songs of experience

If you have 5 or 6 minutes, check out this little documentary of the Chapel Hill Lost and Found art project I participated in: http://www.beerymedia.com/lostfound.htm

I like what the guy had to say about public art. The Chapel Hill arts council could have spent their funding on a massive, commissioned sculpture in some park or business district (which would have involved one artist with us citizens becoming merely passive viewers). Instead, they chose to involve 300 “artists” (“I am not an artist” … eh mis_nomer?), to display the art throughout the city, and to make it truly a community happening.

Americans are becoming increasingly disconnected from one another in our daily lives, so it is necessary - crucial, even - for institutions (such as schools, churches, track clubs :)…) to provide community events and rituals for connection. In the olden-days (love that expression!), extended family gatherings structured our social lives throughout the year. Seasonal traditions such as a summer beach house with all the cousins, big Thanksgiving dinners with BOTH sets of grandparents, Christmas reunions for faraway relatives, Easter egg hunts followed by Sunday brunch with the neighbors have been replaced by sterile, media-invented get-togethers. What kind of real connections can be made during commercial breaks of the Superbowl? Are you really friends with someone when your primary bonding experience is watching Friends together on TV every week? It’s bizarre. I admire my father-in-law for doing his part to build and maintain community in his neck of the woods. Every fall he invites friends, neighbors, and family to an old-fashioned Chicken Stew in his backyard. He provides chicken and Saltines, cold beer, and a blazing bonfire. I look forward to seeing familiar faces and even hearing the same stories every October. It makes me feel not-so-alone on this planet.

Hearing that mom on the documentary speak about her scattered life - then seeing the art she created out of that chaos - made me feel profoundly connected to this “stranger” who was like me … a mother, a fellow-artist, a citizen, a human being struggling to find and make meaning.

“I tell you: one must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star.”
-Nietzsche
from, Thus Spake Zarathustra