Special: four years of Record Store
I am seeing the future and it's looking very bright
Thank you for reading Record Store. I know I say it every year, but I’m incredibly grateful for you; I’m always surprised by this anniversary when it comes up, because writing to you makes the time fly, makes the work easy. This project addresses aspects of myself and my thoughts about music and culture that I never thought anyone would have reason to read—through you, I am seen.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about community, and how the history of music reveals an evolution towards the singular experience we cultivate today, through algorithms and headphones. I’ve been thinking about symphony halls and padded practice rooms and the basements where I learned to sing. I’ve been thinking about what will save us, as artists and listeners, from ourselves, and our fear of each other, learned over years of growing up in houses without porches.
I recently attended a show in the back of a bar, in a part of the city I never visit. As we walked in, my friend remarked, “This is the perfect sized venue.” The stage was two feet off the ground and the band stood in an arrowhead, the four members forming a node to which all the people in the audience were connected. I felt that we were making a constellation, our shape interpretable but without design.
A few days ago I read the poem “Passengers” by Denis Johnson and felt changed by it. When asked, I could not describe how it made me feel. I was flummoxed, frankly, by the premise of the question. Thinking about this experience has made me realize that my relationship with art that touches me most deeply exists on a plane without language or even a semblance of language, without images or colors. This plane is like tying a knot a bite of rope, two points connected where before there was the space of interpretation between them. It’s like when you start thinking in a foreign language, and your brain skips over the translation back and forth. It’s like when you just know exactly what it means.
It’s interesting then, that I choose to work in the medium of newsletter, of criticism, because it is the work of interpretation and reinterpretation, an extrusion of art. But in “On Beauty and Being Wrong,” Elaine Scarry writes, “The arts and sciences […] have at their center the drive to confer greater clarity on what already has clear discernibility.” The essay describes also how beauty begets beauty, incites reproduction (“When the eye sees someone beautiful, the whole body wants to reproduce the person,” in reference to da Vinci’s urge to draw and paint beautiful people he encountered) and revisitation, a thought that surfaces again and again. I engage in this kind of appreciation of beauty when I review an album for a publication, when I hide a piece of a song I love in a song of mine, and when I write an article for this newsletter. Something moves me, and I want to share it even though I cannot even hope to describe it.
I started reading The Artist’s Way. I think it might be making me religious; in the introduction, Julia Cameron levels with readers that although she does not require belief in any specific god, her methods are based on the acceptance that there is a larger creative force from which all creativity stems. She refers to this force in the book as God. Part of the program is to tell yourself affirmations about your creativity and your inner artist, such as: My dreams come from God and God has the power to accomplish them. I am willing to let God create through me. There is a divine plan of goodness for my work. As I told myself these things, out loud, alone in my house, I felt legitimately uplifted by the idea that creativity is larger than me, that if I allow myself to be a channel, it will flow through me without need for my direction. I want to stop feeling paralyzed by the fear that I will make something bad. I want to just start making things.
The Artist’s Way posits that you must give yourself time and space to play to see creativity move through you, that you must waste time. I dislike wasting time as much as the next guy, but I have come to appreciate rest in the past year in ways I never imagined. I have my own affirmation written on my desk, probably lifted from something I saw on twitter (just keeping it real): I can achieve my wildest creative dreams by going slow and resting often. I have started making intentional space in my week just to think, and you would not believe the ideas for this newsletter that come to me in that time. Is it god? Is it the right brain? Is it the right combination of coffee and eight hours of sleep?
Everyday since he died, I have thought about David Lynch. I don’t always feel like I am mourning him, the way I did when Joan Didion died, but I think often about his work, and his commitment to art, and his reticence to explain what his movies meant. I have watched many times the weather report where he says, I'm wearing dark glasses because I am seeing the future and it's looking very bright. I have always loved him, but I love him more now because I feel like I understand him on that plane that forgoes language.
Happy Stackaversary! Here’s to many more! 4 years already? Time is screaming by…