. And that was interesting ,too, just to go back to what I was doing as a kid, what I wanted to do. It’s all strange.

Do you have a different feeling when you play the drums, beyond the sentimentality of nostalgia?

Yeah, it’s different, but the goal is the same: just trying to communicate the songs as well as possible.

I wanted to ask about the J Mascis Jazzmaster that Fender put out. It must be surreal to have your name on a guitar, to have it commodified in that way. Do you often get people coming up to tell you that they’re using that guitar, or even just people who aim to play the same way that you do?

It’s cool. It’s hard to play like someone because it’s so much their personality.

When you play, the distinct personality I see is someone so zoned in. Does it feel that way to you?

Yeah, sometimes. We just played with the guy from the Roots, Captain Kirk [Douglas], the guitarist. We were playing a Neil Young song, “Down By the River,” and then he’s just like, “Okay, now at the end we’ll go on to ‘Hey Joe’,” as if we know how to play any song—which we don’t. I’m just like, “You just assumed that since you’re a guitar player and you know how to play ‘Hey Joe’ that everybody knows it. But we don’t. I know how to play covers on drums, but guitar, I never played it at a time where I was in a cover band or thought about learning songs or anything. So the guitarist in the opening band knew how to play “Hey Joe” and I had him show me how to play it.

It was cool. I didn’t know how to play it before then, never thought about playing it, but I learned it.

I love that sentiment. You developed your guitar skill by writing your own songs, by playing your own songs, so learning other songs wasn’t at your origin as a guitarist.

I remember once I was showing Kim Deal a Dino song she was singing, and I realized I didn’t know how. I couldn’t do barre chords when I started because I felt it was too hard on my fingers. I couldn’t press all the strings down at once or anything. It was too difficult. But if you’re writing your own songs, you can do stuff like that.

Yeah, absolutely. You can pick and choose. You’ve gotten to take that approach with the people you work with as well. For example, you’ve worked with so many comedians, like in your own music videos or appearing on Portlandia. How did you get into that community?

A long time ago, the first time we were on the David Letterman show, the girl who booked it went out with Tim Meadows from Saturday Night Live. He was a fan, and I met him and became friends with him. Then I would go to SNL quite a bit. I had sat in with the band once, Tim Meadows got me to do that, and it was the day that they did the “More Cowbell” sketch. I played with Fred [Armisen] on his last show he ever did. He invited me. I played on some skit the last show. Being in a skit, it’s just high stress. They’re all going crazy because it’s live and it’s just madness.

The old cliché is always that comedians want to be rock stars and rock stars want to be comedians.

Everybody likes comedy, I guess. It’s always fun to be on things and just get to see how they work. I always liked All My Children, the soap opera, and somehow I convinced Ben Stiller to ask his mom, who was on the show at the time, to bring me on the set, and I got to go check out All My Children one day. That was pretty big for me.

Are you and Ben Stiller pals?

No, but he wanted me to do something for Reality Bites. I was like, “Oh yeah, I’ll give you the song. You make your mom bring me to set.” Something like that. It was awesome.

Are you open to giving your songs to other projects? Are you picky about who to license it to?

I’m not that picky yet, I guess. These days it seems like most things are okay. In the ‘90s I saw people being in GAP ads and I didn’t want to do it. I think they wanted me to do it. And then I saw Neil Young did it and I was really confused. Why would Neil Young be in a GAP ad? The GAP just seemed so lame to me.

When you’re working on new material, do you listen to much music?

Yeah, but not like when I was a kid. I’d listen to records all the time. Something about streaming is just not fun anymore. If you have every song in the world on your phone, it makes me not want to listen to anything because it’s just too much. It always sounds so bad. I know Neil Young talks about that. Like 5% of the sound is coming out of the phone. I don’t think you can really get as into music these days through streaming and there’s just nothing there to latch onto. Your body doesn’t feel it. It’s just weird.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Lior Phillips.

Being an editor makes you a better writer, and vice versa. If you write a fair bit, you’ll start to see the edits that good editors often make to your work. “I’m using too many words here. It’s getting too flowery.” I can see the cuts that an editor would make and I internalize those.’

At the same time, as a writer, I know how sensitive I am about my work. I’m not precious, I don’t mind cuts, I don’t think every word I write is poetry, but still, I’m very sensitive to the core question: “Does the person think I’ve done a good job?”

And so as an editor, I try to be extra sensitive to my writers. I think writing, for me, is usually about expressing a strong point of view. A lot of my writing is very directly political, and as an editor, I’m usually trying to tease out what the writer really thinks. I’m trying to get to the essential core of what they’re trying to say. I really regard it as a dialogue between me and the writer. When I first receive a draft, I think of that as the beginning of a conversation. As a writer, it can be quite hard to know what your core point is. A good editor can help with that.

You mentioned a great deal of your writing is political. You’ve become known for these deep political pieces that get to the heart of a current event, such as the fall of Roe v. Wade last summer. A lot of people become overwhelmed by these events but they seem to motivate you. How do you get started and resist that overwhelm?

It really depends. When I was younger, I wrote a lot of very polemical pieces, like “You all think that liberal feminism is good, but actually, I’m here to tell you that class matters!” That’s the enormous confidence of youth, which is not a bad thing. It just is.

Now I’m more likely to write out of curiosity. I’m trying to figure something out instead of writing out of sheer confidence that I uniquely know what the answer is. For example, in the next abortion strategy piece, I have long had a critique of the mainstream reproductive rights movement for being too narrowly focused on electoral work and lobbying.

I felt confident in having identified some of the things that were not working, but I wanted to understand what the actual answers were to that—which is very complicated. After that, I called the smartest people I could think of, people who are immersed in the movement, who have enormous amount of experience, and asked them what they were doing, what they thought was coming next, what they would encourage other people to do. From there, I constructed a political argument about the shape of the movement that we could offer as a framework to our readers, “Here’s how to think about what’s going on, as well as what’s useful and what isn’t right now.”

I also hoped that would translate into information that’s accessible for people who are concerned about the problem and come in the door of the movement and think about what to do. Because I knew that if I didn’t feel like the answers were obvious, other people probably didn’t either. I think that work was meant to clarify things, almost for myself, and then to bridge into that thinking for our readers.

In addition to writing and editing, you also teach at NYU. How does teaching inform your writing and editing work?

I love working with students. I’m a big fan of them. I’m often struck by how open and thoughtful they are to questions that—on adult media internet—are addressed totally aggressively. I really respect them for that. I also learn a lot about how they’re consuming media, which affects how I put out media. It all relates in this really compelling way.

Obviously NYC is incredibly expensive and independent media isn’t the most lucrative path. How do you balance these many different roles?

I don’t know, poorly. I like the joke that was circling around online for a while: “Break free from your tyrannical boss and work independently, so you can be your own tyrannical boss!”

I find it challenging to wake up and sort through which of 97 priorities I should be focusing on first. I have a lot of deranged looking ways for dealing with that. I literally have an Airtable that I use for my personal life. I mean, it’s ridiculous. I have every task from every different type of work I do in the Airtable, tagged in different ways, with what date I’m going to do it, and what project it’s for. Of course, I fall off of that list all the time, but it gives me a nice illusion of control. I have so much respect for everybody trying to make it work. It’s just hard. I’m not romantic about it.

Speaking of it being hard, how do you avoid burnout and stay motivated to continue creating, especially when your work is about the highs and lows of political movements?

Often when I’m feeling the worst is when I am in some sort of work hole, in isolation. I’ll be sitting in my apartment, or a little space at NYU, just trying to grind work out. That feels terrible. I personally am very motivated and restored by dialogue and spending time with actual human beings. Lux does not have an office right now, so we do a lot of communicating on Slack, which is great. But I find if I’m sitting around talking in person with a co-editor, or talking with a writer, we’ll come up with new and interesting ideas. We’ll solve problems. If I’m feeling unmotivated about the work, I try to call someone and speak.

When I was younger, if I felt behind in my work, I would deny myself leaving the house at the end of the day, and feel like I had to just keep working. What I’ve learned is that you should always, always leave the house. Go talk to people. It loosens everything up. It often makes it easier to work, it makes it easier to treat the work as experimental instead of needing to get it right, which closes down creative thought.

Also, frankly, you just need to take breaks. There have been times where I’ve thought, “If I don’t take a break, my head is going to explode.” I’ve found, if you take a vacation, it doesn’t need to be a fancy vacation, but if I can authentically step away from your work for a few days, I will come back to it much, much better.

As you mentioned, much of your writing and editing at Lux is political. What are the rewards of this work for you?

The reward is definitely when the work is meaningful to our readers, or they tell us they can use it in some way. Sometimes it can be overwhelming to think about what each of us is doing politically. It’s like, “Everything’s wrong. What can I do? I should be involved in this, I should be involved in that.” I really try to think in terms of the magazine making a contribution. One magazine is not going to solve our political apocalypse, but one magazine can be a great source of strength, information, and conversation for a political community. For example, we had an article about unionizing abortion clinics, and then a bunch of clinic organizers had a Zoom call and used the article to talk about the work that they were doing and how it fits into this larger context.

I think because we are a magazine that is obviously interested in those politics and principles, we’re able to tackle hard questions in good faith, with a lot of credibility, with the full participation of people we’re writing about. People who work on those questions are open to being profiled by us, because they know we’re going to take them seriously. We’re able to grapple with those knotty questions that might not be engaged with respect or good faith elsewhere. That’s a huge reward.

How have you managed a creative path outside of the established system, which seems most visible in a decision to launch Lux?

One advantage I’ve had is that I edited magazines in places where there were a lot of experienced people for many years before I did something independent. At Dissent, I was trained in a certain sort of intellectual work. I was expected to come to an editorial meeting ready to talk about all the topics on the table, like labor organizing in Chicago or the war in Syria. You had to be ready for all of it. That was extremely good training for magazine editing, where you have to work hard to be able to respond intelligently to a writer in any area.

At The Nation, I was trained more in hard journalism, such as what it takes for a story to be properly sourced and fact-checked, for example. So when I started Lux, there were certain fundamentals that I knew how to do. I also knew a lot of writers at that point. It’s sort of about putting together the puzzle pieces.</i>

It’s also important to say that I accepted that I was going to make way less money than I had made in a normal job where I had benefits. One of the reasons I was able to give that up was the savings from those salaried jobs. Also, I don’t have kids. We absolutely live in a society where if you’re responsible for children, the pressure to make money is enormous. There is basically no affordable daycare in New York City. Rent is incredibly high. I was lucky enough to feel like I was gambling a little with my life, but not with anyone else’s. At the time, it felt like it was a gamble I could take. I don’t pretend that it’s easy or sensible, and again, I don’t romanticize it.

Even though it’s so hard to live in NYC, do you feel the city inspires your creative process?

I’m a big New York City loyalist. I feel like to be a New York City loyalist, you just have to learn how to get your ass kicked on a regular basis and bounce back. You also have to be part of the fight to make it better. I think that’s what makes me feel like it’s a place where I can just keep fighting, but without the fight, it feels impossible.

Can you walk me through a typical day, if there is such thing as that for you?

Every morning, I get up and listen to the Financial Times podcast, and then maybe other newsy things. I really, really like that podcast, because it gives you the news in the least emotional way possible, which is pretty much what I can deal with at eight in the morning.

I check my email, I check Slack. It depends on the day, but my biggest goal is not to be a roadblock for the other editors. Sometimes we’ll have an editorial meeting, where we all come together, we consider pitches, we talk about drafts or what we need to commission. We talk about upcoming events. If something is happening in the news, we talk about what our role is in responding to that, if anything.

There are days also where substantial amount of it might be some of the work I do with AJ+. And then often, in the evening, I will try to see friends, or meet a writer, or another editor. My social life and my work life are for better or worse, mostly integrated, and so I think that’s actually one of the great joys of my work is that I get to be around people who I want to be talking with all the time.

What piece of creative advice do you wish you’d had at the beginning of your career?

I think to treat everything as quite experimental. To go into each endeavor trying to learn something, instead of trying to get it right. I think by learning, you ultimately have the best shot of getting it right, but it’s important to take that pressure off that you always have to know the answer. That commitment to experimentation is tremendously helpful to the creative process.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Colleen Hamilton.

I come from a puppetry background primarily. Puppetry by way of being a failed playwright but trying really, really hard to be a playwright, and my brain not being able to do it. So I started making masks about a year ago and I got really into it. I’ve been making a video series featuring these masked spirits: “lesser gods,” creatures who are delivering these transmissions to people. And they’re sort of these bewildered, largely powerless deities in animal form, trying to understand what life is all about. In conjunction with that, I’m making a series of 12 books—one every month—and they’re called Blessings from the Ancient Forest. There’s a book of blessings for every month that these spirits are themselves writing. I’m not involved at all. They’re doing everything.

The spirits are?

Yeah, they’re doing it.

Okay. There’s a lot more I want to ask you about this project, but before I do, you mentioned being a failed playwright. Can you elaborate?

Of course. I think my journey as an artist has had a lot to do with trying very hard to do things that weren’t natural to me and seeing it as a massive failure that I couldn’t do it and then looking for something else. So I went through classical guitar to screenwriting, to playwriting, to puppetry, and then over time making peace with the things that my brain can’t do, which includes things like writing plots, raising the stakes, creating conflict, all of these things that are sort of foundational to dramatic writing. For a very long time, I experienced it as a massive failure that I just couldn’t get it together to make it happen.

How did puppetry end up emerging out of that? Had you always done visual arts or sculpture?

I hadn’t. I did the Science Olympiad in high school–it’s a science competition that has a bunch of different events. When I was trying to be a writer, I saw a St. Ann’s Warehouse Puppet Lab performance, which is a puppetry residency here in Brooklyn. I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is Science Olympiad theater.” All of these little mechanical inventions, and depending on the kind of puppeteer you are, there’s a spectrum of the degree to which you’re a mechanical inventor. It turned out that what I didn’t like about theater was that so often it’s an unnecessarily staged sitcom or TV show where it’s like, “Why did you bring me out of my house to watch people talk?” Puppetry is such a collaboration between the performers and the audience, where the audience is the reason that thing is alive. I saw that performance, I was really excited about it. I ended up doing the Puppet Lab twice.

Can you talk about how you view failure now, based on the journey it took you to get here?

I don’t know if this is true for most people, but failure has been so important to me. I think because I wasn’t trained in any particular craft. If you’re the kind of artist who really is impressive in a craft, you always have that to come back to even when the subject matter that you’re working with isn’t exciting for you. I kept coming up against this barrier of, “Well, my craftsmanship, whether as a writer or as a sculptor, or illustrator, it’s not going to impress anybody.” That was very painful for me for a very long time. I very much wanted to be impressive to people, and it took me a long time to just sort of think through, “Well, if that’s not going to happen, can I enjoy that?” Or even celebrate that my art has more to do with being just like everybody else who is struggling and not perceiving themselves as special or excellent or fascinating or any of the other things that I used to think were the mainstays of being an artist.

What I make now is foundationally about not succeeding at being impressive. For me, it’s interesting to think about the ways that I’m just like everybody else–that the artist isn’t a person who stands apart or has a relationship with success, but is in the muck of feeling like a failure, just like most people are in the muck of feeling like a failure.

It seems also part of what you’re saying about the value of failure is the way it forces you to take stock of your own limitations, but also the tools at your disposal. And there’s a humility in that.

It’s extremely, extremely reluctant. I would’ve loved to have just exploded at 22, made it. I was not shooting for humility. But one thing that I comfort myself with is that when I was younger, I really wanted to have a style–to be recognizable as yourself and not derivative or copying. But it really helped me just start thinking of that as having a lot to do with what you can’t do.

There are a lot of artists who make their style out of blind spots or a lack of skill or just sort of accepting what your brain likes to do and does naturally, and what you feel excited about.

You’re reminding me of how the limitations of different media are often the thing that people end up having nostalgia and love for. Like the sound of a cassette tape, for example. The things that are the limitation of the format can end up being the things that people enjoy the most about it.

I love the comparison with a tape because I think for so many of us, it just feels like we have to be excellent everywhere in every way. To me, with this analogy, it feels similar to digital overwhelm, where I still feel so lost all the time because everything is available. I really feel for younger folks starting out because so much is available, that it’s just so hard to have any kind of container for experimenting with who you are. The container is just so big that you’re flopping around. Something like the quality of a tape, you could say it’s standing in the way of the music sounding perfect–a lot of us really like that quality of things being specific and bounded and flawed in some way.

I do want to talk about your current project and undertaking though, because I’m so curious to hear about some of the behind the scenes stuff. Okay, you’re doing this project, Transmissions From an Ancient Forest. In giving voice to these lesser gods, can you tell me a little bit about what you find compelling about writing from that voice and/or how you receive these transmissions from those gods? Depending on how you want to choose your own adventure with that response.

I sometimes want to really go all in on the lore, and say that I’m not involved, but then that just sort of makes me tired to be consistent with that.

Maybe both things can be true. It can both come from you and not from you.

Yes, I love that, because one thing I get excited about when I’m working solo is that I just don’t care about internal consistency. And that’s fine for me.

The way that I write for this project is that typically there’s something that’s really, really bothering me. Typically it’s something on the slightly existential side of the spectrum. I’m just extremely bothered about mortality. I can’t get over it. I don’t get a minute when I’m not bothered about it. So usually when I’m thinking about something like that, I’m just writing down what I’m upset about. In that moment I look for a thread of either hope or resolution–something that feels true that isn’t as dark as the dark thought. There’s a James Wright poem that to me is such a template for my brain of a certain kind of poem.

Do you know what the line is off the top of your head?

I will misquote it. It’s something like, “And if I stepped out of my body, I would break into blossom.” It’s about an encounter with these horses at the side of the road. It’s very quotidian, and ends with this sense of, ‘Oh, we’ve just been in this very gentle, small moment, and that gentle, small moment is the essence of transcendence if you choose to take on that perspective.’ It’s not something that I do naturally. I struggle a lot with feeling hopeful. So for me, doing that work feels important because I really need it.

Can you share more about the emotional impact of making art?

For a very, very long time, making art was quite painful. My relationship to it was primarily that I felt like I had something that wanted to come out and I didn’t have a language for it. One thing that I followed is that I’ve always had a sense of flow in making things with my hands. I’ve always had that lose-track-of-time feeling. When I stopped trying so hard to be a writer and I mixed it with a process where I was hand-making, that loosened things up for me a little bit, where I wasn’t so consumed with what I was making and was just able to follow that tactile path. And now I feel like I found a balance that I really, really like.

So I make these paper mache masks, they’re really fun to make. They’re low stakes. The materials are super cheap, which helps. It doesn’t feel like a big deal to make one. And then I film and edit videos myself, which is also something I really like to do. It can feel like you’re going in without very much, and then you can shape it and it gives you something. And the writing that I’m doing has a place where not everything is riding on it. So for me, finding that balance of different practices– I’m not particularly skilled at any one of those crafts, but it’s really interesting to find those juxtapositions and intersections. And for some of us, that is so much of what the craft is. It’s like, “What if I put this next to this?” Maybe neither one of those things on their own really shines, but just the fact that they’re there together is something sparkly and fun.

Transmissions from an Ancient Forest feels like a world-building project to me. If you agree with that, can you comment on the value of building a world as an artist?

I love that question because I always wanted to have that as a component of my work, but it just never clicked. And I don’t know what it was with this project, because when I started making masks, it was for a different project. I had one mask in a solo puppetry show I was doing that I didn’t make very well at all because I didn’t know how to make masks. I started making them just as an experiment. And then I was really bothered that I had made all these masks and I didn’t know what they were. So I just spent a very long time just putting them on and being like, “What do I do? What is this? Why do I keep making rabbits?”

Very slowly, it felt like the masks were speaking to each other. It felt like, “Well, they’re coming from the same place.” And very, very slowly it started to feel true that this was a place. Then I was like, “Ah shit, if this is a place, then there’s going to be a map.” I was so excited about doing your standard Tolkien, or actually to be honest, Winnie the Pooh, map. Once I started drawing that, I took all the poems that I had written and anything that could have been a reference to a place, and made them places on the map. That was just so fun.

Like once you have a logical framework for how this world operates, it tells you what you need to do?

Yes, totally. I think getting to that logic is really tough, but once you have a little seed of it, it’s incredible how nice it is to be like, “Well, I’m not working in this world. I don’t have to worry so much about being successful or making sense or operating under all these rules that we operate under as people.” It’s like, “I’m just operating by Ancient Forest rules. There are only three of them, so this is easier.”

I’d like to switch gears and talk a little more like brass tacks. You’re publishing a book a month. Have you been doing that all year?

I just started. I’m doing it on Patreon. I think it might be a terrible idea. The first month was August. I like to trick myself into doing something that turns out to be a large scale project by actually doing a bunch of small projects. But it appears to be a lot of work.

Can you tell me about some of the practical challenges of the way you have set about making this project?

I’m terrible at money making schemes. I was like, “Starting a Patreon seems like a really nice way to have some money coming into the practice.” Because I don’t make any money off of my work. I just work jobs and then put that money into the work. So I am writing and illustrating, they’re basically children’s books for adults–like illustrated books. I want it at the end of the year to be kind of an almanac of blessings. So they’re connected to the seasons. I’ve done some of my own illustration work before, and I’ve worked a little bit in design where you lay out the book. But laying out the books so that they print correctly and also getting my printer to behave, and then I’ve been hand sewing the bindings, and watching a lot of X-Files and Matlock.

Do you have helpers?

I’m doing everything. I think as artists, one of the lessons is that if you actually asked for the amount of money that the work actually costs, people would laugh because to them it would be so incredibly expensive, but it’s actually how long it takes to do things.

I’m surprised to hear you say that you make money elsewhere, because looking at your volume of work, I just was like, “I think this is probably her main job.” Do you have another money job?

Oh my gosh. Okay, that’s something I’ve been thinking about as something that bums me out. I think so many of us have accidentally created this illusion of thriving as artists. It’s almost a function of just posting work. If you have time to make work, that means that you’re making work as your job. I don’t like that I’ve created the illusion that I figured out how to make money doing this because I haven’t at all.

Do you have a separate full-time job?

So right now, I got a grant that is providing most of my income for a couple of months. But I nanny part-time. For the past couple years [I] have been a teaching artist in public schools. I’ve also worked at a lamp factory. I’ve worked at a carousel. Gosh, what else have I done?

Wait, at a carousel?

It is a true sensory nightmare.

Do you have any tips for managing work and life? How do you set boundaries?

I think it’s all pretty horrible, to be honest. I just have not made peace with the fact of capitalism at all. I can’t keep a job to save my life. I’m really bad. I’m always looking for jobs. I’m always failing at interviews. I’m just constantly trying to figure out what I’m supposed to be doing with myself. Within the ancient forest that I’ve created, that work I can do. But in terms of work that is valued financially by people, I can’t figure that out at all. I think if you have access to a skill that people agree is valuable, go for it.

I think when you’re an artist, it’s really easy for real life to be your enemy. To feel like, “Oh gosh, if only I could get rid of that real life nonsense and just focus on my art.” That might be true, but it’s really painful. I kind of wish every artist who shared their work was also sharing how much they hate working at the carousel.

Is there anything else you’d like to add that has been an important lesson for you?

I don’t have a soundbite, but I feel like there’s something. If making your art feels miserable, it’s all right. It’s not a sign of anything. You know what I mean? So many of these conversations are like, “Making my art is healing to me.” And I get so nervous about that because while true in part, it’s also labor. It’s labor that we’re all squeezing into our lives that sort of haunts us all the time. Maybe for some people the making of it is a little breezier. But there are so many pain points and it is such hard work and it typically feels like you’re not giving it enough and that you have to keep feeding some sort of machine that is either external or internal. And I don’t know what to do about that, but I think probably people are more miserable than they seem.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Rene Kladzyk.

The post The Importance of Independent Media and Critical Media Literacy Education in a Democratic Society appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

Countries must persuade the Burmese military to follow through on the five-point plan, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said as he met with his counterparts from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and other countries in Jakarta on Friday.

“In Myanmar, we must press the military regime to stop the violence, to implement ASEAN’s five-point consensus, to support a return to democratic governance,” Blinken said in a speech during a meeting with ASEAN ministers. 

The bloc, of which Myanmar is a member, has sought to mediate a resolution to the situation in that country, where the military toppled an elected government in February 2021 and threw civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi in prison. Nearly 3,800 people have been killed in post-coup violence, mostly by junta security forces.  

On Thursday, ASEAN issued a joint statement of its foreign ministers, but that was delayed by a day following a meeting of the region’s top diplomats Tuesday and Wednesday. Reports said the delay arose because they could not agree on what their joint statement would say about Myanmar.

The statement reflected the dissonance. 

Thailand had last month held another meeting with Myanmar’s junta-appointed foreign minister, representatives of ASEAN members Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and the Philippines, and India and China. The Burmese and Thai militaries are said to be close, and the outgoing Thai PM is a former army chief.

ASEAN 2023 chair Indonesia did not take kindly to that meeting, which it skipped along with Singapore and Malaysia.

And yet, the joint statement acknowledged that meeting, noting that “a number of ASEAN member states” viewed it “as a positive development.”

The statement went on to note, however, that efforts to solve the Myanmar crisis must support the five-point consensus and efforts by ASEAN chair Indonesia.

Thai Foreign Minister Don Pramudwinai defended the meeting, saying it was in line with an earlier ASEAN document that called for exploring other approaches for resolving the crisis.

In another shocker for the rest of ASEAN, and indeed, everyone else, the Thai foreign minister announced on Wednesday that he had met secretly over the weekend with Myanmar’s imprisoned civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi. The Thai foreign ministry said that she and the junta had approved the meeting with Don.

And not everyone is on board with the five-point consensus either, although they present a unified front, reports say.

The previous foreign minister of Malaysia, Saifuddin Abdullah, was an exception. He had said last July that it was time to junk the peace plan and devise a new one on a deadline that included enforcement mechanisms. 

ASEAN operates by consensus, which means any action it takes has to be approved by every member state. Divisions within the bloc have meant that not every member has approved of tougher action against Myanmar.

Therefore, other than shutting out the Burmese junta from all high-level ASEAN meetings for reneging on the consensus, little else has happened since February 2021.

Hunter Marston, a Southeast Asia researcher at the Australian National University, said the ASEAN top diplomats’ joint statement was largely in line with his expectations.

He would have liked to see “ASEAN invite the NUG as a way of imposing costs on the junta, but that won’t receive consensus,” Marston told BenarNews, referring to the National Unity Government, which is the shadow civilian administration.

He would have also liked to see “see a clearer acknowledgement of ASEAN’s frustration with the military junta.”

And the statement “still left room for Thailand’s rogue … diplomacy,” Marston said. 

Another analyst, Muhammad Waffaa Kharisma, from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta, said he had expected a little better from the joint statement.

“[N]ow I only hope that ASEAN does not accept back the junta without accountability,” he told BenarNews.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Tria Dianti for BenarNews.

The post The Global Importance of Sino-American Relations appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Melvin Goodman.

I had a newfound sense of freedom after a lot of trying periods. Being on unemployment through COVID finally gave me the chance to be an artist. I really gained a sense of hope. And I was reading a lot about the Madonna Whore Complex and the history of the veil and how veils were used with the Romans to ward off evil spirits. I just really honed in on what the record meant to me. I essentially found myself through a series of transitions. And so that’s why all the hands are pointed up on the album cover. They symbolize reaching up through different phases, seeking a higher self, freedom.

When you say that you finally had a chance to be an artist during COVID and unemployment, do you mean that you finally had the funding necessary to be an artist? That you didn’t have to work?

Yeah, definitely. It was the most money I’ve ever made, and I got to just play music every day and do what I wanted to do. The money also funded my record.

What was your process for writing these songs?

It varies, certainly, but a big rush of them were written through March to July of 2020. A few of them I’d written in 2019, and “Crooked” was one of the first songs I ever wrote—when I was 20—and that was in one sitting. So it varies. Some of them really came out of nowhere. I was trying to play music every day, and then there would be this huge rush and something would just pour out of me. For songs like “444,” I had the chorus written for a year and a half before I finished the verses. And not even the chorus melody, just the chorus structure. And I was like, “This is something, this grooves.” And I kept at it and kept at it. And when it was right, it came to me.

What fosters your creativity and what hinders it?

What fosters it is love and staying connected with my sense of self. I try to be really intentional about what I listen to and who I surround myself with.

Do you mean musically or who you listen to in conversation?

I guess both because it’s who I surround myself with, what people. It matters what they say and how they behave, and music as well. I try to be really intentional about that, so that I always know what my influences are. I know what I like. And what hinders my creativity is my insecurities and fear. I think that’s what hinders anyone in their craft—and those are demons that are always going to be there.

When you mentioned feeling connected to yourself, I thought of how you’ve toured so much within the past year. How do you make space to connect with yourself when you’re so busy?

Well, being on the road is strange and a huge time warp because you’re going somewhere every day, but there’s a lot of time sitting around. I spend a lot of time just staring out the window and thinking, and I have rituals for the shows. After we do load-in and sound check, I always go on a walk by myself and try to digest the city however I can. And I always listen to my recording from the previous night’s set the very next morning. I take notes while I listen, and that prompts me to journal even more. I think that’s pretty much how I stay connected to myself. I really am bad about getting back to people. It’s pretty much just me and my band and mostly me just staring out a window, thinking about everything. So I do feel like I find myself and change a lot when I’m on the road.

I know that you’ve done some solo tours and you’ve also toured with your band. What are some of the major differences between the two?

Sound check and load in are way easier when it’s just me. I pull in, set up, do the guitar, do the mic, and that’s it. There’s no one else to worry about. And there’s also a deeper sense of freedom in this way, because if I go off the rail or try something new, it’s not going to mess anyone up. So that’s really exciting. And I like that my vocals can really be upfront and highlighted during solo shows. With the band, you spend hundreds of hours with these people. I tour with a band of all boys, and that can be different… and a lot. And boys have cooties, so I don’t know. It can also be a really fun being on stage with the band, feeling really tight together. It’s an incredible feeling to play every night together and then really lock in.

What crowds do you prefer to play for and why?

I like playing to bigger, younger crowds because kids are the future, but I also have a deep appreciation for playing smaller towns because you can see and tell from their response how much it means to them that you came through. I think of cities like Fargo or Tallahassee where they’re maybe not as well attended, but I still played a great show. And those are the fans that will stick around for a lifetime, because a band from New York or from a different city came through and played their town.

I know that you’re also from a small town outside of Kansas City. Were there any bands that came through or any musicians who made a big impact on you in that way?

Certainly. I grew up in Independence, Missouri, outside of Kansas City, and I started going to live shows when I was 10. I was really obsessed with UnderOath, which is this scream-hardcore-adjacently-Christian band. My dad took me to see them with some of my church friends. And then one of my first best friends, Jude Cash, was the youngest of six and his siblings were all really involved in the music scene. They would have bands stay over at their house, Showbread and all of these hardcore Christian bands. And then when I was 15 or so, more of my friends started playing music in Kansas City. None particularly from Independence, but there are some bands in Kansas City that started to do cool things. And still it’s been cool to watch their journey, like Dream Girl and Shy Boys and Kevin Morby, who’s from Kansas City, but on the Kansas side.

It seems that no matter your tour schedule, you always make room for a stop in KC. What continues to call you back home?

I moved away from home six years ago, and during the first few years I felt really disconnected. One big reason being that my parents split up and my childhood home was sold. And I really feel like this record was in some ways a search for home and trying to find that for myself. Over the years, and I think since the pandemic, I spent more time going back to KC. I’ve found a deep appreciation and understanding about how my roots shaped me. And it’s been really exciting to go back and notice how the people and the city helps define me and my music. I’m in that mindset right now and its part of my writing process. And I love seeing my friends. They’re so supportive and were so supportive of my move.

That’s rare. A lot of times when someone decides to leave a smaller town for a big city, there’s a lot of resentment toward them.

There’s a mixed bag. There’s some haters for sure. Hater’s gonna hate.

** I know that when you’re in Kansas City, sometimes you’ll bring in family members or long-term friends on stage. I know you played with your long-term ex, and your brother who’s a magician, performed at your album release. Recently your dad came on stage to sing “No Roof, No Floor” with you. How did these collaboration with people from your past enrich your performances?**

It’s empowering and it also shows a deeper history of myself and my inspirations. Having a magician brother growing up really inspired me, and it’s a big part of me being an artist. And I grew up singing with my dad. He was supposed to do my album release, but I got scared because we had no time to rehearse. But we didn’t rehearse before the show in Kansas City, and he nailed it. But of course he did! I learned what I do from him. I love inviting friends on stage, and I love having my family play a role in it. And my cousin too, we talked about doing a collaboration together where he’ll do a score on the short I’m working on. It’s important for me to lift up the people who were there with me from the beginning.

That’s really sweet. What has being an artist taught you about yourself?

It’s taught me everything I know about myself, because I work through a lot of my own personal turmoil and dreams and frustrations through song. And it’s not even a coherent thing. Usually I get into a really meditative state and it comes through me, but it helps me puzzle together how I work and what I’m hoping for, what I’m lacking. I’ve also learned that I’m a really hard worker. I think in this business it’s 99% hard work and 1% genuine talent. I still get imposter syndrome and down on myself, but I am a lot more confident than I used to be. I’ve realized that, above all else, I am an artist. And beyond even just music, I’m a visual artist, a director, etc. It’s all helped with the overall vision.

You mentioned hard work. I know from being your friend that you don’t have financial support outside of yourself. And I know that you’re an absolute hustler. How do you manage to balance work with your creative side?

I started training at a very young age. I started cooking and doing my own laundry at six, five years old and chores, lots of chores. And then I worked with my grandpa for a while painting houses. And then I got my lifeguard job when I was 14. And then by the time I was 15, I bought my car. And then I got my license at 16, and then I got a second job. And then through high school I had two jobs and was involved in multiple extracurricular activities. Now looking back, I see that that was a form of escaping for me.

As I’ve gotten older, I realize I can be a bit of a workaholic and I need to identify that in myself when I’m trying to escape my reality. And because I love the feeling of hustling out and booking a tour and then being like, “Woo!” But I think my ability to balance has come more naturally with age. I don’t party, which gives me a lot of time. My days are usually spent emailing, booking, planning, and then at night I’ll have time for working on music. So I don’t really see too many people. I try to keep my social life really close and intimate.

Let’s talk about your not partying. How long have you been sober now?

Over a year and a half.

And how has that benefited your creative work? Your life in general?

It’s benefitted my life one hundred percent. I feel a lot more clarity. I’m working better. I have to remind myself that I am making my most genuine work. I think for a while when I was starting to write songs, I would rely on drinking to loosen up and to get the emotions flowing, or whatever excuse I made for myself. And I realized it might not feel like I’m cracking open this thing and forcing it to come out and just word vomiting anymore. Now it’s a slower process, something I have to work at. I’m not just ripping something open and forcing it to come out anymore. Because often I would drink a little bit and then just be like, “Oh, I wrote a song.” But now it’s more of a process.

The gesture you’re making is like a massage.

Right, right. Get to the sweet center without forcing it is how it feels. And I’d say with live performing, it was a bit of adjustment at first, and I was really anxious, especially after the shows when talking to people. But it means the world to me to be able to be present with the songs, be present with the crowd, and to not rely on drinking. I’m sleeping better. It’s a nice life.

I’m proud of you. What’s the most surprising thing you’ve realized along your creative path?

I don’t know how much of a surprise this fully is, but maybe I thought things would be different once I got my foot in the door a bit. I’m surprised by the workload at this point in my career as I’m building a team. And I’m also surprised that people like my music. Strangers and random people. That’s cool. That’s a shock.

Of course they do. It’s good.

Well, it’s just surprising. Random people, that’s been cool.

I know that you post a lot on Instagram and that you have a Patreon. How does self-promotion factor into your career as an artist?

It’s a lot of it, and it does help because people see that I’m staying busy. I sell a lot of tickets through promoting shows on Instagram. Sometimes I wish we were living in the pre-digital age because it is a lot of work, and I hate being on social media constantly, but it gets the job done. People see that I’m busy, and when I run into people, they know I’ve been playing shows every day.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

My Gut, 2023. Acrylic, ink, marker, wax crayon, paracord, thread, on canvas. 55 x 66 in. Courtesy the artist and Rachel Uffner Gallery. Photo by Brad Trone.

You’re a painter, you’re a writer, performance artist, collaborator, facilitator, and designer. How do you balance the different facets of your practice?

Something I’ve been learning to do over the last couple of years is to embrace this. I don’t know that I have balance, but more like, I’m going with what I’m drawn to and trusting that it all makes sense for me and my work. There are some times when I look back and think, Wow, I focused a lot of time on this one particular project that I didn’t need to, and maybe I could have spent that energy elsewhere. But I also have this idea that even the “failure things,” or the “distraction things” that I do feed into the other projects.

I feel like when you’re in school or early in your career as an artist, there’s an emphasis on, “Pick one thing, one medium, and stick to it.” But like you’re saying, it all influences each other, bounces around in your head, and leads down a different road. It’s nice to hear you’re not afraid of that.

I will say, painting has been a thread throughout everything. There have been years where when I was doing more touring with [Norwegian singer-songwriter and collaborator] Jenny Hval in the US and Europe, and then I would come home and organize. I’d organize events, experimental comedy nights, all kinds of stuff like that. I wasn’t doing as much painting, but it’s always this thing that I return to and has always been there.

Video still, Jenny Hval ‘Year of Love.’ Directed by Annie Bielski, Jenny Berger Myhre, and Jenny Hval. 2022.

Your paintings are consumed with the body. They’re very physical. What about the body inspires you, and what impels you to work in this intuitive fashion?

When I was an undergrad, one of my instructors challenged me to make something at least as big as I was. That was so exciting. I realized my sense of scale, in making, is always related to my body. My physicality, how I relate to size, how I can move this work in my studio, and the viscosity of the materials I’m using. I do feel the most in myself when I’m in my painting studio and really in the flow.

The process of stretching canvas: it’s like skin, it’s clothes. I’ve been working in a scale that’s roughly my height and arm span for a couple of years, and sometimes in smaller scales that are in relation to that. Even if the work doesn’t feel overtly bodily, I do always think of it in relation to my physicality.

Working intuitively means I really love beginning a painting. I’ve heard a lot of people say, “I feel so terrified in front of a canvas, a blank canvas,” but I’m so excited. I start something, and then the terror works its way in later. I like setting myself up for the challenge.

I work intuitively with color, too. I’ve worked for artists where they’ve had Excel spreadsheets of what colors the studio is low on, and what I need to order or go out and buy. I’m not at that production level myself, but I can’t imagine planning to that extent. Shopping and going out to get materials—whether it’s a thrift store or the art supply store–is part of the process, and can lead to some surprises. I wrote in my poem Detours, The Building, about this: “I went to Niagara Falls, because I took a wrong turn for JoAnn Fabrics. I thought I must be close to Niagara Falls and so I went. My paintings will be better having just looked at The Falls.” Being out in the world is how I prepare for solitary studio time in a practical but experiential way.

I also mention choosing colors intuitively because sometimes I get home, look at what I bought, and I’m like, “Oh, yeah, I always pick that one.” When I’m at the store, it feels different, but then I get back and see I have three others of the same color at home, so maybe I could use an Excel sheet…

I feel the same with clothing, though. [laughs]

You do?

Yeah, I’ll buy something, get home, look in my closet, and then I’m like, “Oh, now I have another red plaid shirt…”

[laughs] Totally. Yes, totally. We like what we like.

BASKET, 2023. Acrylic, oil stick, oil pastel, wax crayon, on canvas. 55 x 66 in. Courtesy the artist and Rachel Uffner Gallery. Photo by Brad Trone.

Kissing Cousins Caving, 2023. Acrylic, ink, wax crayon,marker on canvas. 55 x 66 in. Courtesy the artist and Rachel Uffner Gallery. Photo by Brad Trone.

Do you feel like painting initiates a trance state for you, because it is so intuitive? Like you’re just grabbing what’s near you and going with the flow?

It really can be. Something I’ve been working on for a long time is setting boundaries with my time. I can really get in my own way and interrupt my flow. But when I am in a really good place in the studio, that’s the best feeling.

What are some of your routines and the restrictions you place on your time to stay focused in the studio?

My cousin, Zia Anger, is a brilliant filmmaker, and she came up with the idea of “Trash Day” or “Garbage Day.” It’s basically: all the stuff you don’t want to do in your week, like go to the post office or schedule a doctor’s appointment, she chooses one day a week to do it all so it doesn’t interrupt her other creative times. For example, when you’re at the dentist, and they’re like, “How about this random date in six months for a follow-up?” Usually, you’re like, “Sure, whatever,” but she’s always like, “Is it on that day?”

“Make it a Wednesday.”

Exactly. Of course, that doesn’t always work. But when it comes to restrictions, little routines…I feel like I’m still learning that about myself. My studio is steps from my house, so it’s tempting to multitask, throw in a load of laundry or something, but I simply can’t. I have to really focus.

Yeah, what I hear from folks is: when it comes to staying productive as an artist, and establishing routines, it’s clear that you just have to learn about yourself and what works for you.

You mentioned Zia, and I want to talk about Jenny Hval and your collaborations with both of them. What is that working relationship like?

It’s great. It feels like it will be a forever relationship, even if we are no longer appearing in each other’s projects. There’s such a deep mutual admiration and trust there for all of us. It’s a special artistic relationship.

What’s been inspiring about that collaboration that maybe you’ve brought back into your own practice or your own way of working?

​​I think both Zia and Jenny’s work, I am so in awe of their singular visions. I feel like the more themselves they are, the more I feel emboldened to be myself. The more vulnerable, playful, and boundary-pushing they are, the more I’m inspired.

Install view, Agita, Rachel Uffner Gallery, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Rachel Uffner Gallery. Photo by JSP Art Photography.

I think that shows in your current exhibition Agita at Rachel Uffner Gallery, where it feels like everything is thrown to the forefront. Where it’s physical, and it’s intuitive, but it’s completely unselfconscious.

Thank you.

You also put together a book of poetry alongside works in the show. I’m curious to hear how you see your writings and your paintings explore vulnerability in different ways.

Agita is a word that means heartburn, anxiety–in my family, it’s used interchangeably. It’s an internal something that is threatening to come out in some way. There’s something to that with my writing too. Like there’s an internal monologue made public, or a performance of self in relation to others.

And with my painting, with this body of work, too, the threat of rupture or burst is apparent. In some of it, I think I just used Agita as a location, a scale. Not all of the work has Agita, anxiety or heartburn, but some of it feels like the antidote. Like the Alka-Seltzer I would take in response.

In terms of how my writing and painting relate, another thing that I find parallel is covering and uncovering. Flirting with being bold and beautiful, or flirting with an overshare and walking something back. There’s a push and pull between revealing and concealing that I find apparent in both my writings and my paintings.

What do you do when you’re creatively stuck?

When I’m stuck, I try to switch it up, whether by changing the materials I use or changing my environment. When I was struggling with a painting, someone once gave me the gift of saying, “Take it outside. See what the sun thinks.” I actually named a painting after that phrase because I do feel like a change of environment or just “getting the sun on something,” in a poetic way, can switch things around.

I also hide works from myself. Turn things to the wall, like a little cemetery in the corner of my studio, and then pull them out again. Sometimes, I don’t touch them until a couple of years later.

It can also be as simple as allowing myself to work on a home project instead. I used to feel guilty making pillows, or sewing when I should be in the studio. Now it’s more like, “What if making the pillows is working towards something else?” The work always happens. It’s a way to work with materials while taking the pressure off. I used to resist that, but now I see it as a way to work through ideas.

What are other examples of helpful advice you’ve received from an artist or creative mentor?

Protect my time. I have heard that explicitly and also observed it in how other people move through the world. Another, take my ideas seriously. Honor my ideas–even the funny ones–and give them space.

Lipsticked, 2023. Acrylic, ink, wax crayon,marker on canvas. 24 x 28 in. Courtesy the artist and Rachel Uffner Gallery. Photo by Brad Trone.

Pump, 2023. Acrylic, ink, marker, wax crayon, silk, thread, on canvas. 14 x 18.5 in. Courtesy the artist and Rachel Uffner Gallery. Photo by Brad Trone.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Robert Alan Grand.

I guess it’s always been on my mind to some extent when I make work. Not explicitly, but when I made the Déviation record [in 2012], I was thinking a lot about when Baron Haussmann was commissioned to reshape Paris [after the French Revolution]. He was the architect who introduced the grand boulevards, and part of the reason for that happening was the streets used to be smaller and were easier to barricade. [They were] replaced with huge streets which were more difficult to barricade and military force could be brought in quicker. If you go on a big boulevard, it’s kind of made to make you feel small. You’re a fly on a billiard table. Whenever I visit a place, I always think, how is the architecture used here? And what it’s implicitly telling me how to act and behave.

In a more recent iteration, I’ve been making these performances, like The Riddle of the Imp on the Mezzanine [2019]. I was thinking about the symbol of the Lincoln imp. It was very omnipresent when I grew up [in the UK county of Lincolnshire]. It’s on the Lincoln Cathedral, you’d see it on South Lincolnshire county council signs, you’d see it on football teams. I always found it quite funny that the de facto symbol of Lincolnshire was this devil because, as a side note, where I grew up also had the biggest Leave vote in the [2016 UK European membership] referendum. That wasn’t a direct commentary but I thought it was a funny coincidence.

I was thinking a lot about the architecture of a church. It’s kind of like a proto-mall (which, in turn, is like a proto-website or media platform) to attract people and show off its power. There are parts of the church that have a social function of protecting the poor, giving sanctuary, but then also being very oppressive and scapegoating. My parents were never really religious when I grew up. I wasn’t baptized. I always had this kind of outside fascination with these structures, how you interact with them, and what their function is. I went on a tour of the Lincoln Cathedral and they showed us the Little Hugh monument, a child who’d been killed and it had been blamed on the Jewish community—that was in the 12th century, so literally coming out of blood libel hysteria [an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory]. I thought it was interesting how I didn’t know anything about this but I knew about this pretend demon, and I thought that spoke for itself in a weird way.

I was reading Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and I was really interested in the introduction where they were talking about how Victor Hugo was a royalist, he was anti-the French Revolution, and he was very sad about how Notre-Dame was in disrepair and was being used as horse stables. There were discussions at the time to maybe tear it down. So he created the Quasimodo monster to basically do this Edward Bernays style PR spin and ironically save the cathedral.

I was very interested in this methodology of creating a monster to preserve a structure. That was something that really resonated with me and made me think a lot, and then I thought about how that plays out across society and culture in general. That’s why I started the book with that analogy of a gargoyle—it has this dual function to ward off evil spirits but also scare people in or out of a church. In the meantime, there have been horrific abuses of power in the name of the church. It’s almost like the lightning rod goes onto this small singular personification of what we frame “evil.” So I was very interested in using that analogy or metaphor to explore how that keeps repeating itself in the book but also in how we experience the world.

I called it Notes On Evil because I wanted to keep it slightly performative because I come out of performance, so it’s like a script. But also make it a bit playful because I didn’t want it to be straight-up pedagogical or propaganda. I wanted it to have this slightly poetic quality, where you’re not telling someone how to think but you are making them think.

Now that we exist in this largely digital architectural realm, a considerable chunk of day-to-day life is conducted via a screen: work meetings, socializing, organizing, sex, dating, entertainment. What does all this screen time, or the “logic of the screen” as you phrase it in the book, do to us?

I think a bit sometimes about the artist John Miller, who did this series of work in the late ’90s where he was mimicking and appropriating personal ad sections. He made work which looked like it could be a personal ad but it was a strange collage. When he talked about it, he was saying personal ads used to be for marginalized people who couldn’t meet anywhere else so it was this last resort. You would create this kind of profile of yourself, reduce yourself to certain words and an image of yourself, and paradoxically that model which belonged to more socially ostracized people has become the default way that we interact and present ourselves now.

I found that very fascinating but also quite worrying because whilst we come more together, actually everyone just becomes more and more ostracized from each other and yourself. You present how you want to be online and then you’re kind of alienated from yourself. I feel that’s not the sole reason but one reason why people tend to act out or want to have this strange desire to transgress again but in a very reactionary way. People’s anxieties are played out in a way that is so monetized. Everyone is so hyper-aware of how they are being used by a platform and what is happening, that there’s been this incredibly rapid speeding up of how we process information, which, of course, isn’t in itself bad.

There was this funny thing the other day where I was sick with a cold so I had a few days in bed, and I rewatched Mad Max: Fury Road from 2015. When I saw that at the cinema it was so fast I could barely parse it or comprehend it, it was just this relentless overload of image and sound. But then I watched it now and I was like, Oh, I get it. Because the time we live in is so sped up, you’ve kind of become very acclimatized to that. If you think about Ryan Trecartin’s films, which were bonkers before, and now you have TikTok.

Do you think growing up in the agricultural East Midlands—in the middle of the UK between the North and the South, which have more distinct cultural identities—helped develop your creative approach?

I’ve not thought about it before but you’re right in that you essentially don’t exist in this North/South divide. I have debated this with friends before who’ll identify as Northern or Southern, and you’re like, well, I don’t exist in this narrative. If I don’t exist in this narrative, what else don’t I exist in?

When you grow up in a very rural place there is something to be said about [being] confronted with actual boredom, with not having access to everything. If you are not following the status quo, then you’ll also quite quickly recognize that you don’t fit in. In a way, you know your place. That also happens to people in urban areas — with what access you have, materially, to where can I go? Where am I fenced in, where am I not allowed to move, where am I allowed to be myself or express myself?

When I was reading Notes On Evil, I was hyper-aware of news stories that employed the processes you explore in the book: how evil is often personified by those in power as a way to maintain the status quo via a process of scapegoating and distraction. It leaves us in this endless video game where there’s always a new nasty to combat, which distracts from addressing systemic issues. How do you try to break out of that?

The endless scrolling of end-of-level boss or whatever. When I was editing the book with Camilla Wills—she’s an artist and an editor, she has her own publishing house called Divided—we were talking a lot about this idea of the super-ego. You’re incentivized by a platform to post something to show that you are participating—to show that you care or to show that you are in a collective bid to solve a problem—which of course, that’s what we do. On a certain level, that’s a very human process, an almost biological response because it’s fight or flight and you want to look after other people because otherwise who is going to look after you? And also, moral and ethical purpose. But we were thinking, that’s very different to becoming aware of all the evils in the world. It’s maybe important to realize, it’s endless. The only way is to become this keyboard warrior or clicktivist and then in turn, you’ll have this moral dilemma of do I have fatigue of this? Is it okay to show fatigue with this? But ultimately, how I behave on an everyday level is more important than how I present online trying to fight problems.

When you’re working on a creative project, how do you deal with distractions?

I’m definitely guilty of using my phone as an excuse to not work on something. But I also accept that if I’m having an off day, like the classic writer’s block, just embrace that. Okay, today I’m just going to watch a load of junk on YouTube or whatever. I’m just going to watch whatever makes me feel good or makes me turn off. Because when you turn off, you can turn on again.

I joined this gym the other day because they had a half-price offer, and they were basically like, you can either lose weight or you can gain muscle, but you can’t do both at the same time. But actually, you can’t do either if you’re stressed. Stress and fear are counterproductive in most cases. Of course, in small doses, they can make you survive, they can make you function, they can produce a lot of adrenaline and help you push a car out of the way of a child that’s about to be run over. But, more or less, [stress is] counterproductive. I accept that if I’m not feeling something, it will come again.

Sometimes you just have a funny day or a funny week. And that’s very normal: everyone has an off day, everyone has a weird time. It’s good to acknowledge that to yourself and to others: Sorry, I can’t be constantly productive. If you let me not work for a bit then I’ll work way better because I’ll be happy to.

What is your writing process like?

I write a lot on the go. I have a notes or docs app on my phone. Also voice memos for when I’m doing music or I have ideas for something. Very much on the go, I just leave snippets of things. If I’m making music, I’ll suddenly have an idea and as fast as possible I’ll say a lyric or say a melody, and then when I’m in the studio I’ll recreate it. Then I’ll record that one track or one take so you have a bare minimum demo, so you at least have a repository of that. Then you can build on it. I like to do things very fast because I’m excited about it and then I get it done.

With writing, [my publisher] Aaron [Bogart] gave me the option of, “Hello, I’d like you to write a book, what would you like to do?” This was the end of 2019, and I was like, I think I’d like to write about evil because it’s this thing that we talk about again but no one actually knows what it is. I’d like to know for myself, what actually is it? So then I just explored a lot and thought about different structures and ideas and how it’s presented. I guess I made a lot of notes — notes on Notes On Evil — but I have a general flow for narrative. When I first went to university, I wanted to be a filmmaker and I always think that I approach everything I do like a filmmaker, directing something. You think of a story, you think of a narrative, you think how you want to present that. So you have a flow and you have a story, but then you will also think about the editing and what you want to cut out, what you want to leave in. It also doesn’t have to be A to B, it can also be a bit all over the place but it will also have its own logic; it’s just that the logic might not be immediate.

When an idea starts scratching at your consciousness, do you immediately know which form you want to explore it with?

I usually trust my instinct, I think I’m quite good with that. I’ll be like, this should be in this direction, and I don’t know why at that time but then I continue and it usually reveals itself and I work out why I wanted to make that choice. Obviously if it’s not working, then you’re like, well, I think I have to do that in another way. It’s funny, I was doing a lot of arts criticism over the last year, and I did that in parallel to when I was writing the book. Some people were like, “You’re writing a lot of reviews.” And I was like, actually they’re all quite savvy exercises in me exploring how I feel about X artwork in terms of my sense of evil and my sense of my practice. So they’re all a way for me to process by thinking about someone else’s work. Which I feel quite a lot of people do anyway.

As a gig worker, it’s not like you have a place to go where you can talk about that. Basically there’s never any real switching off. It’s always in the back of your mind. You might not even realize you’re doing it half the time. I also think it’s not a bad thing. I’d say 9 times out of 10, if you ask someone, “What do you think of…?” they like to tell you their opinion. And it’s also nice to listen. For me, I quite often ask people questions all the time. It benefits me but it also makes people feel good so that’s great.

On that note, I have to ask you a question that you didn’t answer in the book. In the chapter that explores the work of Detroit techno artist and Drexciya co-founder Gerald Donald, you mention that he asked you, “What is the future of sonic potential?”

At first, I was like, is this a weird rhetorical question. I felt like it was a performance. I think I said something like, Oh, I’ve never really thought about that, what do you think? And he was immediately talking lasers traveling through water. I was like, you’ve obviously thought about this a lot. I’d been reading this book about pure math and we were talking about that. Then we were talking about dolphins being used by the CIA. What I liked about talking with him was it was very fast, the conversation went all over the place but it was hyper interesting, and he was genuinely interested. He was like, “We use these synthesizers which were made in the ’80s and the ’70s. What would a synthesizer be like now? How would we want it to sound?” I was like, “That’s a really good question.” If anything, his questions made me think and I couldn’t immediately answer them but I kept thinking about them, which I think is probably one of the best things that someone can do. I think about these questions quite often, actually, still. And it’s 10 years later.

What do you find the most challenging thing about leading a creative life?

Supporting myself. Financial concerns float around my head constantly. Jesus, under the pandemic, I had to go on the dole. I’ve been on the dole for two years and I’m just coming off it. It’s just a reality. The day of the first lockdown was the day I was supposed to be playing a gig in Berlin and that was going to pay my rent for a few months. I just remember running into the job center and being like, My whole existence has just been canceled and I need money.

So yeah, creatively, I’d say material things first and foremost because I need to continue what I do, but I feel like I always manage to get by. The weird thing is it’s very stressful—I might be up in the middle of the night, being like, oh god, what’s going on—but something always comes along. So I’d say in terms of a process, you just have to go through it. You have to go through any self-doubts or anxieties because you just have to keep doing it because actually stuff does come along. It’s not easy and it’s never going to be easy but that’s just part of that parcel.

I’ve talked to people who’ve got secure incomes and non-creative jobs and they’re just like, “I don’t know how you could ever live like that,” and you’re like, “Well, I do and that’s my reality. Thanks for telling me it’s crazy to live like that.” You know, I’m doing what I want and I like that. I’d rather have that and maybe earn a bit less money than you but I enjoy my work. I wake up in the morning early because I’m happy to get up because I’m doing what I want to do.

If you have a side job, it’s fine. My mum always told me this story: she was a civil servant when she was younger and she did the tax return of Michael Palin and she said that there was a year when he was working in a glass factory. Even Monty Python didn’t save him. Don’t worry. You have rough patches but they’re not the be all or end all.

What is the most satisfying thing about leading the life of an artist?

I think the fact that I’m still doing it. I’m in my early 40s now and I’m just like, “I’m still here.” That’s in itself a small miracle. I’m always satisfied when I solve a problem or a creative riddle for myself because there can be moments where if something is too difficult, you’re like, Oh fuck it, I don’t want to do it. But I do find myself coming back, I don’t fully give up. I postpone and I procrastinate but I don’t give up. I guess that’s what keeps me here because it’s this curiosity or also this slightly egotistical thing of not wanting to give up. I have a thirst for reading and researching and watching. If I go to a gallery or a museum or a concert, I am genuinely interested. I want to see what’s happening. I think as long as I’ve got that, I’m happy. If I just did this for purely just money, then obviously I’d get a bit bored because money jobs are boring. But if you’re excited about what you do, then it’s interesting for everyone.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Ruth Saxelby.

The post The Importance of Building a Just World Order to Democracy and the Diversity of World Civilizations appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Alfred de Zayas.

The post The Essential Importance of John Yau’s Art Writing appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Carrier.

Notes:
Mnar Adley is the founder and editor-in-chief at MintPress News. She founded MintPress as a venue for accurate reporting on the Middle East and the US military-industrial complex. Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in northern California. Her writing has appeared in the Black Agenda Report, the Grayzone, and the San Francisco Bayview. She is also a co-producer of Pacifica Radio’s “Covid, Race and Democracy.” She traveled to Ethiopia and Eritrea in 2022 to investigate conditions there first hand.

Image by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay

The post The Importance of Independent Media when Reporting on Global Issues From Palestine to East Africa appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

Later in the show, independent journalist Sam Husseini speaks with Mickey about working to uncover the truth when both politicians and corporate media circumvent or suppress it. Husseini notes an unwillingness among reporters to ask tough but important questions about major topics. Among the examples he cites include the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the nuclear weapon ban treaty from a Trump/Putin press conference in Helsinki, and the possible origin of the coronavirus in a Wuhan lab. He notes how these and other pertinent questions are either not asked, or become distorted into a Trump-vs-Democrats type of argument that is then often dismissed.

Notes:

Kevin Gosztola is the managing editor of Shadowproof. He has covered the Julian Assange legal proceedings in the UK from its beginning, as well as other press-freedom and whistleblower cases. His new book on the Assange case, Guilty of Journalism, will soon be available in bookstores. Gosztola also curates the newsletter for The Dissenter and co-hosts the “Unauthorized Disclosure” podcast.

Sam Husseini is an independent journalist whose work can be found at husseini.substack.com. He has also worked at the Institute for Public Accuracy, the media watch group FAIR, and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and been published in The Nation, Counterpunch, and elsewhere.

Music-break Information:
1) “Glad / Freedom Rider” by Traffic
2) “Blowin’ In The Wind” by Neil Young
3) “Abacab” by Genesis

the Project Censored Show:

Hosts: Mickey Huff & Eleanor Goldfield
Producers: Anthony Fest & Eleanor Goldfield

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay

The post The Importance of Whistleblowers and Independent Journalists in Free Society- Kevin Gosztola and Sam Husseini appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

The post Work of National Importance appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ron Jacobs.

I feel as I’m getting older, my relationship to nostalgia is changing. I don’t feel it as heavily as I did for a long time. I’m enjoying the present moment more. I think for a while I was experiencing a lot of clinging towards the past, wishing I could have certain experiences again or a certain kind of family life. It’s evolved and then resettled in this really nice way.

My parents split when I was 18, I think that helped fuel a lot of it. There’s a book called The Fantasy Bond by Robert Firestone, he’s a Ph.D. researcher on family dynamics and relational attachment. He explains how when there’s a lack of a strong bond, there’s still the necessity to bond for survival, so the brain will kind of fill in the gaps. I think nostalgia in my writing, and at different times has served as that gap feeling, especially with my earlier records.

I’m realizing that part of the nostalgia we’re talking about is the aesthetic of the throwback genre. I think a similar feeling could be applied, imagining a different time. The music from that era feels very warm and expansive to, and all the tales that they tell around that era in Laurel Canyon, you kind of picture what it might have been to be in that time and what it would’ve been like to experience it.

You talked in an interview about a certain “glowy feeling” you use to describe a specific sensation that comes from the distillation of human experience in a certain setting or in a nice moment. You describe it as being a place where your songwriting comes from, and that it’s this space of embodiment and inspiration. If I’m describing this right, how do you nurture and cultivate that space? Is it a place that you feel you can get to easily? Has that come with time or different practices?

I think I can’t access it as easily now. Actually as I say that, I’m realizing that’s maybe not true. It requires me making time to set aside to just play. It’s almost like meditation. My dad actually has used this metaphor in talking to me about playing shows.

I’ll be like, “Well, you know that one wasn’t great, that one we weren’t in the flow, but this other one was great,” and my dad will say “That’s meditation. Every time you sit down to meditate, you’re not immediately going to access nirvana. You’re not going to immediately fall into no thought and you may not even get there every time you go to do it, but the practice of going and regularly doing it increases the odds that you will experience that peaceful feeling.”

I think there’s circumstantial things outside of my control, feelings, what’s going on in life…all of that. Then there’s this question of how present I’m willing to be and how present I’ve been willing to be for a stretch of time. It all factors into how easily I can access that flow place of like, “Oh, I feel very connected to what I’m singing about, it feels resonant. It feels like it could be true to not just me.”

So within this metaphor, do you sit down to meditate now?

I keep having the intentions to, and then it’s “Oh, I’ve got to leave this weekend. I’m going on a writing trip.” It’s always been the best I have felt are the times where I’m able to show up for it though. It’s kind of just going to the gym. You’ve got to stay in the habit of it.

What is your experience having grace with yourself when you, rolling with this metaphor still, when you like, can’t sit down and meditate.

I think I do have some grace. It’s not like there’s a voice in my head saying “You’re horrible,” but there are thoughts that pop in that say “Oh, you must not care about this if you’re not doing it.” Having those critical thoughts isn’t compulsive for me, it’s more of a reminder that this thing that I’m avoiding is something that’s important to me. It’s something that brings me esteem and I feel better when I do it.

I feel a healthy sense of pride if I’m working at it, which I think that’s helpful. I also don’t have a problem relaxing. I do that quite well, so it’s helpful when a little bit of discomfort comes up and I get that nudge from that inner voice that says “Hey, you haven’t been doing this. You haven’t been doing these things that make you feel good, that are important to you in this lifetime.”

That sounds really healthy. Instead of an inner critic, noticing when you’re misaligned with what’s important to you.

When the mean thoughts come I can take it either way. I can go down the critical road and beat myself up or I can see it as an indicator or a symptom that something’s off.

What’s something that surprised you about how your career has unfolded?

I mean, the whole thing. I think that it’s been a longer, slower process. Circling back to the concept of fantasy, I think about when I was starting out and imagining what things would be like and feel like versus what they actually feel when you get there.

I have a memory of seeing the Swell Season at the Ryman. I was such a huge fan and I love Once. Also, my parents played music together and sang together so it all felt really familiar and special. I think similar to nostalgia is kind of imagining what it would feel to be them, and to be doing what they were doing. Looking back on this memory I realize that feelings that I was having as an audience member and my idea of what they were experiencing is totally different than what it feels to be on stage for me. That doesn’t mean that I’m not doing it right or something. It’s just like, I can’t know what another person feels like. They put on a great show, but they could have been hungover or something.

Meaning that the things that you expected to feel the best aren’t quite as fulfilling as you expected?

I’ve learned that for each thing that I’m doing it’s really just about being present to that specific experience so that when I hit a high point it’s not like, “Oh, I achieved this new thing,” and then my baseline reality is to feel the high from that all the time. There are, of course, tons of moments of gratitude that are truly surreal like, “Whoa, I can’t believe this is…I dreamed about doing this, singing at the Ryman. And now I’ve gotten to do that.” But most of the time I’m really just trying to view each thing as a unique experience and be present for it.

Yeah, maybe that’s the thing. That’s the surprise. I thought that I would be able to sort of guess what it was going to feel like to do different things. You just can’t.

Do you feel those moments of gratitude are what gives you the energy to keep going? Because if you keep having overwhelming exciting experiences and your dreams come true, and you can’t ever stop to take a second to let it distill.

So much of traveling and touring can be so exhausting, but there’s a romanticism to the certain kind of tiredness and the schedule of getting to the hotel at midnight and waking up early. Being exhausted, but getting coffee and being in the van all day, going to sound check, and then you do it all again.

A couple years ago I was reading Questlove’s book, Creative Quest, and in it he talks about these mini meditations that he does, where if he’s sort of frazzled or he’s at the drum set on stage for a performance, he’ll take a moment to center himself, closing his eyes, a little gentle reset.

I think what I do is like that. We opened for Lord Huron at Red Rocks in June, and the year before we had gotten to open for Trampled by Turtles there for two nights, so it got to be where I felt fairly comfortable being there. Then I had this moment—I was packing all my stuff up and looking at that specific view of the green room. It hit me that I should just take it in for a second because I thought, “I don’t know if, or when I’ll be back here.” There’s just so many unknowns. And I thought, “This is really cool, that I got to be here.” It’s about taking in those moments, and then leaving and moving forward.

How is being a working musician working for you these days? How do you feel about it?

Well, I definitely feel grateful to get to it—to get to go on tour and open for people and to have people supporting the work that I’m doing, people in my corner.

I also feel I still have a lot of questions about how it all works. Just learning more and more about how it makes sense actually as a job. Even when things are going well, I’m still thinking “Does this make sense?”

As in, financially?

It just takes a really long time. Even when things are building and going well, there’s still quite a ways to go before you’re in a comfortable and livable situation. I feel so supported and so lucky to get to make records and tour, so now it’s kind of an experience of setting my sights on new goals, more logistical things. I think it’s an age thing too, of just being like, “Okay, I’m officially a grown-up now. I’m taking the reins and wanting to make plans for living.”

At the same time, I’m so often having a really great time on tours where it just barely works out. To me it’s obviously not about the money, but it does take money to live and to fund projects that you want to fully realize. So I feel it’s just learning, learning process.

What kind of things nurture that process of acceptance—of just being like, “All right, I’m doing this. I’m getting somewhere, but it’s hard.” What do you lean on? What bolsters you?

I think seeing how it’s unfolded for peers, or people I have opened for, or looked up to, like my friend Mike of Hiss Golden Messenger. Over time he’s built the incredible fan base that he has now and continued to refine his voice and his whole thing, he just gets better and better. That’s something that really inspires me because it counters the idea that it should be this flash in the pan thing of just like, “boom.” Overnight success.

Just knowing that there’s more time helps me. There’s always more time, you know? So I’ll just keep creating with people and just playing music and remembering “Oh yeah, there’s nothing better than singing harmony.” In a way it’s also inspiring to begin to understand more and more about what goes on behind the scenes and the business side of things.

There was a period of time where that felt really intimidating to me. Not that I wasn’t able to access it, but that my brain wouldn’t latch on well or for some reason it was difficult to be enthusiastic about learning what is required for continued growth.

Now I’m finding that it works much better in smaller chunks—like goal setting. I can seek baby steps to attain that next goal, and that’s energizing to me because I can actually start to imagine and realistically see how things can grow.

More data for the dream-making.

Yes!

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Emma Bowers.

Witchy, creepy, strange things turn me on. I’m a Halloween baby. My grandmother always called me the good witch of the East. I got my first tarot when I was 12. I ran home from the mall, tore the cellophane wrapper off the cards, so excited to read them. But flipping through the 78 cards was disheartening. I didn’t know what I was looking at or how to read them. The experience became the impetus of my first book, Tarot Diva. I didn’t want anyone to feel overwhelmed or intimidated by the process of reading tarot.

I really appreciated that you made it so accessible. You took away the intimidation. I feel like a lot of times you go into the metaphysical store and everyone seems to be safeguarding their secrets and staring you down and you feel like an idiot, like a child at a tattoo shop.

Exactly! You know, back in the ’80s, I’d visit occult shops like The Magickal Childe in NYC. They went out of their way to make you feel like an outsider. How ironic that witchcraft could be as standoffish and snobby as Catholicism and other other organized religion. But that’s the nature of organized anything, from PTA moms to Pagan covens. The power of tarot and witchcraft is its solitary element. You don’t need anyone else. You can be a solitary witch. Nature will teach you everything you need to know. A tarot practice is a sacred intimate relationship between you and the cards. Count yourself lucky if the right teacher appears. But to unlock true magic, you have to give yourself permission to step into the unknown.

What does tarot have to offer the average person?

Is there an average person? Is there such a thing? Tarot can be as simple and fun as getting a reading at a Halloween party. But tarot can be applied to anything. That’s why authors, artists, fashion houses, and filmmakers are constantly sourcing the cards for themes and inspiration. Everyone under the age of 30 seems to now have at least one tarot deck. If you are an intimacy junkie, tarot is a great way to get to communicate. The minute you put the cards in front of someone, all of their defenses tend to come down. You can get intimate really quickly.

It’s like when you go to therapy. You want to be honest with your therapist because you want the right answers. You have to be open in that kind of situation.

But it’s challenging because even when we want to be open, we’re so attached to our stories, our “stuff,” things we carry and grind on for years and years. It is hard to be clear and open. Lighting a candle and shuffling a deck of tarot clears you. It’s ritualistic, it’s sensual. Your body and mind perk up. That’s why sacred ceremony—from Catholicism to yoga to Judaism—all use the same elements: costume, incense, music… it opens the secret architecture of the soul. It seduces the senses into becoming vulnerable in a way that we can receive something, a message, a teaching. Once that space opens up inside of you, there’s a bit of room for possibility. You can see, hear, or discover something you hadn’t or couldn’t have seen five minutes ago.

In The Magic of Tarot, you call yourself a storyteller. How does storytelling contribute to tarot and magic at large?

Storytelling and tarot are inseparable. And tarot is the story of you. When you read tarot for yourself, you flip a card, the story is about you, your potentials and possibilities. You are the master storyteller narrating what is seen in the cards. And when you sit down in front of a tarot reader or an intuitive or a psychic or a medium, they’re telling you a story and you apply yourself to that story. And it’s the same way that astrology columns work. There’s only 12 star signs, but millions of people read their monthly scope and are like, “Oh my god, yes, that’s so me,” because we all bring our own experience to whatever story is told for us.

Storytelling and magic occurs when we expand the understanding of who we are, of what’s possible, by retelling our stories in deeper, profound, and complex ways. Tarot is super helpful for that because it’s a mirror of our psyche. It’s a reflection of who we are. It’s taking everything out of our brain and spreading it out on the table in front of us. So we’re not stuck with it all inside our head.

You’ve traveled a lot for readings. In your book you mentioned the highest meditation cave in the world in the Himalayas–which I was very intrigued by—the Dead Sea, and Chinese tea houses. How did you make a career for yourself in magic, and how did these opportunities become viable?

I cast a travel spell. I had already published a ton of books and tarot decks. I craved travel and adventure. But I had a young daughter and finances didn’t really allow for it. But I have to practice what I preach. I decided to cast a spell. I decided, okay, I’m going to for 15 minutes every day, put myself in the space of a traveler, of an adventurer. And so when I was in the city, I would spend 15 minutes walking around like a tourist.

But when I was up at our farmhouse in the Catskills, I traveled via nature. I found snow drifts that looked like the sands of the Serengeti. Or I gazed into puddles and found rivulets and it looked like I was flying over the great plains and looking down at rivers. I made a point to be in the traveler’s mindset. And within a year and a half, my foreign rights started selling. I developed relationships with my foreign publishers. They started bringing me over to teach in their respective countries.

I had the incredible opportunity, it was actually four years ago this month, to visit Mount Everest base camp—the highest point on Earth—and the Dead Sea, all in the same span of four weeks. So, from the highest point on earth to the lowest point on earth. Or to put it in magical terms, from the earth’s crown chakra to its root chakra. I’m going to tear up. I don’t know that I have yet integrated the experience. It was extraordinary and it was just proof of magic, of the power that we have, and it was amazing.

Wow, the full scope.

It was wild. And to go from Tibet, a Buddhist country, which is heartbreakingly subjugated by the Chinese government, to move under prayer flags whipping in thin air, glacial lakes and ancient monasteries and meet stunning, peaceful people and then to be thrust into the thunderous clash inside the walls of Old Jerusalem and floating in the Dead Sea. There had been a flare-up on the Gaza Strip and it was one of those teetering points where they were on the edge of war again. And to go from such a high altitude where the entire religion is based on losing the ego and then to dive into the heart of the desert where religion and culture fight each other in the midst of religious Disneyland-style tourist culture…It was beautiful, wild, and absurd.

You explain much of tarot by use of archetypes. I was curious if you’ve studied Jung or if you bring psychoanalysis into your interpretation of the tarot.

Archetypal understanding helps you break tarot’s visual code. I am not a formally trained Jungian but have read so many of Jung’s books. He’s fascinating. And I’m schooled in the Rider-Waite-Smith cards, that’s my specialty. The RWS came out of a secret society that organized at the turn of the century in London, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was not just a bunch of Dungeons and Dragons-like people meeting covertly in basements and backrooms. It was a collection of middle class and upper middle class artists and intellectuals that included novelist Bram Stoker and poet and playwright WB Yeats, actress Florence Farr and all of these interesting characters. And what’s fascinating was the way that magic was developing at the turn of the century. It was unfolding at the very same time that Freud and Jung were developing psychology. So it was this big explosion. You had modernism and organized magic and psychology. It feels like it was all part of that same intelligence that was coming through at that period of time. So it aligns really well.

Your Dark Wood Tarot deck is super beautiful, an entire world onto itself. What was it like to work with illustrator Abigail Larson? And other artists in general?

Abigail is amazing. It took the publisher and I over a year to find the right artist for Dark Wood. But the minute I clicked on the link to Abigail’s site and saw her images, I knew she was the one because Dark Wood is a shadow deck. I needed to seduce the reader into looking at the not-so-nice sides of their personality. Visually, I wanted to make it impossible to look away from their own shadow side. And Abigail’s art style is cozy, dark, sexy, yet safe. It was just everything.

And, as far as working and collaborating with artists, it’s interesting. When I make a tarot deck, I write the script for the entire deck first. It is like writing a film with 78 scenes and a guidebook. Once we find an artist, I take on the role also as a project manager as the deck springs to life. In an ideal world, the artist takes what you give them and turns it into something so much more beautiful than you could have ever imagined.

Tell us about one of the wildest readings you’ve ever given.

For some reason when I first started reading professionally, I had a lot of crazy, high stakes tarot readings. Talk about jumping into the deep end of the pool. These weren’t 20-somethings looking for love. And in the midst of that period, I wound up reading tarot for an environmental activist who had been part of a group who had destroyed property in Seattle. The government had just passed new domestic terrorism laws because of September 11th. He came to me for a tarot reading because he was standing trial and on his way to jail. He wanted to know what the journey would be for him.

Now, the cards don’t lie. And it was fascinating. I knew there were a lot of things he wasn’t telling me. And he seemed like a really nice guy, but he was heading off to prison. I was scared I’d say the wrong thing, use the wrong words, and he’d head off to the “big house” with bad advice from me. Plus, you are sharing space and energy with the person you read for and I was completely unprepared for the intensity of the subject matter.

The job of a tarot reader is not to pass judgment on the person sitting across from you. You are there to read their cards. One time, this guy wanted to know if he could get away with cheating on his wife. The cards said thumbs up and I told him as much.

It is wild when you are super attracted and have insane chemistry with a person you are reading for. Years ago, I did a Fashion’s Night Out event at Chrisian Louboutin in Soho. I read for a super sexy-on-every-level NFL star who was the bright young thing of that season. He’d just signed all these endorsement deals and we were up in the VIP lounge flipping cards.

And to be in an energetic alignment with someone who’s also in an energetic alignment with what they’re doing…it was like being on heroin. And he was gorgeous and it was just so fun. Readings can be hot and exciting and flirty and fun. They can also be terrifying because you’re talking about really grave moments in people’s lives and oftentimes the stakes couldn’t be higher.

You teach classes. How’s that been?

I never set out to teach. Public speaking and lecturing made me uncomfortable. In the ’90s, I was a B-movie horror actress. I can memorize lines, become a character, and pretend to be someone else all day long. But it took me years to learn how to stand up and be my unscripted self.

My absolute favorite thing in the world to teach is shadow work. I am obsessed with shadow work for a million different reasons. Shadow work goes to the core of all of our issues. It is the most evolutionary examination that you can do, on every level. I lie awake at night and I am like, “Why, why, why does history repeat itself?” “Why would someone who is abused as a child grow up and abuse their own children knowing first hand how painful it is?” “Why does a culture or country that has suffered the ravages of war, wage war?” “Why do the amazing friends we had as teenagers grow up and morph into cranky versions of their parents 20 and 30 years later?”

All of this, personally and collectively, has to do with the shadow. All the things we know but hide from ourselves. Shadow work is about being honest with yourself, taking responsibility for yourself and your emotions, rather than projecting onto the people around you. And shadow work, when done, well, will set you free.

It feels like tarot, shadow work, and the magic I teach makes a difference. Makes the world a better place. Plus, I have to be that much more on point with all of my bullshit, because I would be a hypocrite if I was standing up there and preaching this stuff and not applying it to myself. So I love it. And that’s sorcery of darkness, all potential. That’s me. That’s you, too. You are filled with magic and infinity. The question is, are you brave enough to unleash it?

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

It was very unsettling. I didn’t think for a second that I was targeted in any way. I think it was just a random product of someone seeing an opportunity and grabbing whatever they could find. And years of work happened to be what that was. But, as far as equipment, we didn’t actually lose anything. I had a bunch of friends over the day after I was broken into and we were all hanging out, and then this wild flood in Toronto happened. Water started gushing into the basement and we were all just grabbing the fabric we could find and absorbing all of this water. So everything was elevated and mostly safe beyond a couple of patch cords. Luckily, we didn’t lose anything. I think, if that were to happen, I might actually have to rethink why I’m doing what I’m doing. But, no, we just kept going forward. We do take a lot longer to make things anyway, so the pandemic and having [drummer] Sheridan [Riley] in the US, it was all kind of a logistical nightmare.

I remember—in maybe 2020, early 2021—I started seeing a lot of tweets from music fans saying, “There’s gotta be a new Alvvays album coming out,” and I’m like, “Well I feel like there’s probably a good reason why there’s not a new album yet.” Having your demos stolen and also navigating a pandemic are two pretty solid reasons for that.

I’m just also not that prolific. I’m really hard on myself. If something doesn’t speak to me, I’d rather just bury it. So it’s partly that, too. I’m not a perfectionist, but I’m tough on my own work.

I think that’s part of the job description of being an artist, to have a narrower eye on your own stuff that you make. Like you said, you don’t think the intent was to steal the demos because they knew it was you, but I’m curious if they will appear in the future for sale somewhere, once someone realizes what they have.

Yeah, it’s probably going to be some memory card that’s corroded in a sewage pipe, but it also could be on the internet at some point and it will be non-stop hours of me howling at the moon.

Does the idea of Alvvays look any different now than it did when you released the self-titled album in 2014?

I don’t have several jobs now, which I did when we released that record. So I do have the means to be creative and that means a lot. I realize that’s a very fortunate situation to be in, so I definitely don’t take that for granted. We’ve all, generally, gone into this situation knowing that it could be our last try. So, we’ve put everything into our records and look at it like that because life is short and music is so unstable and hard to predict. I think my mindset has been the same, to have that hungry chip on your shoulder and make everything like it’s your last thing.

I’m curious about the title of your new album, Blue Rev. It appears in the song “Belinda Says.” What’s the story behind that?

Well, Rev is a wine cooler, a Canadian thing. And the flavor that everyone drank when I was younger was blue, so it’s a very specific cultural reference to my adolescence. I think it’s something that a lot of people from the Maritimes could probably relate to. It was thought of, to me, as a portal going into the past and touching on some unique cultural references of where I grew up. It’s sort of in the vein of strawberry wine, or something.

I’ve seen comment sections of your band’s videos on YouTube and some people will say, “This is the most Canadian band I’ve ever seen,” and I think it’s fun that the new album leans even more into your guys’ home.

If you’re trying to wriggle out of that, it’s kind of impossible, so why not lean in a bit?

Speaking of “Belinda Says,” I know it’s an homage to Belinda Carlisle, so I’m curious about what kind of influence the Go-Go’s have on Alvvays.

We were watching [The Go-Go’s] during the pandemic and it was really interesting, just the way that [the band] weren’t exactly how they were framed. It wasn’t a cookie cutter journey for them, so that was enlightening to me. And we love that song, “Rush Hour,” too, by Jane Wiedlin. Her collaboration with Sparks, as well. You know, “Heaven Is a Place on Earth,” it’s just a classic, blasting jam. [Guitarist] Alec [O’Hanley] came up with that final line in the peak of [“Belinda Says”]. When he came up with that, we were high-fiving, because it just felt so perfect.

You started writing Blue Rev right after Antisocialites came out. Did the original demos for the record sound as dynamic four years ago as they do now, or is that evolution a product of being patient with reassembly and re-recording them directly to tape?

A little bit of both. Some of that stuff is pieced together, and we would redo everything from scratch, or try and inject some of the demo tracks into new skeletons. But, then you have so much time with things and you go back and forth between different versions, and sometimes you just don’t capture the energy, the sound of the initial thought, or the sound of an idea forming. It has this unique air that, sometimes, can be really hard to pin down when you’re really focusing on doing that. So there were things that we used that were just, like, me screaming in our practice shed that can’t be recreated when you don’t know that it’s being recorded. Little moments like that just have this indescribable term.

The response to Blue Rev, from what I’ve seen so far, has been great. Tons of writers who’ve heard the record early are already calling it one of the best of the year. It being so long since you’ve put out an album, did you have to readapt to people responding to your work?

I have been kind of careful about subjecting myself to other people’s opinions, because I’m all over the map and slightly fragile when it comes to those thoughts bouncing around in my head for a long period of time. So I do try to block a lot of stuff out, but this whole process has been a little bit foreign to me, just getting back on the interview train and even just playing music. The whole thing is zero to 100 again. It does actually feel really nice. I feel like the energy that I’m picking up on has been really positive, and that definitely helps when you’re just trying to stay afloat with all of this stuff that needs to be done.

Beyond the overarching dream pop foundation, there are so many genres at play on Blue Rev. When you start writing a song, are you ever trying to fit into a certain box of a certain sound, or is it a more organic production?

Lots of different ideas that I’m thinking [about] when I’m writing. Sometimes, I’m just like, “This could be like ‘Sparky’s Dream,’ or this could be a guitar version of a Celine Dion song, or something.” It eventually doesn’t end up that way, but it sounds like our band. With this album, I know that one thing we all agree on is that we like loud guitars, and, so, it wasn’t a conscious pivot, or anything planned. I think we were just drawn to certain approaches, subconsciously, and were trying to make everything pop and hit.

The visual components of your music have always felt perfectly tailored to the songs they represent. I think a lot about how captivating the videos for “Archie, Marry Me,” “In Undertow,” and now “Very Online Guy” are and how they so beautifully encompass the work. Are visuals something you actively think about when writing, or are those pastorals something that arise afterwards?

A bit of both. Part of my writing process is conjuring and drawing from imagery and making miniature films in my mind so I can describe them in words. But then, yeah, a lot of the visual stuff we try to be really involved with so it feels like it fits. And if it doesn’t fit, then it just doesn’t get used. So there have been a lot of things left on the cutting room floor, for sure. It’s important to me that that realm is the appropriate accompaniment to the music, and it’s not easy, just to find things that are in your palette and speak to you.

There was a sort of lingering melancholy on Antisocialites, but Blue Rev is often joyful and humorous. What was the inspiration for that metamorphosis in storytelling for you?

I think, with the first two albums, there were a lot of uncertainties in my life. And [now] I feel just, maybe, in a better place. Even though things aren’t autobiographical, I think that energy translates. [With] Antisocialites, we were touring so much that I felt really overwhelmed. And there were a lot of health issues and keeping up with your family and missing out on things. That’s kind of what being a musician is, making all of those sacrifices. But, when you grapple with that, it can be a painful thing. So, with this record, just having some time off to reconnect with other things in your life that aren’t music was a really stabilizing thing for all of us. I also don’t really want to fully be buying into the sad trope. It’s starting to feel a bit like an overused party trick, or something. It’s good to challenge yourself.

When you finished making the record, what was your initial reaction to the collection of songs you’d just put together?

It took some honing to make sure that it could all exist on one album, trying to tweak everything so the songs made sense back-to-back. Once that was accomplished, I felt like it was a successful collage of ideas and feelings and scenarios. It was satisfying to meet that balance with every peak and valley of the album.

Because you sat with these songs for so long, unintentionally, or not, do you ever think about how they will become a bridge to what the future holds next for you, musically? Or what kind of shape the next thing can now take?

That feels so daunting, just to even think of what could come next right now. I feel like I just have my head down and I’m swinging ferociously, so I’m gonna put that question on ice for a while.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by nMatt Mitchell.

Notes:
Betsy Gomez is coordinator for the national Banned Books Week Coalition. Nico Perrino is Executive Vice-President at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, formerly known as the Foundation for Individual Rights In Education. Nolan Higdon is a university lecturer in media studies and history. He’s also the author of The Anatomy of Fake News, Let’s Agree to Disagree, and other books on media and society.

The post The Importance of Academic Freedom in a Cancel Culture Obsessed with Curtailing Curricula and Banning Books appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

The whole place looks kind of like you’re not supposed to live here, but this is where we live. My work area is in a cage a couple of feet away. It’s a chain-link fence that’s 12 by 24 feet. I line up enough boards that it’s basically about four by 80 feet of workspace. This building, the whole place, used to be my studio. But we have two kids now, and every year, a little bit gets eaten away by the family.

How do you balance the line between family and personal time and your creative time?

I used to babysit the kids, and I used to give them something to do so I could do my stuff. But now everybody goes to school, and it’s the best time of day when everybody leaves, so between 8:00 and 6:00, I do my stuff.

It sounds like you have a discipline around it, like you’re almost treating it like a day job.

Oh, it is my day job. Ever since I was in fifth grade, I wanted to be an artist. I went to art school. I did everything right. Then you get out of art school, and you don’t really know what to do with it, and you knock around for a bunch of years. I worked in restaurants, but I always worked during the day. Then it became this system of painting multiple pictures and treating it like a job, treating it like a craft, treating it like a nine-to-five.

I paint very quickly. It came about because if I started at 8:00 in the morning, I’d have to be done by 4:30 in the afternoon so I could go into the restaurant and wash dishes. Then I realized my paintings were better because of these limitations, this set of rules I put on them.

Your art space and practice are very specific, very tailored to the way you create. I’d love for you to talk more about the value of a dedicated, fully customized space and a set of rules for one’s creative practice.

The first rule is you have to love what you do. You just have to be organized. In some ways, the way I feel about my work is that I’ve dumbed it down to make it better. I used to slavishly work hours over individual pictures and try to make a really good picture, and it was unsatisfying to me. Then, as soon as I started buying materials in bulk and treating it like I was at a bakery making bagels, or a potter making a hundred coffee mugs that day, then it just freed me up. I felt more creative. I felt more inspired. I felt more connected with a community.

I really enjoyed basically giving my art away, selling my paintings for $5, $10, $2 sometimes, bringing them to rock shows when friends would do shows. If they were cheap, I wouldn’t have to come home with them. I’d have money for the next day for materials.

But the space, it’s just organization. Every two days, I work on 10 four-by-eight sheets of plywood cut up. If I cut them up real small, that’s a few hundred paintings. If they’re larger, it’s around a hundred. But it’s just treating it like a craft.

I was watching a video of you in your cage making versions of the same painting many times. I imagine that leads to imperfection and that not every painting will be exactly the same. Can you talk about the value of imperfection in your creative process?

I think of imperfection like a [Willem] de Kooning painting is imperfect. I want to set up systems that allow for spontaneity and surprises. Because if you do this as a job every day, you want to surprise yourself.

I don’t change the way my paintings look because I have a specific audience that wants my paintings to look the way they look, so I don’t try to evolve. I mean, my paintings do change just because I can’t help it, just because I might be more energetic one day. But for me, the past 30 years, I’ve basically been making one painting. My performance of doing these paintings is the artwork, and everybody gets a residue of my 30 years. They get a chunk of me.

Whenever I show my work, I’m very into the installation of the work. I’m very into when people buy my work and it being fun, like you’re at a really great yard sale and you can’t believe how cheap everything is. It’s as much part of the art as the paintings.

You’re saying the audience is extremely important to what you do. Can you talk about that more?

When I started this, my wife and I used to be DJs at a college radio station in Charlottesville, WTJU, and I got to meet a lot of people that were really into music and starting bands. I was mystified about their bravery: “We’ll get in a friend’s car, we’ll drive 300 miles, we’ll bring a shoebox of CDs, and hopefully we can sell them.” It’s that spirit, that kind of performance that I strive for. It was a performance even before they were performing. That’s important to me. A musician wants to please his audience. So as a painter, I want to please my audience.

You’re hosting these events, you’re having people come out, and most importantly, you’re selling your paintings at super low prices. Why is accessibility—really no barrier to interacting with you and your art—so important to you?

I wanted to mimic the way some bands would encourage fans to tape their music to spread the word around, to make it accessible. To me, there was nothing more mysterious than making my work really accessible. People don’t do that with painting. I thought, “Oh, I have nothing to gain by trying to go that regular route,” so I just wanted to have fun with it. I’m very disciplined with my fun.

There comes a point where you have to decide how to let your art out into the world, how to make it be part of the world. Do you want to rely on others and hope that works, or do you want to have fun with it? People to this day are just like, “Why does he do that? Why does he give his art away?” I don’t make much money at it, but I make enough to do this. I really love what I do.

I just thought it was kind of subversive how I did it. But also, I don’t think it’s cynical. I think it’s very fun that kids can buy my art. Art history professors buy my art. My art’s been used for album covers. I want it to be useful. I wanted it to be multipurpose. I want people to find as much meaning in it as they need, like a pamphlet, a fanzine, a book, a meal.

Maybe visually, my work doesn’t look anything like it, but I’ve always been so moved by minimalist art, like Sol LeWitt or Donald Judd, things that you could decide how much you wanted to see in it. If you want to give it time, you can see a lot into it. It’s not like you can see a lot into my paintings, but my paintings have a backstory, knowing that this one guy made all these paintings, that they’re kind of all over the world, and the “why does he do that?” thing. It’s like indoor graffiti.

Between you having designed Pavement album covers and your series of famous album artwork interpretations, I’m curious how you look to one artform to inspire another.

Painting the albums started about 20 years ago when I would sell them at the WFMU record fairs in Manhattan. A lot of people knew who I was back then, but they still thought, “This is kind of crazy. This dude has 2,000 albums that he’s painted.”

I would grab all these albums out of cut-out bins. I don’t necessarily paint the albums that I like. It’s fun to paint albums people haven’t heard. I paint a lot of accessible albums that people do want. But it was fun to paint out whole batches of albums from cut-out bins.

The albums, they’re kind of like memorials. They’re images from years ago. People don’t even know what an album’s cover is [now] because they get [music] online. I don’t know if kids [now] know what the album covers look like. So they’re kind of remembrances. They’re markers of the past.

You seem as interested in the process as in the art itself. I’d love for you to talk about that more.

Well, I have these buckets of paint, and when I’m in front of 85 or 200 empty panels, it’s exhilarating to start putting down the paint. I don’t paint one picture at a time. I start with purple, purple, purple, blue, blue, blue, red, red, red, and I use one repetition brushstroke on all the panels. So they’re started all at the same time, and they’re finished all at the same time. It becomes a game. If you’re in the zone, you’re in a trance. It is a process. It is a performance. It is these repetitious motions that I do.

I don’t know what the pictures look like when I’m working on them. I just know the individual strokes, and the strokes have a language. I don’t reinvent how I apply paint. I don’t try to innovate. I start off with big fat strokes and then get smaller and smaller. At the end, I write the words and sign it. Then at the end of the day, I’m like, “Oh, that one didn’t work out,” and “Oh, that one’s great.” But then two weeks later, I’ll think the one that didn’t work out looks great. So it’s just that process. They kind of bloom in front of me.

With how prolific you are, do you ever come up on burnout? If so, how do you handle that?

No, because I actually feel needed. This year, they’ve been promoting the book, and I had so many orders that I had to stop my website taking orders for a couple of months so I can catch up. It’s a weird thing to be so wanted. The things that I can’t sell through the website because they’re too large to send because it costs too much, I put up on eBay, because the prices are a little higher, and that goes well.

It’s a neat feeling [to be needed]. I’m not putting down the art world, but there’s a different kind of need. It’s very satisfying, too, working with the gallery and having a gallery enjoy what you’re doing and being able to make it successful, and for them to be able to sell it, which also helps their employees. That’s a good feeling too. So it’s not like one is better than the other. I just happen to work in this situation.

That was everything I wanted to ask, but if anything else came to mind as we spoke that you haven’t yet gotten to say, go for it.

There are always worries. I want to be better than I was before. Sometimes, I’ll look at something of mine on eBay that somebody is selling that’s 25 years old, and I’m like, “Oh no, I wish I could paint as good now.” Then I’ll see something that I did two months ago on eBay, and it’s like, “Well, that’s okay.” It’s different, but it’s okay. I like the new one, too. It’s just different.

My parents always collected knick-knacks. My dad was a Civil War historian, and that was his hobby. The house was filled with Civil War relics. My mom collected china and stuff like that. The house was filled with American collectibles, collections of stuff. That’s always been in the back of my mind. Now, I feel like I have made this thing that’s an American collectible. I really enjoy that I made this thing that has a separate life, that people can find it, that it’s not connected to me, and that they can trade it back and forth with their friends.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Max Freedman.

Later in the show we’re joined by Jimmy Dunson, co-founder of Mutual Aid Disaster Relief to discuss the importance of community preparedness for extreme weather driven by climate chaos, as well as relational infrastructure. We also discuss his upcoming book Building Power while the lights are out – about mutual aid, disasters and dual power published by Rebel Hearts Publishing.

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

The post The Realities of So-Called Conservation, and the Importance of Community Preparedness for Extreme Weather appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

Looking back to how I was working when I started getting into painting, aesthetically things changed, but this general theme of symbolism has always been a pretty important thing. When I was younger, I wanted to get better technically and keep learning but then as far as finding a personalized aesthetic, it wasn’t necessarily something that I sought but I happened upon. I still feel pretty young in it. I feel like I’m just at the nascent stage of what I’m starting to do and I have a feeling things are going to change very dramatically because looking at other artists, their style is so distinct. It’s like when you don’t see someone every day, after some time you’d see them and they’ve changed a lot. You don’t notice these nuanced moments.

I know that things have changed for myself in time, but I don’t think I’m where I should be or might want to be, or I think I’m supposed to be, but everyone else can be like, “Oh, your style is very distinct.” That’s really interesting because I don’t necessarily know what it is that makes it so distinct.

Does that impact your perspective on your own work?

Sometimes. When somebody brings it up, I’ll think about it because again, I personally don’t feel like I would necessarily want to be recognized prima fosse––just how everything is stylized––because my personal philosophy in trying to make work is that I’ll try to utilize any kind of aesthetic to deliver a general point. It usually makes me feel locked into this one specific form and it makes me want to challenge that and keep changing it. People saying, “Your work has changed so dramatically” is a nicer feeling to me than “Oh, your style is so distinct.”

I’ve always had a general disinterest towards artists who make these reiterating images or objects because there’s only so many ways you can say something. I love and respect his work, but I was thinking that if I were someone like Ellsworth Kelly, I would be so bored. I could not make these different shapes and different colors every day for my whole life. Things should be changing constantly, and not that that should be an objective in painting, but I should be open to experiencing a new technique or a new way of presenting something because it’s like the human experience. As you navigate the world, you will come into new ideas and new things and if you allow it to change you, that’s a lot more gratifying. It’s a lot more fun, especially when you can propagate something new and different through that new experience.

I think there’s a danger and a pressure, especially in creative endeavors, to be a brand.

That’s a terrifying avenue to go down. To each their own. People who do it are benefiting from it––at this point we all have to live––but I don’t think that I could happily compromise my work for acquiescing to some kind of demand for something. I don’t like the idea of reiterating an image, especially not just to sell to someone. To acquiesce to someone’s demand, whether there’s some lucrative incentive or social incentive, I think that would compromise the fidelity of the work itself and end up annexing it into a brand and to me, that’s really boring.

Do you have any formal education in art?

I don’t. I actually only have a GED and I think for me personally, it really helped. I had this math teacher in high school who had a personal vendetta and she failed me by a single point, so I wasn’t allowed to graduate but I wanted to go to art school pretty bad. So I spent the next year trying to get some credits at a community college and then applied to SAIC and I went for a portfolio review and they told me that I needed the GED. While I was in that process, which I think took about two years, a lot of my friends had gone to art school and half of them were kind of just beat down by the curriculum. They were very discouraged.

I’m very self-motivated when it comes to learning something, so if I’m told to do something, typically I won’t want to do it, but if I’m really curious about something, I will be really adamant about learning it. Painting has been the only thing that’s always providing challenges and things to solve or learn, so it’s constantly really engaging. Considering the resources that we have, I think there are certain elements of art school that are kind of obsolete, but there are certain faculties and resources that are really good to have access to. I think there are things that you can gain from art school or formal education, fundamentals or some kind of organized curriculum, but I don’t think that you can learn inspiration or a work ethic from school. I’m a big proponent of not going to art school and just diving into it and using your hands, and experiencing whatever medium and troubleshooting.

What are some of the ways that you’ve honed your skills over the years?

I’ve learned that because my paintings are so idea driven, I need time to experience things and have ideas ferment. I’m also working full time. I go to the shop and work nine-to-five and then it’s hopefully eight hours of studio practice but that’s just the working element of it. When it comes to making work that I feel confident in interjecting some sense of spirit, I’m realizing now that it takes a little time for me to be able to put something out. Painting specifically, it’s easy to make a beautiful image but for me, there needs to be another level of engagement, another idea. The discipline I apply to that is when I do have an idea, it becomes this moment and I have to do research about this idea. So it forces me to read new texts and go through these different rabbit holes of degrees of association, which becomes a learning experience.

It also forces me to make time in-between work and the studio. At work, I’ll read in my downtime and then during studio time, I’ll apply those readings. I’ve definitely learned a lot of time management when it comes to a work ethic, which was something I was never ever good at. And even then, if I’m not that inspired, then I can slack off a little bit. But then that ends up being beneficial too, because I’ll just go places and end up talking to strangers and finding new things to think about that can then be applied to the studio.

Are there any practices you put into place to be able to get yourself in the right mindset to create work after doing your day job?

I don’t have a set kind of thing because working on cars requires a completely different form of thinking. I assume my pre-consciousness does a lot of work while I’m actively thinking about how to remove something or how to diagnose the car, just these quiet thoughts, and at a certain point, something clicks and it’s like a dog chasing after something. Once it latches its teeth into it, it wants to stay there. I don’t have any real meditative practice because then that feels like I’m chasing a butterfly, which is pretty difficult. My mind is always running all the time. So, to have that job is really helpful because then it’s two wheels running in different directions.

Do you have to be in a certain space to create?

Currently I’m working out of my apartment, which feels a lot better than having a studio because it affords me a chance to be hyper intimate with the work and to constantly witness it in my personal space. I can more casually converse with images. I like to have time with something and to slowly craft it carefully as opposed to “I’m going to this space dedicated to working and I have to get something done.” A space like that turns painting into more of a labor than it is something to participate in.

Do you ever abandon a piece you’re working on?

A lot. I’ll usually have some ideas that are not fully formed in a sense and then I’ll put it together and see how it looks. Sometimes with that sort of eagerness to make something, it’s not a half baked idea, but an idea that wasn’t fully thought through, where it’ll have a missing element that I just can’t put my finger on. Then what ends up happening is I’ll have a handful of works sitting for a long time and will keep looking at them, asking ‘what is it that this thing needs?’ But then when that goes on for so long, you forget the general idea and what the point of the painting was and then there’s no way I can return to that conversation.

So I just have to paint over it and then do something new, but I’ll document it and go back to it and I can use this element from this painting to cannibalize it. To create something new. It’s like going back to a two-year-old conversation with someone like, oh I actually have this one point and they’re like, “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

You just had your first solo exhibition at the Rachel Uffner Gallery. What are some of the things you learned from that experience?

It was my first time reiterating a point through so many pieces, so I was trying to find ways of using certain symbols and reiterating these symbols without it being too repetitious. To prepare to produce that much work and to reiterate a conversation about suffering and life and death, I went through as many different channels as possible and gleaned certain passages or symbols from different cultures, different theologies and tried to retranslate them through my own. And then trying to figure out ways to gracefully position them without it getting too boring but to still maintain a general kind of family tree. It was mostly a lot of thinking and a lot of reading different texts to try and basically dress the idea of suffering in 12 different ways. Even then there’s some repeat outfits, which is fine. We can do that sometimes.

What did your timeline look like?

What can I realistically produce in five months? I remember when I did a residency with my ex a while ago and we were there for four weeks and I got there and thought I could make five paintings in four weeks. And everyone was like, “You’re fucking crazy.” And then I ended up getting really close to that goal. So, if I can do four paintings in four weeks, I could probably do three paintings a month, and then ideally make 12 paintings by this deadline. Looking at the space, I wanted to have it look right and feel kind of full and then I just set my eyes on that and tried to work in sizes. With larger paintings, I try to make them on the simpler side and with smaller paintings, I can make them look a little more intricate. Having five months and setting up pretty high expectations, I definitely realized what I was capable of and what I was not capable of and really know the time that I need to do something, what’s basically physically possible and what is just super unrealistic. It’s nice to be able to learn that threshold of mine, but that was all in the technical production. What I’m really learning now is this sort of spiritual production in a way which is something I didn’t think about.

Did the show make you feel successful or change your perception of what success means?

For the first time, I feel a little more widely recognized in my labor. And then after a lot of heavy therapy throughout the year too, I was able to acknowledge my own labor in it. I feel a personal sense of success for having this goal and completing it. As far as the actual success of the show itself and how I feel as an artist finally making my way into that circuit, I realize that I am not necessarily too enchanted by acclaim. At the end of the day, the work just needs to get done. I just want to paint things that I would like to see and things that help me understand what I’m thinking and whatever reception comes of it, then that’s great––or not great––depending on what kind. I will not stop painting because it’s just something that I need to do. But for me, I’ve definitely learned it’s been more a personal success for myself, mentally and spiritually, which has been a pretty gratifying thing to experience.

Will you be approaching your work differently at all now?

It’s exciting, but it’s also kind of daunting because I feel like there’s going to be a little more attention as to how much of a lunatic I really am. And I am worried about how people are going to take my stance on things whether it’s through painting or on the internet, but I don’t think I will necessarily change that because as far as my presence goes in painting, it’s just funnier to be a bit of a kook and I’m going to roll with that. All things considered, I didn’t get here by being conservative or making works that people wanted to see. I have been doing me and maintaining that. And if I have to change that to progress, then that just sounds miserable. I wouldn’t be caught dead changing to somebody else’s will. It’s already hard enough to live this life.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sammy Maine.

As I often say, my dad is the youngest of 11 children and I was the last born of his generation, so I’ve always been the young one in the room observing and fascinated by my family’s history. I am also the one behind a camera or trying to jot things down to remember later. I think that’s always been my role in the family or my way of participating in the world.

But what really formalized what felt like my responsibility or inheritance was when I received the FBI dossier on my father. [Rodney Barnette’s 500-page surveillance file amassed during his time organizing with the Black Panther Party and helping Angela Davis in her fight for exoneration serve as source material for some of Sadie Barnette’s work.] As a family, we filed a Freedom of Information Act request in 2011. It took almost five years of going back and forth with the FBI to receive this 500-page surveillance file. It was very chilling and infuriating, and at the same time, it forced my father and I to have the kind of conversations that are easy to put off otherwise. That’s when my dad really became a central character in my work.

Caption: Untitled (Dad, 1966 and 1968), 2016, Diptych, digital c-print. Photo: John Wilson White. Image Description: Two photographs of Rodney Barnette. In the first image Barnette, a young person, is wearing an army uniform, in the second Barnette is wearing a Black Panther outfit.

Building on that, your work oscillates between intimate and personal, or public and collective. What do you hope your father’s story might bring to our collective understanding of history or how history is constructed?

I’ve always felt like the more specific I could keep my work and story, the more wide open and inviting, and in some ways universal, it is. The more personal it is, the easier it is for other people to locate history personally for themselves. It seems counterintuitive; the more it’s about us, the more it’s for everyone.

It’s also important for me to tell the stories that I know best. I try to stay focused on what feels like it’s mine to tell. And then hope that it will relate to other people, to wider histories, and on an emotional human level, beyond even the history of the Black Power Movement or any of the social structures that we’re living under.

There are always parts of the work that just connect us to what it means to be alive, and what it means to be a spirit in a human body, and what it means to be on this planet hurtling through space. By talking about these really specific things, it’s also leaving room for really abstract, existential quandaries or those big questions.

Caption: FBI Drawings: Picketing or Parading, 2021, powdered graphite on paper. Image Description: A black and white drawing of an FBI document charging Rodney Barnette with picketing or parading outside of a courthouse during Angela Davis’s 1972 trail. Sadie Barnette has redacted some of the information and drawn flowers on the document.

It’s so interesting to think about how many different stories and timelines we touch on in our lifetime.

Definitely, and how many stories are forgotten or how many stories someone has and you have no idea. One of the main reasons I wanted to tell my dad’s stories was because he wasn’t a famous or well-known person, even though it sounds like he would be based on how extraordinary his life is. So many people have these extraordinary lives that there’s no documentaries about, and no one knows about.

When I tell people my father founded the Compton chapter of the Black Panthers, they would ask, “What’s his name?.” They would expect to have heard of him in their history books. He was just a regular person. But that is true of so many people who are our uncles, teachers, whoever, who have intersected with all of these amazing moments in history. It is regular people who make history and then a few names get remembered and written about. I guess my work is also a way of de-centering this idea of the famous leader, these are families and regular people.

Caption: FBI Drawings: Mug Shot, 2021, powdered graphite and spray paint on paper. Image Description: A black and white drawing of Rodney Barnette’s mugshot. Sadie Barnette has drawn red and purple flowers around the image.

What are some key ideas to keep in mind when creating a work that is personal and about someone else’s life, even if it’s somebody who you know intimately?

If anybody is considering stories within their family, do not hesitate or put off recording the interviews or asking your family members questions. I think sometimes it feels invasive or awkward, but people usually want to share their stories and are happy to be seen in that way. Just go for it, just take out your phone and record.

How does being an artist and personally related to these stories allow you to engage differently than a historian or archivist? And, in your opinion, what is the role of artists in questioning public memory?

The way I move through the world and know how to make sense or find meaning in things is through making artwork. Because of the slipperiness that it allows, the contradictions that it’s able to hold, and because of the emotional registrar that is available .

I don’t think of artists as having more or less responsibility than anybody else. It seems like you can do that job in many different ways, whether it’s to critique or entertain or make money. For me, I’m thinking humbly about honoring and paying dues towards an inheritance of a history that has brought me to where I am. There’s just so many people, ancestors, and artists, and I move through the world in a way that would be unimaginable without them.

Caption: Installation view of Sadie Barnette: The New Eagle Creek Saloon, The Kitchen, New York, January 18, 2022–March 5, 2022 Photo: Adam Reich. Image Description: A fluorescent pink and glittery u-shaped bar with bar stools and a neon sign that reads EAGLE CREEK.

Thinking about creatively re-examining the past, your work seems to bend space and time so that the public can experience the essence of a past moment in the present. For example, for The New Eagle Creek Saloon [Barnette’s reimagining of the first Black-owned gay bar in San Francisco, owned by her father, which offered a safe space for the multiracial queer community], you reimagine your father’s bar, but it’s a recreation through your eyes and not a historically accurate representation. Can you talk about this approach or translation?

Early on it was a practical matter, in that I didn’t have a lot of documentation of what his bar looked like. I also realized that it was more important to make it feel how it felt, rather than look how it looked. For example, I didn’t want it to be reverent or quiet. I didn’t want my project to exist on walls, but instead to be in the center of any space and feel more like a beacon that’s drawing you into a central light within a space.

I wanted it to feel alive. To me that felt like the best way of honoring something that was so dynamic, by making something that would facilitate new connections, joking and dancing, and all of the texture of what the original bar was like.

I also noticed that it was important for my voice to be there. I think the spirit of the Eagle Creek would want me to put my artistic aesthetic at the forefront, because it wants everybody to dress the way they want and show up in the way they want.

I dialed up my perspective and authorship in the piece as well. In order for people to feel really cute and flirtatious and be excited to be in a space, I felt like it needed to be pink, holographic, and very aesthetically pleasing. And also look a bit contemporary so that it felt like it was rebranded for today because that would make it feel as hip as it felt then.

Caption: Tygapaw DJing at Sadie Barnette: The New Eagle Creek Saloon, The Kitchen, New York, March 5, 2022. Image Description: An image of the same bar with a DJ, DJ equipment, and smoke coming from a smoke machine.

With both The New Eagle Creek Saloon and The FBI Project in mind, can you talk about why it’s important to look back from the present moment?

It’s about looking back as a way of trying to understand where we could go and as a way of honoring those who have tried to change the world in big and small ways. I am paying tribute to the ways in which my father showed up with so much belief and hope and really tried to change things. It’s a meditation on people who dared to believe and then hopefully making space for future dreaming and daring. It seems like a beautiful way to move through life, thinking about how to make it better for more people.

This work is always relevant, even when you wish it wasn’t. Thinking about the The FBI Project, which at so many points coincided with developments around the surveillance of Black Lives Matter activists and the expansion of digital surveillance capabilities. All these things are still maddeningly relevant.

Caption: Installation view of Sadie Barnette: Inheritance, Jessica Silverman, San Francisco, November 20, 2021–January 8, 2022. Photo: John Wilson White. Image Description: A large, shiny, silver holographic couch with pink and purple glittery speakers on either side. A large black and white photograph of a woman reclining on a coach is hung above the couch on a wall with black and white wallpaper.

Totally and with that in mind, what do you see as the goal of your work?

I guess there’s the personal part of it, which is that it often keeps me from just spiraling off the face of the earth, to have something to focus on and to show up for. To know that I can’t do everything but I can make this one drawing. This one drawing isn’t going to undo state surveillance, but something is going to happen through making it that’s worth sitting down and showing up for.

To define what’s successful: I would say, when the work creates enough of a parameter that people are having an experience that isn’t all over the place, but at the same time the parameters are loose enough that people are having experiences that I didn’t necessarily think about or intend. So it’s directed but not didactic.

Also when other people see themselves in the work. When people are like, oh, this feels like my family or I recognize this living room or this kitchen, to me that feels like a successful reflection.

The Eagle Creek project feels successful when everyone forgets that they’re at an art installation and it just feels like a party. And you get that high that you get from dancing when you just get out of your own head, and get out of your own way and are just in this collective groove. I want there to be some generosity, or even seductiveness, where you want to be there and then you’re figuring out why or what it means.

Caption: Malcolm X Speaks, 2018, archival pigment print and rhinestones. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio. Image Description: A photograph of a hand with pink glittery, studded nails holding a book with a black and white image of Malcom X with a title that reads MALCOM X SPEAKS.

Building on that, your work deals with heavy subject matter from surveillance to homophobia, and racism, but you’re always centering joy, through color, glitter and by creating welcoming spaces. Can you talk about why joy is so important?

For me it goes back to my family and seeing that even as all of these really repressive structures are imposing themselves in people’s daily lives, it doesn’t mean that people were waiting for the perfect world in order to be their full selves…in order to wear their best outfit or to sing their best song, or cook their best meal. There’s something about both looking critically at the world, but also enjoying your life, and how we take care and show up for each other. And just how beautiful and cool people can manage to be, even in the face of adversity and dire circumstances or racism or the prison-industrial complex. It never took away from the magic and poetry of my family and Black creativity in this country.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Amelia Brod.

I can answer that in two ways. One is from a craft standpoint, I do find that every form feeds into the others. A really good example was that I think the column I wrote for Elle was successful mostly because I had a background in playwriting, so I was able to create a character that was a version of myself. The column was written as myself, but it was a bigger version of myself. Every column, I kind of approached like a frantic monologue. That’s a skill I wouldn’t have had if I wasn’t a playwright. And similarly, the newsletter helped bring me out of the elevated voice and feed into the memoir writing. They all make me better.

The other side of the answer is that I get very nervous that people are going to get sick of me, or that I’m going to get sick of myself, so I like to have a lot of irons in the fire. It’s really exciting to me, but it also is fueled by panic, like everything I do.

I’m surprised you’re nervous about people getting tired of you. Can you talk more about that?

One of the strange things about creating in our time is that any creation has now become creating content. I don’t think of myself as a content creator, but that’s sort of the paradigm in which I’m working. Because I write books that I would like people to buy, because I can see the open rate on my newsletter, and because I write plays and can count how many people are in an audience, I’m always aware that I’m not just creating for the sake of creation. I’m also creating for consumption.

And the positive way that I understand it, and I really do believe this, is that creating is sort of community-making. And I want to keep making community, and I want to respond to the feedback I get from the community that I’m trying to make work for.

It can be a little bit nerve-wracking to think that the people who I’m writing for, even though I may not know who they are, won’t always be interested. You never know when your time is up. There are plenty of artists that I used to go hard for, and now I’m like, “I don’t think so. I don’t really care.” That’s fine, but I don’t know what else to do in my life. And I’ve done a lot of things.

I’m not nervous about figuring out what to do, but I’m nervous about losing the community. I don’t want people to get sick of me, because I’m also writing humor, and humor has an interesting shelf life, but it also has a serious core. I want to make sure I’m still in tune with what the community wants and the conversation we’re having.

We’re talking about a sense of community, but from what I understand, most of your writing is pretty solitary. How do you make sure to get other people involved?

It’s become so prominent a need for me to be in conversation with other people. I got [The Ever Present] commissioned about a month before COVID. And the play was originally supposed to be about climate change because I didn’t know there were other disasters to be sorted out. It was a miserable writing experience because I was so separated from my process. It didn’t turn a corner until I was able to sort of re-engineer the community around me.

Over Zoom workshops and casual conversations, I seek out a lot of feedback. I’m very fortunate to be in the position to not just ask people to read things that I’m working on or talk to me about ideas, but to say, “Hey, can I pay you for your time?” Which is very important to me, but not something I was always able to do. I have a lot of brilliant friends to whom I say, “Hey, can I get two hours of your time on Zoom?” And we talk through the issues I’m having.

It’s also so crucial to me to just be out in life. I’m working on a pilot for a sitcom with a studio. It’s been sort of herky-jerky, slow-going. I haven’t been able to crack the series. And then, I was finally able to go back to Tavern on Camac in Philadelphia, which is my favorite bar. I hadn’t been there in two years. And then I went to a small wedding in Brooklyn and met some weird characters there. Soaking in socialization, in casual conversation and hearing people walking down the street, talking about stuff and having that ignite things in me, that changed everything for me. I rewrote the outline of the pilot, and one of the execs was like, “What happened? This is so much better than what you’ve been bringing us.” And I was like, “Oh, I got to leave my house.”

I didn’t realize until the past couple of years that as much as I’m doing solitary work, everything I do is built with the fingerprints of other people, strangers, baristas, friends, and editors. I have to become much more intentional about pulling those people in early and maintaining those connections.

It sounds like one of the main takeaways is knowing what your friends bring to the table, whether socially or in terms of your creative work, and leaning into that.

Yeah, absolutely. And it’s so funny—I don’t believe New York is somehow better at creating creative opportunities, but I’ve had to go up for work a couple of times over the last few months, and there are images and moments that spark things that happen very much in public that I don’t encounter in other places.

I was walking behind these two au pairs, and they were pushing strollers and texting furiously and navigating the sidewalk without looking up. I eventually got around them, and there were no babies in the strollers. And I was like, “What is this?” I think just allowing yourself to be confused and distracted is really crucial. And it’s harder to get that when you know exactly how things will go, when you’re going to the same space where nothing really happens.

Can you say more about confusion being valuable?

I was afraid of confusion and not knowing for a really long time. Whenever I do plays and TV, I do a lot of research. But the thing I always had to break myself away from was writing book reports, because eventually, you have to create something with a life of its own.

I feel like confusion is that sensation of getting lost in a foreign city or getting lost in your own city. I need to get lost in my own life because I have a more heightened awareness of the things going on around me, and I lose some of the security blankets I might otherwise cling to. And that opens this conduit through which creativity can flow better. Maybe that sounds esoteric or like I’m Jodie Foster in Contact, but that’s the way I feel.

I think that some confusion is structural or dramaturgical, and that’s very frustrating. There’s some confusion that’s like, “I don’t know what’s going to happen next in this scenario, in this relationship. I don’t know which way to turn on this path.” That reminds my brain, at least, that anything is possible. And then I can put that back in my work.

I want to rewind to something I was hoping to ask earlier. When you realize you’re spending too much time with one of your forms of writing over the others, how do you strike a balance?

I like to keep a lot of projects going at the same time, and I’m very fortunate that people want to work with me on different projects. But even still, why do I have two newsletters? That’s deranged behavior. I don’t know how to modulate or switch gears other than, when one writing form starts to require too much attention, I try to move it to a new phase and get it off my plate so I can get back to equilibrium.

How did you get into all of these types of writing? What made you want to balance so many types of writing?

A lot of it is just saying yes to opportunities. I started off wanting to be a novelist, and I do have a novel [Kings of B’more] that’s coming out in May. But I didn’t know how to go about it. I was also a very dramatic person, and I loved theater. My love of novels and my love of theater led me into playwriting.

To circle back to what we were saying before, a lot of my motivation for exploring different avenues and writing forms is confusion. I was confused about how to [have] a career as a novelist. I was confused about how to have a career as a playwright, and so I didn’t do those things. But I really felt this desire to write, so I started blogging. And then, I thought, “Maybe I’ll turn this blog into a book.” And then I asked a friend of mine who’s an agent, “Should I self-publish?” And he very bluntly said to me, “Who would read it? You don’t have an audience.” He was like, “You need to get some clippings,” so I started writing concert reviews for Philadelphia Magazine.

It’s such a circuitous path. Anytime somebody invites me to talk at a high school, I’m like, “Oh, these poor kids.” I just said yes to things that paid me a little bit of money, and in retrospect, it really looks like I had a plan, and I did not. Even now, do I have a plan? No. My manager will say, “What do you want to do next year?” And I’m like, “I don’t know.” That’s terrifying, because I’d like to know how I’m going to pay my mortgage next year. But it’s also the only way I know how to create. I need to figure out what questions I have creatively. And then I need to figure out how to pursue them. Sometimes, that process is reversed, and somebody says, “Hey, do you want to explore this?” And then, in the middle of the exploration, I’m like, “Oh, this is actually a creative question that I had.”

Since we’ve been talking about the many things you do, are there certain days or times that you devote to one art form or when you find yourself doing your best creative work?

Unfortunately, my process is so chaotic. It’s frustrating. I think a lot of my days are dictated by the calendar. With TV, there’s a lot of meetings. For a typical day, I’ll have a meeting at noon and one at 2:00 or one at 6:00. So then I’m trying to thread all my other things in between. It’s meetings and then deadlines. I have these two newsletters I send out, and they go out a total of three times a week. So it’s also like, depending on the day, do I need to write one of the newsletters?

When I left my job at Elle, I carved out a month to write my young adult novel. That was the first time I was ever able to say, “Every day is devoted to this project.” I’d wake up in the morning, read a young adult novel, and then I’d have lunch, and then I’d do some plotting on my novel, and then maybe I’d read another novel at bedtime. I did that for a month.

About midway through, I started writing more and reading less. It was incredibly productive. … I wrote most of the novel that month, and I really hunger for that. I worry that putting too many things on my plate with hard deadlines or a need to always be cultivated runs into that. I’m trying to write my newsletter in advance so I can push it off a couple of weeks, close out my calendar, and try to put blocks of nothing in my schedule so I can fill it with the deep work and exploration that’s really crucial.

This all makes me wonder, is burnout ever a thing that feels like it could be coming your way? And in moments when it does, how do you approach that?

I really worry about it. I feel like I’m burnt out right now. I don’t have much in the tank. It’s emotional, it’s where we are in the world. It’s also like, my personal life has gotten very complicated this year. And you can only do so much.

I try and structure release valves. Even just going up to New York, it’s really useful in terms of resetting, giving myself more, filling the tank back up, seeing a show. It’s really important to me. So is just stepping away. I was feeling burnt out at Elle. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. Everybody was really supportive, but I was writing a humor column in the pandemic, at the end of the Trump presidency. I ran out of ways to be funny in that context. That was really scary to me because I was like, “Well, this is your job. You don’t have something else lined up. What do you think you’re going to do?”

I was fortunate that I had this book deal, so I was able to be like, “Okay, well, I can figure it out.” And I was fortunate that the TV industry pivoted to writing over Zoom because I was able to keep working in that industry.

I booked myself this inexpensive Airbnb in Boulder because I have a friend who lives in Denver. I was like, “I’ll go out to Boulder. I’ll spend the week working on a book, and then I’ll hang out in Denver with my friend.” And then I didn’t do any work on the book. I came back feeling less burnt out, but not really. I’m like, “Well, I don’t know how to escape my life.” So that’s the question for next year. I’m also going to be thinking a lot about community and I’m really hungry for that. I wonder how we can keep redefining what community is and how we reach each other in ways that feel meaningful as opposed to draining. That’s something I’m really interested in.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Max Freedman.

I feel like it took a lot for me to get to that analogy between journalism and dancing—and in a way, the analogy alone was enough for me. But a lot of what journalism and dancing both manage is uncertainty. We don’t actually know what’s on the other side of that potential hostility: most of the time, neither our fantasies nor our fears turn out to be true. I guess for me it’s important to have a strategy for approaching the intensity of the world even before it’s important to anticipate what that intensity might give me. The similarities are also just very literal: like, how should I approach somebody I don’t know? How do I initiate a relationship with a stranger? I don’t want to be subject to the alienation that both the digital world and capitalism impose on all of us. I have a pretty strong desire to break through and make contact: for me, both journalism and dancing are about finding a form for that desire.

You mention strategy. Can you walk through what your reporting strategy looked like with this story in particular?

It was more reporting than I’d ever done—and maybe most people don’t even consider what I was doing real reporting! I actually have kind of a vexed relationship with reporting because I wasn’t trained that way; I was basically trained as a poet and scholar. I’m learning how to report on the fly and it obviously helps that I’ve had a brilliant editor [Sasha Weiss]. But I’ve only recently gotten comfortable with calling [what I do] “reporting” as opposed to “research.” I guess the distinction between reporting and research—beyond, like, professional dialect—has a lot to do with how we think about time. Journalism places the emphasis on the present, and research places the emphasis on the past. But I don’t relate to that segregation.

Aesthetically, a lot of the writing I love best experiments with our relation to time—weird books like Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue or Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights. I want my writing to meet you in whatever present we might share but scramble our sense of what the present might be made of. Before I started writing for the New York Times Magazine, I did sometimes record conversations, and I’ve always kept careful “field notes” or whatever. Even when I’m writing so-called “criticism” or something more archival, I always try to be attentive to the writing process as it transpires in real time. But the particular form of reporting that story required–approaching strangers in the moment–was pretty new to me, and the story now stands as a record of the way I felt my way through that experience. Reporting from a club or from a party…

Not crying in the club, reporting from the club.

Why not both? I’ve done both. It’s obviously a fool’s errand to try to interview people at the club. I was out with my little notebook, scribbling down truly random stuff in the dark, like “purple camouflage pants”…“Estamos Bien for funerals”…“secret g-spots in the sky”…When I was reporting from the Tony Touch set on the Coney Island boardwalk, I saw a beautiful woman improvising with a series of strangers—she was maybe in her fifties, and her versatility was incredible. With one partner she was fluid and yogic, with another she was all salsa, sazón. At one point I tried to gesture her away from the action, and I flashed my notebook as if that might mean something. But verbal desires are really hard to communicate nonverbally–all gestures on the dancefloor end up looking like dancing–so she thought I wanted to dance, and we did! We never ended up speaking. Encounters like that happened so many times.

It was impossible to record anybody on the dance floor, so I set up interviews with people after the fact, usually within a week, and we would talk on the phone about what they remembered—we’d begin with that night, but very quickly the conversations kind of tunneled back into childhood. Tap-dancing in the shower for the slapping sound, that kind of thing. I discovered people were really hungry to discuss those memories, stored in the body, that usually go unspoken. I think I interviewed 12 people on the record–substantial conversations, most of them lasted over an hour. I wasn’t able to quote all of them in the final version of the story, which was honestly devastating–on some level, it felt wrong. I guess that’s journalism, you’re never going to get everything in. But you should still consider–and mourn–all the directions the story didn’t go, the histories you didn’t tell, and the points of view that you didn’t take into account. I ended up spending a couple of weeks working on an email for my extremely infrequently used TinyLetter, following up on those dropped beats. I’m not sure how helpful that was, but I felt accountable to the generosity of strangers. The details they’d shared with me were too precious.

What would you say is your biggest draw to reported personal essays?

I guess I’m always thinking about the kinds of experiences I want to have in life. It was February [2021] when I pitched that story: I knew I wanted to make my attempt to pursue the joy we had been missing in Season One of the pandemic. The assignment gave me the infrastructure and accountability I needed to guarantee the experience. And in the very privileged case of writing for the New York Times Magazine, it also gave me the budget: I took Lyfts back from every party, I didn’t have to worry about tickets, and that enabled all kinds of adventures that wouldn’t have been possible for me otherwise. But even when I’m on my own dime, I only want to write stories that I also want to live. Of course that’s not always about seeking pleasure. But it is about seeking.

Speaking of thinking about how you want to live—how do you want to work? What are your ideal working or writing conditions.

Wow, you’re asking me to think about ideal conditions in this economy? I definitely stay chasing that! Even though I know that dependence is the nature of things and we shouldn’t be pursuing total self-sufficiency, I really prefer not to belong to specific institutions. Ideally, I don’t want anybody—any institution or person—to have a monopoly on my time. I want to feel like I am the nexus of my time. The question is really about how to preserve that “independence,” while also somehow securing necessary benefits like health care—and oh my god, time off.

I’m at a crossroads right now. I was dependent on the institution of Columbia University for the past six, seven years. The Ph.D. program gave me the baseline security I needed to develop a creative practice that could sustain me financially on the other side of it. I’m about to cross over into life as a full-time freelancer, and I feel proud that I’ve been able to engineer that transition somehow. But I’m also a little apprehensive about the risks. At the end of the day, I know that the true balance sheet is in the moment. If I’m not experiencing some level of freedom and fulfillment in how I spend my time and how I spend my energy, then what am I really pursuing?

How has family or community played a role in your development as a writer and an artist?

It’s hard to imagine how I would have become an artist outside of the context of the artistry that I observed growing up. Back in the ’70s, my mother was a performer in the Nuyorican scene and she curated events downtown. She did all kinds of things: she sang, she danced, she DJ’d, she participated in multimedia experiments. She had a government grant from CETA [Comprehensive Employment and Training Act], which funded artists for two years at a time–an actual living wage, with healthcare! She wasn’t a “working artist” when I was growing up, but I definitely experienced her that way. She exposed me to so much–Brazilian music, movies like Daughters of the Dust, watercolors, PBS documentaries about people like Joni Mitchell and Martha Graham. Cassandra Wilson. Gregorian chants. Little dance demos: the mashed potatoes. My grandma was also a singer and had two radio shows in Puerto Rico when she was in her early twenties, before she migrated. In Washington Heights, she worked grocery checkout at the local market, but that bohemian sensibility has always been very active in our line. I should also say that they–we–come from a culture in which art is understood in a more communal way. I don’t want to essentialize, but there’s definitely a more participatory thing going on in Puerto Rican culture. There’s music in the air and we all sing along.

Let’s talk a little bit about your translation work. You once wrote, “Even if your relationship with another language is strained, translation can transform your anxieties into the virtues of an artist.” How do you lean into those anxieties for the benefit of the work?

I think anxiety can, and perhaps should, provoke you to ask more questions. If you understand it as a natural part of the process, it can drive you deeper into the work. In translation, I also think anxiety signals that a real border is being crossed, even when you “belong” to the culture you’re translating from. Having certain fears about the risks involved in that traversal is healthy; it can cultivate respect. Sometimes the anxiety is telling you that you’re not the right person to translate a particular text—and that’s always worth considering as well. I understand it’s hard to learn to trust yourself, but I think letting some of those anxieties in can be ethically productive.

How have you managed your time and energy working on multiple demanding projects at one time?

I mostly don’t work on them at the same time. I try to parcel out my time in weeks or months, rather than parts of days, you know? But while I’m here in Puerto Rico, my dissertation is due soon and I have a draft of a short story [for the* New York Times Magazine*] due at the end of the month. So I’m thinking about both of them, I’m reading, I’m taking notes, I’m talking with my friend Elisa [Gonzalez] who’s here with me. Sometimes the cross-pollination can be generative: Freud might show up in an essay about R&B. But my book and my dissertation have taken a long time to incubate because I’m not a machine. It’s been three years since I sold my book proposal–it was just a proposal, so I hadn’t actually drafted any chapters at that point. It’s also been three years since I proposed my dissertation. In recent years I’ve been writing freelance, I’ve been translating, I’ve edited a bilingual anthology of Puerto Rican poetry with my friends Raquel Salas Rivera, Ricardo Maldonado, and Erica Mena. There’s been a lot going on, and it hasn’t been possible to integrate all of it into some kind of seamless production line. It’s not my preference to have as many projects going as I do right now: these last two years have involved an unsustainable intensity. I’m trying to trust that this work is leading somewhere that I want to be. At the same time, I’ve had to remind myself: If I don’t like how it is right now, if the day-to-day is too punishing, then that’s a sign that it’s not worth it anymore. It has to be worth it. Creative work shouldn’t just be about a future reward, because the future isn’t promised. It should also be rewarding in the present.

Tell me about a recent rejection that ultimately course-corrected you towards something better.

Oh, there are so many that it’s hard to pick one! I guess I was recently rejected from the Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant for the second time–a lot of great people got grants this year, so I’m not mad. In some ways, [rejections] are just a reminder that you’re in the game. You are living the life you say that you’re trying to live. But any application process is conditioned by so many social, political micro-factors. Rejections–and wins, for that matter!–are always an opportunity to observe where the rubber meets the road, and where our idealizations about the creative process interact with the world of authorizing and credentialing and funding. To some extent, you are being evaluated on your capacity to perform yourself as a creative product. We shouldn’t be too innocent about that.

You mentioned “performing yourself as a creative product.” How do you negotiate that performance on a day-to-day basis?

Sometimes I think of that Joan Riviere essay “Womanliness as a Masquerade” from 1929! Social media didn’t invent anything, but obviously it’s specifically designed to prey on the stresses produced by pre-existing social conditions. There’s so much toxicity there, so I try to take a lot of walks, to see my friends IRL. But I’m single and I live alone, so my moment-to-moment life is very quiet and interior—and sometimes the making of the day wants a witness. Not because I’m lonely, really, but because sometimes life asks to be shared. Or I admire something that I’ve made—and by that I mean a particularly custard-y scrambled egg—and the beauty seems to somehow exceed the capacity of the moment to carry it. That’s when I find myself turning to Instagram. There’s this passage from Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, which is delivered in the voice of this old white candy magnate, a very flawed character: “At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don’t need someone to share it with or tell it to.” Those words seem wise to me. But I’m not there yet.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sara Tardiff.