We live in a culture when taking an hour from the day to compose a piece of music, to paint a picture, or to write a story counts as an astonishing act of subversion, unless we’re making money at it! This makes no sense to the average person, however enthusiastically they praise the work.
In this world, we’re conditioned to embrace a false paradox: that time and money are always running out unless you use the former to generate the latter. For the artist who may not even bother trying to monetize, this is poison, not medicine.
From the first cave paintings to the first set of steel guitar strings, the real America has always been about the Outside Artist. But our individuality can only be preserved in recognizing our interdependency. That’s what Blues & Haikus is about.
The great existential question for America and the world is, Where do we meet when the shooting stops? It seems to me that the ideal of a church is a union of solitudes gathered under some kind of steeple. The steeple is a guidance mechanism pointing toward timeless clarity. When working at its best, such a constellation is equal parts energy and stillness, and metaphysically speaking, may generate a small vortex of clarity that expands and gathers in.
The name is taken from the 1959 record album by poet-novelist Jack Kerouac and saxophonists Zoot Sims and Al Cohn, who blew bluesy legatos in dialogue with Kerouac’s free-styling, scattershot poetics), creating a spritely dance between symbolic syllables as musical vibrations.
Kerouac, of course, stands tall more than a half-century after his death as the face man of mid-century counterculture, that pre-hippie post-war collective sentiment that would come to be called ‘Beat Generation.’ It’s worth remembering that ‘Beat’ meant something very specific. Kerouac used the word ‘Beat’ as in ‘exhausted’ to explain his generation’s opt-out from the churning industrialization that they believed to be sucking the soul out of America.
Welcome to the numinous jook house! This is the home of Blues & Haikus, which fancies itself a publishing imprint, record company, art gallery, merch donkey, and event headquarters, all more or less dedicated to exploring the role of the ‘Outsider Artist’ in healing a shattered culture.
Outsider is the essence of all true American artists, be their tools paint, ink or guitar strings. Perhaps it needs be remarked that there are Outsiders and then there are Outsiders.
In the more normative middle is anyone who must connect to their art form of choice frequently and at length in order to maintain basic neuro-emotional equilibrium. It’s not about ‘passion.’ I am an extreme case, but my imagination has to have something in development pretty much 24/7. I could bend myself away from it when I was much younger, but that ability is now gone.
It’s one thing to create art year after year while remaining more or less indifferent to reward or recognition. But to do this in the face of a culture so brainwashed by materialism that the idea of taking time to engage in non-paid creative work can seem almost like theft! Despite this sometimes outright scorn, legions of O.A.’s keep honey-badgering through life in the materialistic jungle with their art, music or writing, without regard to reward or recognition.
