Some Serious Business presents #FiftyQuestions to highlight folks who are creating, presenting, questioning and critiquing. Each featured artist picks a handful of questions to answer.
4- Describe your ideal workspace.
Before 2 p.m.: outdoors, sunny, little to no wind, a cup of black coffee, a loaf of bread and olive oil, a giant table, plenty of paper of various sizes and types, a crude pencil with a sharpener, an eraser, some fine-tip pens, a small plastic ruler, the smell of piñón or salt water, the sound of birds or people in the near distance, a quiet dog sitting under something shady…all adjacent to a large-windowed, light-color-walled adobe or cabin or apartment with a stack of books; another larger table with more pencils, markers, and papers; a laptop; the quiet dog following inside. At 2 p.m.: a glass of water, sheer curtains, increased urgency from distant birds or distant people. After 2 p.m.: a resonant space some short walk away from the first two spaces, with the quiet dog, a glass of bourbon, more pens, more paper, an old slightly out-of-tune piano, solitude for a mile, an audio recorder, and some lamps with incandescent bulbs.
16- What do you worry you will never be able to express?
Sincerity. Each time I try, it comes off—to me at least—as trite and tired. If I write exactly how I feel and exactly what I’ve experienced or read, I hit walls—inspiration tends to leave me (or the project) and I get really sad on behalf of all art. It’s very dramatic. No one looks good. I just wallow away and watch Avengers movies. But when I twist my sincerest feelings with what I imagine other folks feel or think, that is, when I get out of my head and into imagined heads all over the world, I feel satisfied. This has guided my creative life, but oh boy…I so worry about making overtly personal music, or writing overtly sincere prose. I hope I can get to it one day, but it doesn’t seem any more attainable than it did a few years ago.
27- What is your artistic relationship to loss? Either personal loss, or lost works of art, or other kinds of loss?
I lose everything. I can’t be trusted with anything important. Wasn’t always this way, I was once very responsible with stuff. But now not so much. At the moment I’m trying to be a person who doesn’t stress about the temporality of things.
28- When does joy tend to visit you?
When I see others around me being visited by joy too. I draw so much from the joyful environment of others. The pinnacle, for me, is the palpable joy of an audience while I’m performing. If I can tell people are into it, the joy feeds back to me in waves and waves. Every sound is a great sound. Every word is spoken in delight. Every gesture becomes exaggerated: kicks are bigger, stretches higher, primal screams more primal, drums beaten louder and fuller. I’m cutting out the bitter. I’m cutting out the exhausted. I’m cutting out the desperate.
38- How important is it to you that others connect, understand, and appreciate your work?
It’s paramount that others connect and appreciate it. Understood is more of a gray area. Sometimes I’d like people to understand every word, but more often I like to make work where there’s too much to grab onto at first listen. That’s my favorite work to experience from others as well.
49. If you could be anything besides an artist in human form, what would you like to be?
A shape-shifting space creature of pure light (as long as I have mastered faster-than-light propulsion).
