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There was a night - well, it's been a while now - that I very nearly lost my temper with a near-stranger. She was a friend of a friend. Nice girl, really. I'd traveled to Washington D.C. for New Year's, and we took the train up to New York. We were in a bar filled with people wearing chunky eyeglasses and sarcastic mullets and in one case, a perfectly ridiculous winter hat. This awful hat was powder blue and had an enormous pom-pom on top, and was pulled down over the head of a young woman who was hanging off the heavily tattooed arm of some rockabilly guy at the bar. Not that he wanted her there. He was actually sitting with another girl. Pom-Pom just refused to leave. He chain-smoked and did his best to ignore her, even as she cried and pulled on his arm (the one attached to the hand that was holding the lit cigarette, as a matter of fact). As this embarrassing scene was transpiring, the friend of a friend I mentioned earlier discovered I'd grown up west of the Mississippi. She was from Queens. She'd never been out of New York State, or even New York City. She said to me: "What do people outside of New York do? I can't even imagine them having lives." I think I said something like, "Yeah, we buy drums of Cheetos as Wal-Mart, eat them at every meal, wear sweatpants with T-shirts advertising pancake runs from 1987 that we bought at the thrift store ... and then we ride on our donkeys and plant some corn." It was everything I could do to prevent myself from slapping half her face off, I was so angry. Don't have lives? Come on, babe. What do you think they have? And isn't spending your entire life in Queens or Manhattan pretty %$#(*&^^ provincial?
But, enough of that. I still get mad when I hear things like this, but not as intensely as I once did. I suppose that's because I've watched Midwestern artists forget about the coasts and just embrace who they are. (And maybe I'm just provincial, too, but I find a lot of the work produced under this mindset more interesting than the heartless conceptual stuff that's been in vogue for so long.)
Normally I wouldn't include a Columbia event on this blog, but it's only a two-hour drive, and feeling as riled up as I do about the importance of celebrating Midwestern artists, I have to put a word up here about the Bluebird Music & Arts Festival, which is coming up in November - the 14th and 15th, to be exact. You'll see they put the word "music," in the title first, and it is much more of a sonic thing, but visual artists are participating as well; in fact, it looks like they are still accepting artists, so if you make art and have the time to participate, you might contact them about it.
I liked their mission statement:
"The hope of the Bluebird Music and Arts Festival is to celebrate the American Midwest through its music and arts. Midwestern American culture is, however, multifaceted and variously comprised of tradition, geographic and economic implications, and innovation. By creating opportunity for the appreciation of the American Midwest’s music and arts we hope to foster a forum for both celebrating American Midwestern culture and for discussing, understanding, and building that cultural solidarity. This will be accomplished by hosting a non-profit two day, indoor, walking festival in downtown Columbia, Mo on the 14th and 15th of November 2008. The festival will take place in over fifteen music and art venues, and will host over fifty International, National and Regional bands, all with Midwestern roots."
Thinking of Pom-Pom and Miss Queens, I say to myself: "Huzzah! We most certainly do have lives."
