#lusterlit

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Lusterlit - Wax Wolf

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Lusterlit - River

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Lusterlit - Lost In Space

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Lusterlit - Ceremony

Lusterlit is Bushwick Book Club founder, Susan Hwang and producer, Charlie Nieland playing their songs about books. It's a little nerds gone wild.

No Answer

In the December 16 interview with Adam Curtis in Artspace, he opines rather pedantically that the self indulgence of free expression is what has opened the gates for Trump world. Adam singles out Patti Smith as an example of how an artist's belief in their own expression and seeing their art as a form of "radicalism in an individual way" has resulted in a "fetishization of the self". And goes on to explain that such a thing is why we don't question capitalism enough. That artists have basically shirked their duty and that art's function is to "explain the world to people" In the coming months and years, not only will our worth be questioned by our baffled relatives but by progressive bloggers and journalists as well.

Curtis’ insistence on demonizing self expression as opposed to something more politically discursive assumes a lot about the function of art, and whether art has a function other than to "make life more bearable." Which are the words that Kurt Vonnegut used on the page I just read in his final book, Man Without A Country, which I'm reading for this month's Bushwick Book Club. "Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake."

Rumble, rumble. An unborn song shakes the cobwebs.

I just read an interview with Laurie Anderson in The Creative Independent that was published last month. She speaks in an inspiring way on whether "work that's politically pointed is necessarily worth more than something that isn't.”

"...a giant blue painting can be much more about freedom than 1800 performance pieces about how free you should be or songs about that. It works with experience, not necessarily some kind of encoded message."

"I don’t feel specific political work has ever really inspired me that much, frankly. I’m more inspired by things that are just either really dopey or really daring in other ways, that are just like, 'break every other rule.' Rule breaking is much more interesting to me than trying to give people messages encoded in music or painting. It’s just like… Why don’t you just to tell me what to do? Why do you have to put it in this thing here for me to decode?I often don’t really feel that those kinds of works are that successful, for me. Maybe for other people they are. I don’t think anybody really enjoys being told what to do, even in code."

I feel this is an amazing time and it's the best that I get to make art with the most inspiring and talented humans. For me, making songs about books with Bushwick Book Club and my partner in Lusterlit, Susan Hwang, is the way to find the path to keep love growing. As we warm our hands together around that fire, we hear each other's thoughts and ideas about the world in our work and by just being together to play and perform. This gathering is where the value of expression resides. Too bad Curtis hasn't been to a book club show.

Susan writes in her song No Answer (inspired by Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five) "Time… there’s no suspending it. It’s just suspending everything we know in it. Living has to happen in something. It happens in time…

What you want is not what you get. We ask questions with no answer. We’re the nuts in the nougat. We’re the bugs in the amber.

Let me be a song singing, a dance dancing, a story telling, a life living. Let me be a sex sexing, a fix fixing, a joke joking, a love loving. Birds don’t care at all that life’s replete with human woes. All the people die, it’s po tee weet and so it goes... We are structured to ask why when there really is no answer. Is it to make us feel like idiots, oh that’s right, there is no answer. What if Kilgore Trout is right about the hum and fear of cancer The dimensions that make you sick or pregnant, oh right, there is no answer. You don’t need a Delorean If you're a Tralfamadorian. No answer, no answer no answer no answer" How can we not be changed by the beauty of that?

I'm grateful to be here in this world in this moment.