Tonight was an amazing night of music and performance at the Bolton Hill Open Mic. Truly stunning – and it makes me want to do thing better, it makes me want to do things louder, bigger… makes me wish I had a space all my own, no worries about language, no worries about making a buck. Wouldn’t it be nice? I haven’t wrapped my brain around this as a concept – part of me knows I could really use another weekly event to help pay the bills, another part knows that a truly artistic space might not be as lucrative as I’d like. It’s a frustrating dichotomy.
Funnily – it’s the same thing that’s reflected in one of the stories I was reading in the NY Times today – about a man who first invented Blogger who then went on to be in on the ground floor of Twitter – apparently Evan Williams is currently trying to create a new communications tool called Medium to “fix” the “broken internet”. He feels responsible for getting Trump elected and as penance is trying to create a more content-driven system. He’s trying to reroute our attention on the web because “the internet has learned that we like car crashes, so it makes sure car crashes get to the top” (I’m paraphrasing, but I like the car crash metaphor he uses)… However, NOT paraphrasing, the NY Times doesn’t really pull any punches with statements like “At a moment when buzz can appear to be everything, Medium is not afraid to be dull” and “The notion that you’re going to succeed as a writing site simply by putting quality first is not compatible with venture capital revenue expectations.”
Oof. The NY Times, oh so guilty of not taking fake news and Trump seriously till it was far too late, is one of the mighty blue-state East coast bastions of left-wing elitism that continues to revel in the derision that makes it so easy for right wing conservatives to claim that lefties have nothing but contempt for them all, and I find it ironic that they call out Evan Williams’ sin as “expecting [others] to resemble the person he saw in the mirror: serious, high-minded” – and frankly continuing the cycle by implying that nope – the majority of America is just populated by frivolous low-minded hicks.
Not that Evan seems to have grasped quite what’s going on either. I LOVE that they go on to quote Evan as stating that “Silicon Valley has a tendency to see itself as a Prometheus, stealing fire from selfish gatekeeper gods and bestowing it on mere mortals. What we tend to forget is that Zeus was so pissed at Prometheus that he chained him to a rock so eagles could peck out his guts for eternity… Some would say that’s what we deserve for giving the power of tweets to Donald Trump.” Barring, for a moment, the arrogance that goes with believing oneself to sort of single-handedly believe they’ve elected the president of the United States – I Love that he still manages to place himself blameless. It’s not that he (and the rest of the world) are reaping the whirlwind caused by not thinking through the consequences of unlimited free speech on platforms too lazy or idealistic to moderate hate – nope, they’re being punished for their awesome actions by cruel and jealous fate.
The sensible part of the article? Altogether too late Williams comes to the realization : “There’s a lock on our office door and our homes at night. The internet was started without the expectation that we’d have to do that online.”
Okay, enough about the world. I’ve got to think about another open mic or something, and then I’ve also got to write about how amazing Bolton Hill was without getting distracted by how awful the world is.
Four exquisite moments of music recently. I’m not sure how to quantify them – but exquisite artistic beauty, moments of communication, everything that I Love about music sort of came to a head in multiple times over the past week. I hope it’s the beginning of a trend…
May 19th, 2017.
Last Friday was the first of them. My friend Chuck Maddox was the featured artist over at the Bolton Hill Open Mic Showcase – an event I’ve heard of for maybe a year or so, but something I’d never been to. It’s a different breed of event than my own, closer in flavour to Acoustic Thursdays over at Peace and A Cup of Joe than to Teavolve – no “family friendly” restraints, a ten dollar cover, and aggressively black: black-owned business pride, #blacklivesmatter, black grandmothers and mothers and plenty of “you might be one of the few white people I like” (maybe) jokes. It can be a little uncomfortable, but I try to get over it because the art comes first (I’ve got a whole other Journal entry to write about shifting perspectives, anger, minority, Baltimore… but not right now), the artISTS come second and my own issues come a distant third.
It was a really magnificent environment and whether by coincidence or the Powers of Chuck a LOT of Teavolve was in the house tonight – with rare exception, anyone I didn’t know from Teavolve I’d at least met once or twice at Marc’s night at Peace – so it was a familiar night all round. There were enough greetings to make me feel like a celebrity. I think all of the first-timer artists were from my open mic, which made me kind of proud… and Kristen and Dave Benham (Native American Flute) assisted Chuck on his featured slot.
So – the amazing musical moment was Chuck’s set. The lights went out and he struck a pose and he drove into being one of the most powerful forces I’ve seen on stage in a long, long time. Haunting, terrifying, watching his voice swing from a tentatively sung note to his powerful beatbox rhythms, deescalating to a hiss, re-escalating to a growl, working two separate microphones all with powerful bass lines driven by Kristen’s cello and ethereal moans coaxed forth from Dave’s flute. There were moments rivaling the power of watching Rage Against the Machine on stage, bringing on chills and chest-thumping emotional churns. Music of Love and revolution. Some of it dripped with anger, some of it dripped with sex. All of it was uniquely Chuck.
The stage for this shouldn’t be relegated to an apartment building’s activity club – this should be threshing minds and ears in Baltimore clubs and people should dance while worshipping at the altar – learning the Wisdom of the Madd Ox.
Something like this could never have happened at Teavolve because of the PG13 wishes of the owners – but damn do I wish it could cause a) I’d Love to see it recreated and b) I want the GOOD RECORDING of Land of the Projectile… Having seen Chuck really do his thing, I am all the more proud that Chuck Maddox appears on “cicada” – and so very glad that Kristen had suggested asking for his words and rhythms for “Spring”. We’re going to get THAT on stage at some point and it’s going to be terrifyingly good. I don’t know how and I don’t know when…
