On Fugazi, pivoting, and anchors
There’s this video I can’t stop watching of Fugazi performing their song ‘Turnover’ in front of the White House in 1991. The first time I saw it I had a cascade of thoughts in a matter of seconds: this doesn’t happen anymore → no wait, of course it does, I just haven’t been going to shows → I’ve been at that show before.
For the opening 30 seconds, Fugazi is just making sounds and feedback and you can see the crowd taking a moment to catch their breath after whatever song they were just moshing to. Wide eyed and smiling, but in a manic sort of anticipatory way because they know there’s more coming. I only recognise it because of the many times I’ve been there myself, in that liminal space between songs where you realise you’re really in it now. Soon, the bass and drums come in and heads start bobbing. Then the opening riff slides in and the camera is focused on Fugazi who are jumping up and down. Ian and Guy sing the first two opening lines in unison, which I find moving, and when the camera cuts to the crowd again, they’re jumping up and down too and pushing up against the stage. Everybody’s moving.
Sometimes when I’m listening to music, I move my speaker closer to me instead of turning the volume up because there is something to be said for being in closer proximity to the source of the sound. It’s not just about decibels. While I watch this video, I wish I could be face to face with Guy Picciotto’s guitar. I want to see the crusted sweat on the fretboard. I want to see the dirt on his shoes. I want to know what color socks he’s wearing. I want to see the creases in his jeans. The threads in his shirt. The length of his finger nails. Calluses on his fingertips. The vein in his neck when he yells. I want to see the stubble of his shave. I want to see what color his eyes are. I want to see his teeth. His tongue. I want to see spit fly from his mouth while he sings and have it land on my face.
There is something to be said for absorbing as much of a person as you can while watching them perform a song that is physically moving you. This song is playing and I have to move. I have to jump and push and shove and the people around me feel that too, so we’re all doing it together. And I want to sing the words back to the band as passionately as they sing it to me so they can feel what I’m feeling; although I’m sure they must know already but still, there is something to be said for a person, or a crowd, repeating your words back to you.
Of course I wasn’t at that Fugazi show in 1991––I was born a year later. But I am continually baffled by the way time can pass and the world around us can change so dramatically yet some things stand the test of time so well they feel timeless to their core. Sometimes I feel like music is the only thing that can stand the test of time.
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There is something to be said for the things that continue to speak to you throughout your life. Getting older is just about being able to recognise patterns in yourself and eventually deciding to break them or refine them. There have been countless times over the years where I wanted to quit being an artist. I’ve let myself get invested in other jobs/hobbies with clearer paths to ‘success’ or ‘stability’, partially due to my genuine interest in them, partially in hope that they would captivate me enough to sweep me away from the fine line of dumb delusion and creative integrity that comes with being an artist.
But whenever I come across something like this Fugazi video, or the time I started listening to the podcast No Dogs In Space, or reading Hanif Abdurraqib’s book They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, I always feel a return to self. When I say self, I mean an anchored sort of self. An unmoving sense of self. A sense of self that has always been there, will always be there, whenever I choose to return to it. That said, I do think it’s important to stray from what you know and experience and educate yourself on things outside of what you are typically drawn to. The beauty of that is finding out where they all intersect.
Last night I made dinner and listened to Pile albums. The night before that I watched Gilmore Girls. I have a visual arts background but these days I write. On the flip side, your interests don’t have to intersect, they can just exist. Not everything needs to be justified or moral or meaningful in the greater context of your life because many truths can exist at once. Something can be true in a moment and that’s it. We humans are multidimensional. Life is a series of tangents. I saw this tweet once––
––and that’s when I knew I was going to be fine.
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There is something to be said for things that used to speak to you but don’t anymore. Like when food you used to love makes you gag. Or when you and a friend no longer see eye to eye. Or when you feel ugly in all of your clothes or with your haircut. Or you’re not having fun at parties anymore. Or you develop the ick for your partner. What happens when these things stop speaking to you but you don’t know how to find the new things that do? Or you weren’t ready to change yet? Change doesn’t wait. Change moves at its own pace and waits for you to catch up.
When my life starts pivoting in a new direction, it feels like everything I once knew to be true stops speaking to me all at once and I feel lost. But if I’m using the anchor metaphor correctly, when the rope attaching us to that anchor has the most slack is actually when we are the closest to it.
My advisor in grad school, Peter Power, told me this once but in a slightly different way. We spent the majority of a meeting discussing my photographs at length, mostly in relation to aesthetics and not having to make art that is political. He told me things like, try not to make your work look like art because it should look like art. When the meeting was over, he glanced at some lists and poems I taped to the wall of my studio and said, ‘the real you is closer to you than you think,’ and walked out. If I wasn’t looking at him, I wouldn’t have seen what he was looking at. And only now does this make sense to me, 2 years later.
My point is, sometimes the things that are closest to us are the hardest to see. And when you do finally see them, you realise they’ve always been there, standing the test of time.
September 2023