this evening is

i am writing this during a grey cloudy early beginning evening time. bill frisell the amazing american guitarist - i hesitate to ascribe a genre to him - but you’ll likely find him in the jazz section of your cd store - is picking and pouring his guitar signal through loops and delays and genre, styles, forms, and techniques.
i am drawn to musicians, artists and people who move beyond the raw gift of the sound their instrument (be it vocal or instrumental) makes into that realm where processing or even technical skill transforms the sound into voice. voice. a place where there is nothing commonplace about your statement, about your presence, about your being who and what and why and when and how you are. unique, and possibly beyond anything but mimicry . . . . mimicry being something that falls far short of duplication. it’s in art and writing and music and architecture and dance that i find the most stunning voices.
miles davis had a voice, robert fripp has a voice, nina simone had voice, bill bruford has voice, nick drake had voice, picasso had voice, mies van de rohe had voice, samuel delaney had voice, laurie anderson has voice . . . .it’s a (very happily) long list!
i love that each of us is utterly unique and that the first battle of our lives and sometimes the longest and most hard fought is the battle between the many forces bent on providing us with compelling rationales to deny who we are, versus ourselves.
i see many people losing this fight both in the short and long term through being defeated by chance events or through social pressure or through recognizing that it is a safer and easier way out to deny their own innate beautiful selves. i know through my own experiences, it can even provide modicoms of success to homogonize your self, if you are inclined towards business or some sort of mediated success - the mediation coming in the form of a product that can be measured. however.
the person through whom the creative life force flows is condemned to fight this good fight. and it is good. it is life affirming. it leads to greater work. redemption even.
robert fripp writes: “ The centre of gravity of the act of redemption is love. How easily said, how easily typed. What can this mean? I don't know, and I don't believe it is possible to know redemption on its "own" terms. Creativity is a "foundation" for the redemptive act. This is also beyond what we can know, but we may get glimpses, or a sense, or a feel, of this. It also puts a very different spin on the nature of "art". There are different "qualities" and "intensities" of art, and each "world" has a kind of art that is proper to it. Objective art" belongs to the creative world, the world of the genius. "Objective" art represents the truth of what is true. It has no concern with "beauty" per se, which is a by-product of "true". This is hard for those of an "aesthetic" disposition to grasp. "True" or "real" may not represent what we find personally beautiful, or we have been taught is "great art". "Objective art" may not be anything like we recognise as Art at all. Aesthetics are a "by-product" of real art, useful to describe symptoms and effects, the history of art in sequential time, originating causes in historical society, but not creative origination. Aesthetics, as a study, belongs to the world of the craft; and while we may recognise the power or "authenticity" of a work of art - we may sympathetically "resonate" with what is "real" - we won't get to understand through aesthetics alone.”

deep breath. re read the whole piece again. remember that real work isn’t necessarily easy!
hmmmmm. this was supposed to be a peaceful easy evening and look where it’s gone!
just to place us gently on earth after this cerebral excursion, here’s a picture of the evening sky.