I have always considered myself, first and foremost - an artist.
If each of us belongs to "a camp" when we enter this life, that is mine. At the moment I mostly make music, that's my profession anyhow. I do quite alot of photograpy too, and writing of various kinds. Over the years I have dabbled at pretty much everything.
From the time I was a kid, I knew this, I knew there was no other life for me, it was "my mission". I felt if I couldn't live my life as an artist I would never be happy. It's been equally difficult and gratifying - mostly I'm just grateful for the ability to make a living doing what I love. I feel priviledged, and fortunate. Unfortunately, at least for me, it's always been mixed with fear -
fear of it all being taken away. Fear of failure. Fear of unworthiness. Fear of a some larger, more pressing force outside myself disallowing me to spend my days as I do now.
Politics has never held more than a cursory interest for me.
Not that it's uninteresting, just that I didn't want to devote what I felt was a limited resource - my energy - to the pursuit of what seems to me, still, to be just a power struggle.
All of politics has always appeared to me to be people fighting over the ownership of things they were loaned from God. If you're uncomfortable with God, than let's say nature. The majority of the Indians who populated the land that is now called "America" understood this perfectly. A fundamental respect for one's home should be as natural as respect for one's mother. There's a reason it's called "mother Earth". How should we feel about someone who rapes their mother and leaves her for dead?
In these days of post post modernism I am something of an anacronism. I unashamedly seek beauty. I don't much care for anything else. I don't seek to invalidate any kind of expression, and ultimately people seek and create the language they need to express themselves. Form indeed follows function - like it or not - the need to manifest feeling or idea gives birth to language. And language has no boundary. Reality is language, or perhaps the other way 'round.
Back to artists now, and the gist of what I'm saying here.
When free expression is disallowed, destroyed, or devalued it will not be long until that soceity fails.
I italicized devalued because it is the first warning sign of a culture's demise. When meanness becomes common, when art is about little more than marketing, when nothing is sacred anymore - because the idea of "sacred" is reduced to an idea rather than an ideal - when beauty is finally supplanted by ugliness, and everyone fails to notice.
Your culture is at an end.
And you have to ask yourself.
Have you allowed it to happen deliberately, did it cease to be important, or did the struggle for power become so violent that you'd forgotten to notice the feel of the wind on your skin?
