Work: Surviving the Arts

Exploring issues of sustainability in the arts.

~by Scott Pinkmountain

City Walls

 

Out grabbing a quick burrito one night shortly before I moved away from the Bay Area for parts sparser, I got swallowed into the grinding, smoggy gridlock that throttled the streets of my distinctly not-fancy Oakland neighborhood. I marveled at the density –

cars, trucks, busses, pushcarts – seeing it through my new, exiting eyes. We could power the planet by harnessing our wasted energy, spun wheels. So much determination, so much frothed agenda to clearly signal that we’re all too busy to deal with each other’s needs – every man unapologetically for himself. I poked at my tinny horn as a Planet Crusher almost pancaked a biker. The cyclist swerved, the SUV did not.

I used to bike to my day job, constantly debating whether or not it was worth it. The softened carbon footprint, light cardio workout, and open-air engagement with my environment were pitted against the taxing of my thyroid as I’d dodge to avoid violently negligent drivers. Venomous thoughts poisoned my spirit and soured my pluralistic ideals when people enacted the worst, meanest characteristics of the stereotypical versions of themselves. Not to even mention the pollution, the risk of catching a car door, a bullet, a social disease from one of the used needles littering my path. It was a calculus of value to determine the worth of self-betterment. “It shouldn’t be this way,” I’d catch myself thinking at least once a day.

A guy got killed in downtown Oakland on his morning walk to work. An “innocent” guy. Someone jumped out of a van, had him beg on his knees, shot him in the head; then again in the back a couple of times. Lots of people got murdered in Oakland and it meant nothing to me. But this guy’s crime scene happened to be in the middle of my bike route, so the day of his execution, I rode to work and there was all this yellow police tape, red concrete. The day after that, there were flowers and a big teddy bear and cards and candles out on the sidewalk. People had to scoot around the morbid offerings to return their copies of Pretty Woman, Prince of Tides at Blockbusters. And they did. I did. But biking past that makeshift altar twice a day wore me down. There’s baby-rapers, high-school genocidists, arsenal-stockpiling domestic terrorists, penis-eating cannibals on every block in America and that’s never going to stop no matter where you go, which ought to be sad enough in and of itself, but it struck me as unacceptable that normal life continue after this one guy’s senseless murder. The city of Oakland should have shut down. People should have taken to the streets by the hundred thousand demanding we treat each other humanely.

I decided that while there’s no escaping violence, I’d rather live somewhere that responds appropriately to such violence. I want people holding hands in front of city hall. I want tears of empathy at the edge of every neighbor’s eye, choked hellos and somber nods from strangers in the street. Soft touches on shoulders. I want town hall meetings and hastily organized junior high all-student mandatory assemblies, sock-clad Consciousness Raising sessions and free group therapy ending with lumpy mass hugs. I want bumper stickers with stock-image graphics and unkeepable vows, children’s anti-violence artwork hung at the DMV. This shouldn’t be an impossible thing to find. Somewhere there has to be a place that’s not free of violence, but appropriately repulsed by it; not perfect, but wishing it was, still trying, however foolishly, to become so.

I realized – as the Hallmark trash heap altar decayed over a month of spring rain – that in order to stay in Oakland, I’d need to build a thicker wall, a better force-field to inure myself to the killing and dying and constant suffering. In order to function on any kind of normal level while also daily crossing paths with the beaten-to-near-death castoffs of our potent American vigilante capitalism hitting me up for spare change, I needed to develop a skill set to navigate the bombardment, on a sub-particulate level, of pain vectors and humiliation in constant, violent reorganization.

I built the requisite urban wall around myself, but I wasn’t very adept at raising and lowering it at will. I went around clenched most of the time, bracing for someone to hit me in the back of the head with a stolen steering wheel lock. I wore my wall to the bar, to the dinner table, into the studio, in conversation, into bed.

An opportunity to move to a small town with easy access to sprawling, unpopulated nature arose unexpectedly. It allowed me to imagine an exodus. That’s when I finally admitted to myself that I didn’t want to be skilled at wall management. I wanted to get soft and stay soft. I came to understand that if I ever hoped to become a halfway decent musician, it was my obligation to stay permeable, as unwalled as possible. I needed to be a sponge, a receiving antenna, a wide open window – allow ideas, voices, sounds, images to flood in and drain out, leaving behind the rich mineral bottom silt lifted from unseen depths.

This all became very clear to me while blazingly high on hashish in my Oakland bedroom, afraid to wear headphones because they would prevent me from hearing a potential attacker breaking into my house to rob and/or stab me with my own dog’s severed mandible. With headphones on, I might not hear the frequent gunplay in the street and know to get down on the floor or climb into the bathtub or whatever the fuck I was supposed to do when the gangsters and infanticidalists posing as my neighbors started killing each other, with which toxic information I was filling my mind calculating, instead of learning how to love.

I am well aware that many, if not most, great artists live in 2 or 3 densely populated urban centers. They are not only capable of coping with the constant witnessed suffering and tragedy of epic, skull-peeling human horror,[1] but some are even able to transform it into deeply significant creative contributions to the rest of us. I am simply not one of those people. I have great respect for them. I benefit from their existence. We all do. I wish them well. I definitely tried to be like them for many years. In addition to the Bay Area, I’ve lived in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Paris. I fully admit it’s my own failings that prevented me from learning to function normally alongside psychotic, medieval torture, casual human rights violations, brazen disdain for bicyclists and the mentally ill, manslaughter.

Shortly after that guy got executed on my bike route, I became inclined toward lower ratios, wishing to be surrounded by things countable, numbered, named, redundant. I craved the boredom of familiarity and the tremendous mental freedom which accompanies that lack of excess choice so characteristic of rural and remote locales. I took the offer to move away and have since permanently relocated to the end of a one-lane dirt road in the Mojave Desert. I don’t claim to be a “better” artist for it, and I don’t take particular pride in having been unable to sufficiently deal with living in an urban environment. I still find things to get outraged about and I’m still wholly invested in my role as a participant in civic democracy. There are still awful things that happen around me, and I still hear more than I care to about the flesh-gobbling ghouls and brain-splattering psychopaths crawling our city streets and government halls any time I turn on the radio or the TV. But I used to spend a lot of time stuck in traffic, staring out my windshield to see a pre-teen playing a video game with headphones on in the backseat while his father illegally texted in the front seat, or a gal sneaking a toke off her one-hitter in the car next to me, or a malicious middle finger thrust out of a car plastered with the Berkeley Compendium of Clichéd Aphoristic Stickers for a Vapid Liberal Tomorrow, my mind obsessing on endless loop about the mass insanity of a million-person city having an essentially useless public transportation system. Now, on the days I have to drive into town, my view instead features Joshua Trees and saw-tooth mountains interrupted by the occasional dashing bobcat, and it invites an entirely different set of thoughts to pass through my mind.

 

 

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