(this is a fragment from June 21st)
I dreamt I was in the basement of my mother’s house. We were just hunting through boxes and kept discovering snakes and moss. Finally we went into the low-ceilinged sump pump room and discovered a small alligator, and we were done exploring my mother’s house.
Yesterday was not NEARLY as grueling as I’d feared and though I was SLOW about waking up today, I’m up and functioning and exploring MY house instead. Found some ancient works of pre-Heather ilyAIMY, j-cards for the original “i love you And I Miss You” cassettes, old, miniscule portfolio concepts, things that all seemed like good ideas at the time.
It’s good to see how well the colour xerox and ink jet prints have held up!
(and this is from a letter I wrote on behalf of Dark Horse in Annapolis back in May to help with their “Footloose” issue – basically when Pinky bought the bar and it’s liquor license, it came with a license for playing music – but not for “dancing”. Since she wasn’t planning on having a dance club she figured this was okay… unfortunately Anne Arundel County apparently differentiates between those licenses as “music” is when there’s one or two people on stage, and “dancing” happens if you’ve got a trio or more… )
To whom it may concern (and that should be all of us),
At a time where division is ripping our nation apart, Maryland is an amazing microcosm of the United States as a whole. We bring together urban and rural, we mix Blue and Red, and we all rub elbows together. Music provides as much lubrication as any amount of beer, and when we’re dancing together we’re not screaming at one another. All around the 2024 election we talked people down and sang to them at the Dark Horse. We brought them together, or at least rocked them hard enough that they forgot to argue. I’ve never really been in another room like it.
My band, ilyAIMY (i love you And I Miss You), was contacted out of the blue over the COVID pandemic by the owner. She was enthusiastic about our ORIGINAL sound and our energy, and she reached out asking us to come play her bar the moment “it was safe to start having live music events” again. Low-slung with a couple of dozen televisions, when we finally got to roll in, the place looked like a sports bar, a generic watering hole – but the moment we struck our first chord we knew something was different here.
The Dark Horse has gathered people who are yearning to be together, to participate in live music, to sing along when they know the words and to dance along when they don’t. This isn’t some dank bar filled with predatory drunks, this is a celebratory gathering spot – and part of that celebration – a HUGE part of that celebration – is the music (and the pot roast grilled cheese, but I digress). The people here are KIND, and the owners work hard to support musicians (paying more generously than a LOT of bars in the area), ORIGINAL MUSIC (they don’t just support cover bands), as well as their bartenders and servers…
Go pick on some place that wouldn’t mind just having a DJ in the corner or Spotify coming from the ceiling. The music’s IMPORTANT here, and that deserves to be supported, not attacked by pedantry. The PEOPLE are important here. They don’t want a computer cross-fading algorithm-selected dance tracks. They want to be face to face with music that MOVES them.
Just let them be moved.
Thank you for your time,
Rob Hinkal
ilyAIMY (founder and owner)
FocusMusic, Executive Director
Institute of Musical Traditions, Technical Director
And then some thoughts responding to a friend today….
A friend of mine who’s worked in countries as they tear themselves apart, during civil wars and coups, she talked to me (as she left the U.S. for good) about how most people, in their day-to-day, just go on Living – the casualties don’t usually mount as body counts, but rather as percentages. Half people as they get emotionally and psychically torn apart by broken relationships, friendships and broken trust. I’ve been thinking about that a lot.
In a weird way it makes me a little more hopeful. I’m simply not going to go train up with an automatic weapon this late in my Life. I can’t do battle that way. But if there’s a lot of PSYCHIC damage, as artists, as musicians – that’s the war (and healing) we ARE good at.
(please don’t come at me about people who are being physically harmed. no shit. I know. families are torn apart and people are being “disappeared” et cetera. you do what you can)
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