Written by James Davis: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

December 4, 2009 1:01PM

    I tip-toed around and over patches of asparagus-coloured moss on the weathered footway to the steady cadence of cathedral-style homes untoward Main and 20^th Street.  I window shop: handmade marionette string puppets; cotton knot macramé; paper mache pigs; framed triptych panels; thousand fold origami; ivory scrimshaw.  Inside Bean Around the World Coffees, a twilight chalk menu suctioned to bricks lit with orbed cakes of incandescent light hitched and hung from the rafters.  Back out through the solarium, windows framed with ruby translucent glass spheres, bristle brush pine, and garlands of electric tinsel.  Down through the terrarium: asiago-arugula-tomatoed-cervelat-salami sandwiches.  The aesthetic relaxes me into a Christmas mood.  A chalet?  No.  Fooled.  A business.  One dollar per hyphen—$4.00—the night between the “s’s,” $0.50, plus government dues.

    A wave from the subject of my next interview, radio-show host and poet, Ryan Fletcher.  My interview strategy?  No prearrangement.  Apple cider for me.  Coffee and a leaning tower of carrot cake for him.  Wild blue yonder eyes; Ginger Ale hair; three layers of cotton stratified under a raw umber sweater; almond khakis; well-worn runners.  Over the course of our three hour interview, Ryan would lead me into poetry, through his past, back, and eventually on a winding tour past three unusual paradoxes that he (and I suspect most artists) face: (1) While reimbursement for art sanctions freedom, it also jeopardizes our freedom; (2) Artists that deserve and want reimbursement cannot collect their dues; and (3) on the one hand, the public cries out for authenticity, but on the other hand, they’re paying for illusion.

In coffee lines, cafe lines, and bistro lines we see,
vacant people, helpless people, and empty people's needs.
In fancy clothes, working clothes, business clothes elite, 

Are vacant souls, helpless souls, empty souls, who seek.
[Extracted from his poem “Just TV,” findable at www.unconformed.com].

    Circa 1997, Ryan’s been writing poetry.  He tries to re-create the authentic, sticking to existential, relationship, and environmental themes even if this necessitates illusion busting, offending, or evoking emotion.  From what I’ve read, he’s cautious, methodical, and calm; but simultaneously, rebellious, in-your-face, and confrontational.  As such, presenting the problem excites him as much as offering a solution…a feature of progressive thinkers.

    I ask about process.  Rather than deconstructing and analyzing rhyme and meter from the renowned, he depends instead on intuition.  Of course he has influences—English tragedy poet, William Blake; folk musician and activist, Harry Chapin; musician and lyricist, Marc Cohn; even rapper, Eminem—but freedom from the whorls of submissive gazing has liberated time for “practice and listening….  Rhyme comes to me very naturally.  I like to use what I call “double usage” and “triple usage of words.””  Thus, Ryan playfully snaps together multi-meaning, multi-form words into trains of meaning: “protesters protesting protests.”  I ask: If you depend on intuition, do you write prose?  “Since I tend to write from the inspiration of the moment and prefer to complete projects in one sitting, I’ve gravitated towards poetry.”  The genesis of his interest in poetry began earlier.  As a voiceless middle-child toddler, he recalls the frustration and hopelessness of hearing his older brother make requests to his parents.  His Georgetown, P.E.I. classmates, protected by their familiar familial families [←tribute to Ryan], rather than encourage interaction and integration, promoted more introversion and silence.  Rather than bully by force, they bullied by alienating.  Over time, Ryan developed a volcanic need to talk.  What’s more, he developed a compassion for those with important messages to express but who have no obvious medium through which to express it.  The benefactor of his past, equipped with memories of his to and fro trips to Toronto, and with the help of his younger sister—housing and employment—Ryan moved to Vancouver and currently hosts a duo of CJSF 90.1FM SFU sponsored shows: Melodies in Mind, Tuesdays 8 to 10PM and Sustainable Futures, Fridays 3 to 4PM.

    In the four years on the airwaves, Ryan’s shows have earned quite a following.  He has interviewed and framed air time for over one hundred talented musicians and bands.  He loves the interchange, the story-telling, and the dialogue.  For these reasons, he says his shows hearken back to the origins of folk music.  Ryan: “I want to give the amateurs (and even the pros) opportunities to perform.  I want to give them a chance.”  The implications of this attitude?  Before Ryan, a colossal sub-culture of ultra-talented, un-remunerated, often obscure and artists would have remained   i n v  i  s i b  l   e   to the ears and later eyes of its audience.

    A lexical creator.  An auditory empowerer.  The scent of value.  I ask about reimbursement and learn that Ryan, like a lot of artists, paradoxically flip between being revolted by money and desiring it.  On the one hand, Ryan believes the quality of his poems could be improved further if he was paid: “If there was financial support for freedom loving artists like myself, I would have more time to become a better poet.”  Like other artists, Ryan wants money.  And yet, Ryan insinuates that being paid could also compromise the quality of his poems: “Good poetry could get quashed by a financial need to survive within the capitalist framework; what’s more, I refuse to work without my freedom, so this lack of freedom is a threat to me.”  [As such,] “all the poetry I do is for free.  I post on the internet and perform in between music sets in a downtown cafe.  I enjoy it; the audience listens and appreciates it.”  Like a lot of artists, there’s a reluctance to request cash for doing what is inherently enjoyable.  So Ryan eats his cake but he won’t have it too.  Is income related to how much one enjoys their work…or how free one feels?  Regardless, Ryan has a clever and satisfying solution: “I work around the threat to my freedom by working for free and keeping a very low personal cost of living.”  It seems like there’s a blurry impermeable divide between capitalist and artistic realities…of money or enjoyment, respectively.  Nevertheless, many unconformed artists continue to gaze through this membrane at vacuoles of suspended money…both desiring and fearing the surfactant.

    Let’s suppose an artist has maintained a satisfactory level of creative autonomy, has created perceivable value, and decides they’re ready to accept remuneration.  We arrive at paradox number two: when we finally deserve payment, we don’t receive it.  Undoubtedly, some buyers, out of spite, won’t trade money for art with someone who has enjoyed creating their art as it’s not deemed necessary to reward an artist twice.  More often however, I wonder if money isn’t traded because the art isn’t perceivably valuable?  Having spent roughly five-hundred hours over the past four years interviewing artists who are not under someone else’s control, Ryan possesses rare insight into the musician and their musical output.  More times than not, he says the melodies, progressions, tone, and timbre of grassroot musicians, in spite of being relatively overlooked by the masses, is of tremendous quality…even better quality and authenticity than “popular music.”  Whereas popular music tends to be hackneyed, compliant, ornamental, splashy, oversexed, and sophomoric, grassroots music tends to be wholesome, grainy, rustic, homegrown, wide-awake, fraternal, and moonlit.  It’s heightened harbour-front oxygenation that ravishes the senses, re-electrifies memories, and later, challenges the mind…which re-electrifies memories of the grassroots art I saw en route, which ravishes my senses, which makes me sigh: O2 out.  I re-hear the jangle of an argent bangle.  It sounds and looks isolated, separate, limited, mysterious.  I reflect: A sidewalk trompe l’oeil chalked onto concrete by children; watermark paintings; a pixilated tear.  They pacify our sense of sadness by forcing us to confront it…in its most intimate, distilled, and vulnerable form.  Sometimes horror becomes humour.  Grassroot art thereby uplifts, inspires and liberates, up close, forever and often, for nothing.  It is made with a human subconscious and a set of human hands, not a machine, math, or a marketer.  As such, it’s intrinsically authentic and therefore an emblematic, un-recyclable, and tradable expression freedom.  My dear spenders: is not this value?

    Ryan: “BC's arts funding has been cut by an insane amount from low to almost nothing.  There is very little support for anything new or imaginative in our artist culture.  You need a government that cares about culture, which is hard to find in a short term gain capital based society.  The casinos are where most of the government's entertainment based money goes.”  What’s more, “no one running a for profit business wants a poet because the very effects of poetry—poets that think in intelligent and entertaining ways, who speak freely, and challenge audiences to expand their conceptual boundaries—wake people up to the tragedy of our modern lives and thereby represent not a valuable commodity, but the biggest threat to any power based leader or corporation.”  [Such swellings]—a “close knit awakened community—can be viewed as a threat since such a group would not need to depend on capitalists for anything.”  Whereas capitalist systems depend on spending, artistic-based systems don’t and are therefore insoluble.  According to Ryan: “Art is impossible to defeat because it is fundamental to being a human being.  People long for expression and will do so by any means necessary; you cannot hold back human expression.”  Relentless and unstoppable.  Is this why government and private corporations back out of funding for grassroots art?  Is it because artists are self-sustaining?  Do government and corporations prefer cash for cash deals instead of cash for art?

    If not government or private corporations, what about the general public?  Amongst art buyers that aren’t artists themselves who earned cash with painful sacrifice and discomfort, I wonder if there’s a basic reluctance to give any away…never mind for artwork.  What’s more, ever since MTV and the internet, there’s been a shift in the cultural zeitgeist.  If it doesn’t have a brand name, if it isn’t egregiously expensive, if it isn’t drawing crowds, if it isn’t accompanied by propaganda, noise, strobes, break-dancing, bells, bass, and booms, it goes unnoticed, is thus impossible to appreciate, thus, ineligible to be paid for.  “But I’ll give you ten dollars” cries the talented grassroot artist who spent fifty hours on his/her creation.  As it seems, the public too declines.  In spite of the quality, low cost, accessibility, why aren’t government, corporations, and now the public demanding it?  Where are the lineups?  Where instead is the money being spent?

    This leads me to paradox number three.  In spite of public cries for authenticity, the masses are spending money on popular pseudo-artistic illusions: Paris Hilton: $9,000,000 (2009).  Britney Spears: $35,000,000 (2009).  Taylor Swift: $18,000,000 (2009).  Kanye West: $17,000,000 (2009).  We’re already at a point where young emerging artists equate artistry with celebrity.  Chris Brown: $3,000,000 (2009): “One day prior to [his infamous Twitter post in which he blamed his distributor for less-than-expected sales], Brown wrote “im tired of this shit. Major stores r blackballing my cd. not stockin the shelves and lying to costumers. what the f*ck do i gotta do...” (National Post, December 15, 2009).  Unlettered?  Lily Allen: $100,000 (2009): "I don't make any money out of record sales at all.  I make money out of touring and syncs, publishing," she says for Q Radio (http://www.aceshowbiz.com/news/view/00021427.html).

“Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.” William Shakespeare, Sonnet 94.

    The masses won’t even bat an eyelash over a hundred dollar popular music ticket, can’t wait to spend five hundred dollars on a purse, or two hundred dollars on a pair of jeans.  They won’t spend ten dollars to listen to a grassroots musician.  Instead, the debate is over what is the most popular amongst the popular of pseudo-artistic commodities.  Ed Hardy or Quiksilver?  Sean Jean or Guess?  Almost forgot: G by Guess?  Wage hikes mean graduating from Armani Exchange to Armani.  Who’s better amongst Coach, Hermes, Dior, Chanel ?  $200?  $2000?  $20,000?  $120,000?  The debate rages.  Days, even weeks are spent deciding whether to buy the Back to Basics TEM500 Egg-and-Muffin 2-Slice Toaster and Egg Poacher, the Cuisinart CPT-180 Metal Classic 4-Slice Toaster, the Dualit 4-Slice Toaster, or the Petal Pink Brushed Stainless toaster?  How have we allowed commercial piques to goad us into martyr’d meeks?

    What are two practical distinctions between the aforementioned italicized brands and grassroots art?  Firstly, popular commodities are boxed and popular artists are hidden; whereas, grassroots art or artists are widely viewable and accessible.  This creates suspense in the former case.  I see a box and spending must precede my experience of its reality.  I can’t get my money back until it’s too late to return it.  Whilst promises are often broken, I have no choice but to re-spend before I can re-experience different promises of efficiency and happiness.  With grassroots art, however, the naked reality is observable and palpable.  There are no illusions.  As such, less money is spent on artistic commodities.  Secondly, each of the italicized brands/products have to their advantage teams of illusionists with material dreams whose mission and livelihood depends on their ability to convince the masses by any means necessary that their boxed product is better.  Wellington’s Law of Command: “The cream rises to the stop.  So does the scum.”  The war between the illusionists and the debate amongst spenders represents the two wheels of capitalism, and running on them, two arbitrary categories of hamsters.

    Ryan, via talk radio, poetry readings, and social advocacy, is pushing to re-invigorate the grassroots art industry by encouraging creators and enticing listeners.  For Ryan and alike artists, the revolt against illusion continues.  He believes that every effort should be made by the community to seek-out, stumble upon, enjoy, pay for, promote, protect, partake in, and propagate grassroots art.  Why?  It’s dangerously authentic and thereby dangerously valuable.  “Grassroot art exists everywhere in the cracks of our society begging to be freed into common culture.”  But the allure of popular illusion persists.  Could it be that art’s strengths—it’s insolubility, it’s authenticity, it’s ubiquity, it’s un-boxed presentation, it’s humility—are in fact it’s weaknesses in a market that lives or dies by illusion and promises?  Knowing that the masses prefer the un-real, the fairytale, the numinous, the mystical, the romantic, the illusion…as artists, ought we to deviate?  Illusion or reality: what has caused you the most pleasure?  But what has caused you the most pain?  Defiance against illusion?  Or defiance against reality?  Unto what are we revolting?

December 4, 2009 4:04PM

James Davis: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it