#10 Club Sentimentality
So what do you think should we just live here on the land?
This summer was a blur, evident by the fact this is only the second of my “monthly” newsletters I’m sending out since April. I understand why so many people take the summer off of these kinds of projects. The last week of July I drove across the Northern Midwest en route to the Driftless region of Wisconsin, stopping at typically out of the way National Monuments and Parks, picking up a 100 year old paper cutter in Minneapolis along the way. I made the 33 hour drive to South Western Wisconsin to be a resident at ACRE, an artist residency dedicated to community building and experimentation, set in a rural landscape far from the environment most participants live their daily lives in. At the end of two hot, hard, humid, bug filled, and absolutely wonderful and well fed weeks on the farm, I began the long drive back to California, this time making pit stops to see family and friends in Kansas City and across Colorado.
The playlist that follows is a reflection on this window of time. It’s full of winks and nods, as any mix cd for your summer crush should. It is mostly a party playlist in my opinion, accompanied by a solid showing of 80s and 90s rock ballads. For that reason, I highly recommend the youtube music playlist because there are some truly incredible music videos in this mix, including possibly the greatest music video ever made.
#10 Club Sentimentality
Listen here on Spotify | Listen or watch here on Youtube Music
Friendship - St. Bonaventure
Florist - Sci-Fi Scilence
Harry Styles - Little Freak
James - Laid
New Order - Ceremony
The Rentals - My Summer Girl
The Moody Blues - Your Wildest Dreams
La Bellini - Satan In Love
Steve Monite - Only You
Animal Collective - Brother Sport
Broken Social Scene - Windsurfing Nation
Shania Twain - Man! I Feel Like A Woman
Sylvan Esso - Look At Me
Four Tet - No More Mosquitos
PARTYNEXTDOOR - Not Nice
Lil Silva - Vera
Problem Child - Nasty Up
Mitski - The Only Heartbreaker
Carly Rae Jepsen - Cut To The Feeling
Cher - Believe
Robyn - Dancing On My Own
Heart - These Dreams
The Cars - Drive
Billy Idol - Eyes Without A Face
Abba - Knowing Me Knowing You
Newsies - King Of New York
Metallica - The Four Horseman
Kiwi Jr. - The Extra Sees The Film
The Doobie Brothers - What A Fool Believes
Mariel Buckley - Let You Down
Florist - Feathers
Celine Dion - It’s All Coming Back To Me Now
For those unfamiliar with artist residencies, I would describe them in three ways:
The rather prestigious institutional “Artist in Residence”, in which an artist is provided a studio, resources, and often housing by a museum or other cultural institution for 6 months to several years.
The “work” residency, which usually is one week to one month where a single artist or small group of artists comes to a studio space with the main intention of taking a workshop or working on a project they likely submitted as a proposal to explain how they will use the resources on site.
The “art camp” residency, where larger groups of artists come together for one week to several months mostly with the intention of creating space and relationships with little pressure to make anything tangible.
ACRE (Arists’ Cooperative Residency & Exhibitions), falls squarely within “Art Camp'' territory, which is precisely why I have wanted to attend for quite some time, especially after the last two years of relative isolation and art friends leaving the bay. Additionally, the founders of ACRE had connections to the program where I completed my BFA in Chicago, and thus it has been part of my artistic zeitgeist for as long as I have seriously considered myself an artist.
I, however, did not grow up going to summer camp. There was the occasional weekend mountain cabin trip with friends and terrible tent camping at music festivals, but nothing resembling the coming of age activity of finding yourself far from home with a group of strangers. I had nothing but the fictional realm of countless 90’s classics to vicariously live through.
The closest I have come to summer camp was the period in my early 20’s in which I was part of a band that took me on the road across the Northern Hemisphere. For two weeks to three months at a time, I would find myself one of 30 to 300 people living out of vans and busses, spending every single night together until we went our separate ways on the last day of tour, usually exhausted and ready to get home, focused on what was next. When I stopped touring, I gave all of my instruments away and mostly left the music industry and the bulk of the relationships I made in it behind. I would not trade anything for this time in my life, but it’s a time I don’t talk about often, the way some people will never speak of a long term ex. Part of this is because of the complicated nature of explaining my role in the band and why I eventually left, while another is the fact that, especially out in the Bay Area, almost no one I know cares about the band or scene I was a part of, making it just an ambiguous past life. Mostly though, I think I don’t talk about it often because doing so makes me think about how I wasn’t very good at my job a lot of the time and was even worse at maintaining almost any of the relationships I made along the way, In part due to age, but largely as a reflection of my own perception of acceptance and belonging.
I bring it up here because at ACRE the venn diagram of “artists” and “people familiar with Fear Before The March Of Flames” overlapped more than any other setting previously, which seemed rather amusingly coincidental because of how much it was on my mind leading up to my arrival. After the last two years of COVID, the constant movement of this summer felt familiar to those years I was never really at home. As I drove through cities and states I had last been in nearly 20 years earlier, listening to records we played in the van back then, I was reminded of those sacrifices one makes to follow creative and untraditional lives; the friends you won’t be able to hug at the opening you won’t be at, the presence of grief for a funeral you had to miss.
I arrived at the lodge in the woods already tired, having spent most of the previous week alone, dulling the social skills necessary for finding myself amongst 40+ strangers. On the other end of the gravel road, I had no real plans for making and realized there were no facilities where I could make my work naturally, a problem for someone with an unhealthy relationship to productivity that finds confidence in projecting the proficiency of their craft. I reverted to entirely id tendencies, regularly hearing what was coming out of my mouth before I had even consciously considered what I was saying. I had to fight the urge to be alone, listening to the new Florist record on repeat.
I eventually found solace at night staying up too late listening to Metallica with Dylan and Kelly in the kitchen. Artist talks reminded me that we were a collection of incredibly talented and deep individuals, not just a gathering of random beings, when Stephen reminded us we don’t need to know what we are talking about all the time. Jamie stirred up memories of a club in Houston that used to be a dentist office. Then I danced with Katie to Robyn and Carly Rae Jepsen, the same songs I danced with my friend to in our studios in grad school, and then saw the Harry Styles tattoo on her ass. I found my grounding talking with Sarah for 4 straight hours about extreme nuance as we drove to Madison and ate bagels at the same shop I ate at every day just a few months earlier after my Grandfather’s funeral. Madeline’s pure excitement towards karaoke melted my bah humbug attitude and convinced Alea to sing an Abba duet with me, a rendition of Man, I Feel Like A Woman was performed so well that it should be retired from all karaoke offerings, and Be stole the evening, closing it out with It’s All Coming Back To Me Now. Phoebe asked Jacob and I about what we long for while Layla played Animal Collective in the distance. We sat around a campfire, recording voices for Lyntoria and yelling TE EXTRAÑO with Christina. Showtunes were sung to the moon, potentially spurred by my evangelizing of Newsies, or maybe it was Cats. On our final night, Zach suggested we all write each other notes while CVS Bangers played in the background. We made some art somewhere in the middle there too. As usual, I wasn’t as conscious in the moment of how lucky I was to be there with these people as I am now.
I have grown to appreciate the tension of leaving one life behind to be present in another more than I did as a young adult, mostly by becoming more sentimental. I’ve learned the potential of meaningful connection if you leave yourself open to the opportunity of it. I do this things where if I meet someone and we have any semblance of a connection, they almost instantly achieve best friend status. The number of people I text in a given day is honestly unsustainable, and I’m prone to sudden outpourings of appreciation I guarded myself from previously. I spent long enough being the person who left to now hopefully also know how to be the person who remains. I’ve had people crash into my life like a meteor, staying for just a bright hot moment, and been fortunate to have many friends who have stayed on the back burner for a long slow simmer.
The morning I left the farm where I made these and many more new summer friends was anticlimactic. Early flights and thunderstorms caused most of us to substitute group chats for proper goodbyes. My mind quickly shifted to the classes I had unexpectedly been hired for that I would begin as soon as I got back home. Maybe nothing has changed, but I try to find time for reflection now. I make these playlists and write these stories. I try to harness gratitude for the time I’ve shared and remain hopeful for when it all can happen again. I think that's really the best we can do these days.