Insecurity vs. Inspiration

Since I started working in more of an editor and mentoring role at my job, I’ve fallen in love with this quote from the movie “Wonder Boys”, which is pretty faithfully based on the novel with the same title by Michael Chabon. It’s spoken by Grady Tripp, a college writing professor, to his book editor:

“Nobody teaches a writer anything. You tell them what you know. You tell them to find their voice and stay with it. You tell the ones that have it to keep at it, you tell the ones that don’t have it to keep at it, too, because it’s the only way they’re going to get where they’re going. . . . Helping my students figure that out … that, and Sara. That’s what’s made these last years worthwhile.”

That passage seems to me equally applicable to teaching as it is to music or painting or any art. Which is probably one reason Chabon is such a good writer … the bastard. I figure the best I can do in my quasi-teacher role at work is just what Tripp says, and to try to set a good example through my own writing.

My own writing. . . . Yes, and what about that? It’s funny (or not) how often insecurity rears its head in that regard. No matter how often I tell myself that I’m not writing for them, I’m writing for me, somehow it always seems to matter what they think. Someone tells me he or she read something I wrote and I freeze. What do I say? “Thanks?” “Did you like it?” More often than not I make a joke about the six other people who also read it, or I quickly backpedal into some kind of awkward chit-chat. Most people with whom I’ve had the “I read your. . . .” conversation probably were left with the impression I’d rather they hadn’t read whatever it was they read. Which is 180 degrees from the truth, of course.

I want people to read what I write. But I don’t want to ask anyone to read it, and I would just as soon undergo waterboarding as ask someone what he or she thought of something I wrote. I can play that off by pretending I don’t care what anybody thinks. While sometimes there’s truth to that, it’s really just a façade constructed to protect my ego.

I face a similar situation at work. I wonder if the advice I’m giving means anything to anyone, or if they all think I’m full of shit. I’m pretty sure if they thought I was full of shit, they’d let me know, or I’d at least sense it.

Some days I feel so old, like a grizzled veteran handing down kernels of journalistic and writing wisdom. Other days I feel like I just started myself, and I have no business telling anyone anything. Where do artists get the confidence to overcome that? Where do teachers?

Maybe we never overcome it, per se. Maybe we just stare it down as best we can, as often as we can, and success is when we manage to get up in front of a crowd (literally for some, figuratively for others) and do the thing each of us does. That way is found inspiration, rather than insecurity.

Imbalance

You know that feeling like you’re swimming against a current? Like everything you try and do is meeting this weird resistance – some kind of negative karmic polarization. I’ve had that feeling recently. It’s as if there’s a gentle hand on my chest, not pushing me backward, exactly – the force isn’t that strong – but firmly pressing against me, like a friend pretending to try and keep you out of a fight he really kind of wants to see you in. Sometimes the resistance is steady and persistent, sometimes it’s more like an occasional gentle shove.

I really felt it Wednesday. I fought against a mild current of it pretty much all day, slogging through phone calls and other tasks that seemed fairly spread-out and manageable at the start of the day, but which as the clock hands fell toward evening increasingly seemed targeted toward keeping me from leaving when I needed to leave.

People who know me know I’m generally 10 minutes late … consistently and to just about everything. Commercials before movies in the theater, annoying as they are, were made for me because now I can still make it in time for the previews. I used to set my watch and all my clocks 10 minutes ahead to compensate, but that didn’t work because I knew all the clocks were fast. It sounds like a joke, but it’s true. I’d eat through that 10 minutes, plus 10 more. Even when I’m five minutes early (or five minutes late to you), something will happen to add those five minutes back.

Same thing happened today. First I was delayed at work, and then the train stopped short of the station at which I needed to get off and sat for five minutes. Then of course I was late (not 10 minutes late, but still late) and flustered and pretty much nothing seemed to go right after that.

But it’s not just a being late thing. Recently I just feel a step off – I’m catching the joke a hair too late, just missing a call, walking too fast in downtown crowds or too slow, reaching an elevator as the doors close on me and then lurch back open, missing the bus, missing the train, catching all the yellow lights. I’m a half-stop off, a few degrees out of time. In general, not quite right and running a little rough.

This syndrome smacked me upside the head on a recent trip to Oregon. It was like I wasn’t supposed to go; the force was working against me. Southwest forgot to put my bag (and the bags of about 80 other passengers) on our nonstop flight to Portland. My rental car ate one of the two CDs I really wanted to listen to while driving – on the first day. My replacement car was half-car, half-monster truck. It snowed in places in Western Oregon where it hardly ever snows. There was a tornado in Vancouver, Wash. I got a bogus parking ticket while visiting friends in Tacoma, Wash. The pump at the gas station on the way to the airport kept clicking off, and the one attendant (no self-serve in Oregon) was too busy to pay attention. There was construction on the usually empty freeway out to the airport.

Which isn’t to say the trip wasn’t enjoyable, it was. But there were all these … things. And they’ve continued to varying degrees since I’ve been back.

Things just don’t feel quite right. I mean, there are plenty of reasons for things in general not to feel quite right, but this is different … this is like being out of synch with the universe or something. I’m trying to play bluegrass while everyone else is singing a dirge. I’m walking on the right but everyone else is walking on the left. Not to complain, because I know you don’t care, but it’s tiring. Hmm. Now I’m trying to recall the last time I wasn’t tired, like tired to my bones. It’s been a while. And yet, I can’t sleep, at least not when I’m supposed to.

Maybe that’s it. I am by nature a night person. I’m just getting cranking at 10 p.m., but that alarm clock is set for 6:30 … a.m. that is. The butt-crack of dawn. I think that’s where my synchronization begins to break down. I’ve been shoe-horning my life into “regular business hours” ever since I can remember. That’s what we do, right? That’s acceptable. And most of the time it fits OK, that schedule. But maybe sometimes things just get a little out of rhythm, out of round, and the drum starts banging against the side of the washer in spin cycle.

What happens then? You shut it down and rebalance. Not an option here. Shit, I just took a vacation. I just gotta hope that things find their center with time. Maybe with the spring … winter, after all, sucks.

In the meantime, I guess you’d best steer clear if you want to keep your baggage and your CDs, or if you don’t want to run smack into me as I’m tottering along the sidewalks, trying to regain my balance.

The Musical Revelation

I recently began taking guitar lessons. I phrase it that way because saying I recently started “playing guitar” would be too complimentary to the limited ability I’ve been able to pull out of my hands and fingers. But even this relatively tiny amount of music I have been able to play, and the little bit more I’ve learned about music and about the people who make music, since I started the lessons has opened a new window into the art of expression.

Music has always been something I enjoyed. There are certain things I know I like—the way a driving beat can push you through a song, or the way a nice melody can pull you through, or the stories told by the lyrics. I don’t limit musical likes (or dislikes) to one genre. I have placed at the same time in the little three-CD shuffler at home Nanci Griffith, the Cars and Asleep at the Wheel; The Gipsy Kings, Harry Connick Jr. and Dave Matthews; the Dixie Chicks, Counting Crows and Bon Jovi.

I’ve been to concerts by Sting, U2, James Taylor, Kenny Loggins, Robert Plant, Joan Baez, INXS, the Black Crows, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Tracy Chapman, Springsteen, the aforementioned Asleep at the Wheel and plenty more.

Until recently my experience listening to music on CDs and at concerts has been pretty much the same: the music has come at me and I’ve listened. Sometimes in the right frame of mind it has washed over me and given me peace, or it has energized me. I’ve listened to lyrics I admired and some I thought were ridiculous and contrived. But music has always been a thing done by someone else that I either enjoy or don’t, and I never felt a personal connection beyond identifying with a favorite song.

I think now that’s because I never knew anyone who really made music; I only knew people who played music. Consequently, I hadn’t paid much attention to where music came from—its roots. What was the genesis of a song line “Mr. Jones,” for instance, or “Fast Car?” I liken it to reading the newspaper before I started writing for one. It was just news that I read, without any consideration for how that paper got in my hands.

But starting in 2003 when we moved back to Chicago from New York and took an apartment downstairs from a self-styled country and western singer/songwriter named Urban Djin, and continuing recently with my group guitar lessons, I have met people who make music. They conjure it out of thin air. They’re not cover bands, although they cover songs they like; they are their own bands.

When we lived below Urban, he was working in the recording studio on his “Enabling Angel” album , and we could hear him practicing. We’d watch him perform at the Smoke Daddy on West Division on occasion. When he finished the initial studio work, he gave us a CD he copied from the studio master and asked us to listen to it and tell him what we thought. I didn’t know enough about music to give him any information that he could have really used, I’m sure, but it felt special to be included that way. It liken it to what Jonathan Lethem’s friends probably felt if he handed out drafts of “Motherless Brooklyn” looking for feedback.

I loved Urban’s CD; I still do. I don’t love every song, but by and large I think it’s musically adventurous and I respect him for having that inside him and I respect him even more for managing to get it out of himself and into a format that can be enjoyed by others. That’s the thing about music: you can write it, but it doesn’t really come alive unless someone plays it. Once that happens, it’s instant art.

The woman who teaches our guitar class, Lisa DeRosia, has her own band, Lush Budgett. I’ve not seen them play live, but I caught Lisa fronting the Hoyle Brothers western swing band a few weeks ago at the Empty Bottle. She played the second half of their show, Urban the first half, although I didn’t know Urban would be there. Anyway, Lisa and Lush Budgett have two albums out. They have a sampling of four of their songs on the band’s MySpace page. I finally had to buy the CDs on CD Baby because I kept visiting the MySpace page and skewing their listening numbers.

I don’t know Lisa at all beyond the reality that she took a group of nine people—most of whom had never even held a guitar until that first night of Guitar I class—and in eight weeks taught us to play some music. Our odyssey will continue with Guitar I Repertoire this month. But I can say this about her music: If I had never met Lisa and had instead stumbled upon the Lush Budgett MySpace page, or heard one of the CDs at a party or in a restaurant, I still would have bought these CDs.

Associating music with a person, for me anyway, changes the dynamic of my musical experience. Urban and Lisa wrote their stuff and played it. They translated feelings into art. The fact that the two of them are working people grinding it out in Chicago, just like the rest of us, heightens the experience of hearing the music come through the speakers.

I hear music differently now, and I am gaining an appreciation for music that is less produced and more raw, straight from the heart as opposed to being filtered through the recording industry and the mass market. I’ve been listening to a lot of Mark Kozelek recently, for instance, his Sun Kil Moon “Ghosts of the Great Highway” album, and other songs on YouTube. That’s raw, emotional stuff. The stuff of great writing.

Knowing about these people that they made this music I enjoy gives me added hope that I can one day accomplish the same thing in terms of expression with the printed word that others do through music.