Panic! At the Artistic Disco!

The Potluck Tour of Homes Kick-Off is approaching.
Anxiety abounds.

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The temptation to despair and materialize my doubts into reality seems too close a friend nowadays. Sometimes I think this whole thing is too great for me--that I'm presuming and intruding and grabbing at some kind of holy thing with which I have no business dealing. I called my mother yesterday in the middle of a panic attack. They are usually rare but they happen. I took myself to Kuhl's Family Restaurant on O, across the street from the Black Market. I ate and then I sat in a sunny courtyard to read. Sometimes you just have to let the train cars pile up and take a breath.

I've been talking to Cindy Lange-Kubick from the Lincoln Journal Star; she writes some really great human interest pieces, so I thought she'd be interested in running a story on the tour. I initially wanted the story to run before I left town in order to involve as many people as possible into the project, but I don't think that was feasible, especially for a newspaper. In any case, she'll be making an appearance at the show on Friday and I guess I'll be in the paper sometime next week.

The notion has gained new perspective and fresh anxiety that I will be very, very poor this summer. Like poor-poor. Not just uncomfortable, not just inconvenienced, but seriously, poor. The last time I was that poor was about 4 years ago on a trip with some friends from Arkansas up here to Lincoln. I was 17, had little money, and had planned quite minimally for the trip. I spent most of my money on novelties at gas stations including a camouflaged trucker hat that read "We Support Our Troops in Missouri." I was literally starving by the end of the 4-day trip.

I've begun recording sample tracks for the shows this summer. I still don't know what I'll do exactly, but they'll come in between the songs. One of the tracks, from 1978's Slave of the Cannibal God, crescendos into an ear-piercing screech of feedback and fatal orchestral disaster. I'm pretty proud of it and plan to use it as an opener. The drawback is the difficulty in playing the samples between songs without losing some of the atmosphere. I'm trying to come up with the money for a looping pedal but so far, it's not looking too good. Look at me, an artiste-for-life.

Speaking of which, I was talking to someone the other day about the concept of "the artist" and how uncomfortable I felt when she called me that. I get antsy calling people artists or calling something artistic or defining art. That explains why I get nervous going to art gallerys. In this place, here, art exists. You come here and you see art and then you go home and then don't. Art is not at your home, job, backyard; it is here. I suppose that could be filmhouse, a coffee shop, a community center. In any case, she also argued that being an artist is to be an observer and reflection of society. But is that all an artist is? An observer with a fancy mouthpiece? What is the difference between an artist and a person with artistic tendencies? Where is the line between artistry and creativity? What distinguishes an artist from a human being? I told her that I was comfortable with just being Wagner Israel Cilio III.

Maybe it's just a fear of labels and their inherent restricting nature that makes me cringe or maybe it's that I'm afraid of operating under some kind of misnomer canopy and then being made exposed for it. The former seems noble, the latter does not. Similarly, I don't like to define God with a respect to religion or dogma: defining the concept by its denotation seems to me, myopic.

I might be getting off topic but I truly believe that the concept of "art" is simply another natural, organic, praise-worthy facet of God. Singling it out as nobler than other facets is redundant because as soon as you name it, the game is up. Immediately, this "art" ceases to be natural, ceases to real, ceases to be God. It begins to be contrived, pretentious, boring, man-made, repeated, old. As a matter of fact, I would say that I am hesitant in defining art--and inherently God--for the exact same reasons: It seems awfully presumable to funnel the Creator of the Cosmos and of Life and Hope (and Art) into a concrete denotative cage to display/boast, don't you think?

So instead of observing God and society, let's experience it. Let's celebrate man and God in man and man in ourselves. Let's be experiencing machines and participate within our own reflections of society. Let's reflect only as naturally as a mirror reflects stains, beauty, truth, and life. Let's just be.