What is the legacy you want to leave behind? As a person, you can hope your family will remember you. As an artist, you usually hope for a little more. If you're ambitious, you crave a lot more.
I began to reconsider this question as I walked from The Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco this week. I was among several hundred lucky people who got to see the first open dress rehearsal of the mega-hit musical Hamilton. We didn't have to pay, because the production wanted an audience to warm them up for their extensive run.
Before the show began, Director Thomas Kail introduced himself, and asked us not to Tweet or Facebook or Instagram our experiences. Because offering opinions about a show before it opens is just bad form.
But Kail also expressed that the experience of seeing this live production (a beautiful one, by the way, but don't mistake that for a review) was a shared experience that cannot be recreated through social media.
You can tell a lot about a person by what they try to destroy.
That is what they fear.
Women. Children. Veterans. Artists. Muslims. Mexicans. Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, Gypsies, Trans people, Syrians. Park Rangers, astronauts, First Nations, and the very air we breathe.
Where did it start, the unraveling of Drumpfiana? When they tried to shut up park rangers, after the wall, before the wall, the animated gif of him scowling at Melania.
What will stop him? RogueNASA, Sanctuary Cities, altEverythingNotTrump?
Grants cut. Climate change silenced, yet sprouted up again in a thousand tweets by Badass Park Rangers.
His grubby tiny hands deep in the pipeline, he and his dinosaurs conspire to ravage Dakota, which is already spilling.
Gay rights shoved back decades, in an "Orwellina nightmare," to before Drumpf mentor Roy Cohn's could imagine such grand-scale evil a mere glimpse in the corner of his bugged out eye.
As we dive butt-first into a new year, I was going to repost one of the lovely retro New Year's Eve scenes from my past two books, Every Time I Think of You and Message of Love.
But you'll have to check my older posts, or read the books themselves, to enjoy those. It's not that I'm being cautious, but more justifiably outraged by the level of Orwellian idiocy now taking place when authors dare to share their political views.
The simple act of publishing one's thoughts and opinions these days has taken on an absurd level of what I term 'call and irresponsibility.'
Author Kevin Sessums achieved headline news when his post critiquing Trump supporters was only hours later deleted, and his use of Facebook withheld by the bot-like underlings of the social media behemoth.
An excerpt of Sessums comments:
“Matthew Dowd who holds Trump and his followers to the standards of
any other politician and hers. But as those who do hold Trump to the
standards of any other person have found out on Twitter and other social
media outlets these Trump followers are a nasty fascistic lot. Dowd is
lucky he didn’t get death threats like Kurt Eichenwald. Or maybe he did
and refuses to acknowledge them. If you voted for Trump and continue to
support him and you think you are better than these bigoted virulent
trolls, you’re not. Your silence enables them just as it did in the
racist campaign that Trump and Bannon ran. In fact, hiding behind a
civilized veneer in your support of fascism I consider more dangerous.
We’re past describing you as collaborators at this point. That lets you
off the hook. You’re Russo-American oligarchical theocratic fascists.”
How do we find inspiration to make art in difficult times? What kind of art should we make when our lives are being disrupted by the most absurd and clearly corrupt election in decades? What should be our response?
It's been raining nearly every day and night here in the San Francisco Bay Area. I've not gone out as much as I usually do, and turning it all off to watch a movie or read a book has become a sort of conscious avoidance.
Usually, rainy days and nights are a great inspiration to stay in and be creative. I did some of that; sorted, filed and photographed all of my visual art (yes, I do that, too), refiled manuscripts and research files, and even converted a few old VHS tapes of my dance and performance works to DVDs.
But doing administrative work is not creating work. And as the rain continues, despite the ecologic good it's doing for our drought-ridden state, the rain feeds my sense of dread.
