In thanks for art

A news story motivated me last week.

It was another story from that world my family and I entered twelve years ago as we worked our coffee shop on University Avenue. The avenue is aptly named the “central corridor” between St. Paul and Minneapolis and in lieu of the “central corridor light rail” that is about to begin construction, a building that housed some of our favorite artists from that five-year sojourn, has been sold. The new owners, with an eye toward the future, plan to develop market-rate apartments. The artists, who considered themselves part of a casual co-op, and part of a community that has dotted the former industrial warehouses with studios, particularly near the area of University and Raymond, are being displaced.

Dan Mackerman, who has been housed there twenty years and who was one of our most popular regulars, told the reporter that he remembered when there used to be two coffee shops (among other businesses). I felt sure that memory referred in part to us, and took it personally. It made me want to say, “Thanks, Dan, for remembering us,” and to feel this catch in my chest, the kind you feel when a casual acquaintance like him is about to disappear after years of enjoying that feeling that you knew where he was – no matter that you never stopped by to visit or planned to.

My cousin Nina visited from Louisiana one year while we were still in business. Mia and I were working the shop. Angie had moved into an apartment over an art gallery a half block up on Raymond and worked there as a part-time receptionist while going to school. My cousin thought we were all “living the life,” that we were sort of bohemian I suppose. We took her to visit the building now condemned to this new fate – the building all the locals call the C and E building, and to see Dan. I was afraid we might be a bother but he was as gracious a host as someone who might have invited us into his living room. He was in his element, just being himself.

Dan did sculpting too and he’d come into the coffee shop a real mess – as dirty as a construction worker at times. Finally I asked him why and he pulled out the Harry Potter head he was carrying from under his arm. He was sculpting a show for a Dayton’s (or Macy’s…or Marshall Field’s) Christmas display – the kind that attract crowds who walk through this enchantment on their way to visiting Santa Claus.

I used to pine over the idea of being like those “small artists” I came to know from the C and E building. They were simply doing what they loved to do and making a small living from it (the reason I called them “small artists”).

There’s something you have, an aura you have about you when you’re doing what you love to do and you even have a little of it when you’ve taken the risk of it and it hasn’t turned out as you’d hoped. (As Cher says, “Mistakes are vastly underrated.”) When you take the risk of expressing yourself, in whatever way moves you, you give yourself a chance to be your own person at the same time that you can find yourself blending into a community of some like folks, so that you are – (even us in our coffee shop) supporting an alternative way of life.

There was, being surrounded by artists, an element of something like surprise. I’ve not been in too many places like it – because it wasn’t just the artists who were unique and surprising but most everyone who came in the door, as if the area bred folks who weren’t so on a schedule that they still had time for the kind of conversation that makes for interesting exchanges and the feeling of a common bond.

Being at the shop was like living in the world in a way I’d never experienced when I was taken care of by a boss and a payroll and was kept, quite literally, sequestered away from the environmental/political/social effects you feel when you’re making your own way.

There are those who say creativity on demand is as much of a grind as anything else, and I suppose they’re right, but it’s a different grind, and that’s what shows. You see it in the eyes. It’s kind of a look that says, “I’d rather be who I am and be poor than live any other way. You can’t do anything to me worse than I’d do to myself by not living my life this way.”

The article included a notice that the artists were having their last open house. I went to see Dan. He’s superbly talented. (www.danmackerman.com) He was so funny. He talked in this ordinary way (when we were conversing) of such profound things, and then ended on the note that the key to being an artist is low overhead.

I talked with Bob Donsker, who is doing a photographic collection of abandoned buildings in the Twin Cities and thinking of a coffee table book. There’s such a story there – full of pathos and history and insight.

I told Dean Lucker, who recognized me (and didn’t…Where do I know you from?) that I thought of him and them as “small artists.” He said, “Then you got it long before I did, but that’s what we are.” He started in his direction, (mechanical art) he said, by taking apart toys as a child – none of them his own. I love hearing that kind of thing.

I guess the main thing certain people, and even areas of town can give you, (until they get sold-out anyway) is a glimpse of another way. I know I shouldn’t romanticize it…like the people did who thought we were “living the life” when we owned the shop, but I still do, and there’s a reason for it. Someone has to keep up the lost art of alternative and artful living.

People who give off that aura of simply being who they are, have figured out a few secrets. Like “low overhead” some of them are practical. But those aren’t the ones that help you keep your dreams and not feel undone by your difficulties. It’s just them; just the people; the individuals. They’re the ones who remind you of what is possible and who keep a certain style of living from ceasing to be.

On this day after Thanksgiving, I’m thankful to all artists everywhere, and especially to these local ones.

Avatars

I’ve had two friends tell me in recent weeks about how good it feels to send things out – letters and emails. One was my friend in Norway who writes me real letters that he posts with a multitude of pretty stamps. He’s said I don’t need to worry about responding. He loves getting up in the morning and putting pencil to paper and sharing what’s in his heart. Then a woman whom I share a lot with had her e-mails to me start bouncing back two and three days after sending them. She said it wasn’t response she needed so much as it was knowing that she was being heard. To send them out into the void, not knowing if I was going to get them, started to get to her.

I don’t have this blog set up in a way that tons of folks know about it and so I don’t get a lot of response, and that’s been fine by me. It’s the act of expressing myself that I enjoy and even require. But I admit that when you’re doing something like this and you take a break from it, and you have a hard time getting back to it, it’s because you start wondering why you do it. Why you take the time to do it is part of it. But there’s a bigger question (or two).

Why do I want to share what’s in my heart – even if not a soul is listening? Why do any of us?

And, When did we quit, and why would we question the value of it?

Those are bigger questions than why anyone starts a blog, but they’re related. When you get started on something like a blog, and you like it, and it takes on a life of its own – that’s just an amazing thing. I mean, maybe you start out to tell a story or write about one situation – the one you faced yesterday and that’s still on your mind today – and pretty soon, something else entirely other than what you started out with is happening. I’d say it’s like going into an antique shop – you never know what you’ll find.

So I was musing on this last night and this morning, being that it’s Sunday and there’s a book section in the newspaper, I went looking for it. I got hijacked by the article on the first page of Sunday Life. It’s about Avatars.

After reading the article, replete with “self-portrait avatar” renditions, I looked up the word avatar.

Avatar: decends from ava – away + tarati he crosses over.
1: the incarnation of a Hindu deity (as Vishnu) 2 a: an incarnation in human form b: an embodiment (as a concept or philosophy) often in a person 3: a variant phase or version of a continuing basic entity.

Fascinating.

The article highlights a number of avatar artists concluding with Dennis Calero, who does freelance comic-book art. “He decries today’s rampant “culture of celebrity” and thinks it healthy when “people wake up and say, ‘I don’t want to worship another person.’”

Instead, they want to express themselves, be made known as who they are, rather than as who people take them to be. Like anything else, this can be shallow or profound.

It’s kind of like the yearly self-portraits I mentioned a while back. One year, I was trying to do “literal” art. I first painted a sunrise. It was awful. As elementary as a kid’s would be but without the charm. I was so frustrated by it that I painted a second one. I was bolder and the feeling of “something happening” came in the midst of it. When it was done I liked it.

I decided to do the same thing with that year’s self-portraits. They’re the images at the top of this post. The first was literal. The second was what I painted when “something happened” as I worked on it. I got this feeling in my chest of a sort of excitement/dread/compulsion. I had no idea why I was adding the things I was adding, what the color choices were about, none of it. When it was done my daughter walked by my room and said it was a little scary. It is. But I like it. I see it as kind of cosmic and having some strength and power.

Then the whole process of painting the literal and the non let me see something new about life, and particularly about the process of creating. “Literally” I was standing in my room pacing around an easel or sitting at my desk drinking coffee and typing. That’s all you’d see. But what was happening, especially as I wrote the books of A Course of Love, was not what you’d see. The “literal” had little relation to the non-literal experience.

So there's other possible descriptions of the avatar -- could be a stylized likeness of an Internet user, or could be a non-literal expression of an experience.

Quotes from "A Face in the Crowd," St. Paul Pioneer Press, 12-6-09, p. E1, by Julio Ojeda-Zapata.