Chasing the Glow
#145: Art and Auroras, Etsy Rebels, Against Creativity (Oli Mould), YAC, L. Frank; More Meute, Tank and the Bangas, Noy Narciso x 2 w/Hikut-Hungihong Art Collective.
HERE & NOW
We have a car today because a friend asked us to drive him to the airport, and in return we will have his car for a week. Various projects requiring a four-wheeled vehicle are planned. But today is also a work day, so other projects may have to wait.
This seems like such a boring topic to write about—I should be dispensing wisdom, offering forecasts of doom or penetrating criticism of some system or other. But, no, it’s a day in the life of an artist/writer/prole. Occasionally I stop my tasking and quickly draw and/or dribble watercolors on a piece of paper, hoping that the ancestors and gods will speak to me through it. And perhaps they do, but my tuning-in skills are just so-so. I miss a lot.
I always have difficulty naming an art work. It seems so cold to just number them or call them “Untitled.” So I’ve started lifting phrases from my poems and using them for titles.
Did I mention that flowers are blooming? That the sun is shining and tossing out gigantic flares from the biggest solar storm since 2005? Here on the border between northern and southern California, we may even get a tiny glimpse of the aurora borealis.
In 2005 I was in Washington State during the last solar storm. My friend Margo and I were taking a ferry back to Seattle from one of the islands in Puget Sound (Vashon, I think). Despite the freezing wind, we went out to the stern deck to look for auroras, joined by a small group of strangers all jacketed and muffled against the cold. And there it was: not the gigantic curtains of glowing color I expected—but a shifting, luminescent green blob in a sparkling black sky that was one with the black waters of the Sound. We laughed and congratulated each other, feeling lucky to get even that small glimpse.
Aurora borealis over Washington State, 2017, video by Alex Spaeth:
RABBIT HOLE
Today I’m featuring the collective Rabbit Hole: art sites that consider collective and collaborative support, growth, and being:
A group of Etsy artists rebelled against Etsy and formed their own Artisans Cooperative (article in Shareable).
One of the three criteria is that the goods sold on the platform must be crafted with “the workmanship of risk.” The idea comes from the artisan David Pye, and according to the Artisans Cooperative website, “In essence, it means that at some point in the process, the artisan could ruin the work.”
I’ve been reading Oli Mould’s book, Against Creativity. Here’s a good summary of his work and his thesis:
Youth Arts Collective (YAC), founded by Meg Biddle and Marcia Perry, is doing some great work for youth artists in Monterey. Hear it from the young artists themselves:
Photographer, artist, and tribal scholar L. Frank Manriquez on “re-membering” and coming together (from Reflections of Life):
SOUNDINGS
How New Orleans shapes the improvisatory music of Tank and the Bangas:
Hikut Hungihong Artist Collective of Davao (Philippines), with DIY instrumentalist Norman “Noy” Narciso, performing “Surplus Collaborative Music Improvisation”:
Noy Narciso gives a TED talk about his DIY instruments and the joys of improvising:
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Meute: “Pack” (in French)