News
This morning I close on a house in North Adams, MA. My feelings on the subject are equivocal. When I was living in a bus and then in a car, I spent a lot of time wishing I had somewhere stable to live. Now that I’ll have somewhere stable to live, I feel a bit trapped.
This 34th annual Fall Festival of Shakespeare began last night with productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Much Ado About Nothing from two local high schools. It was among the most enjoyable Shakespeare I’ve ever seen. Seeing the fruits of the FFS staff’s labor is bittersweet: I am happy for my friends and colleagues and I’m loving the shows, but it heightens my sadness at not having the time to direct in the festival.
Backpacks
Recently I’ve been listening to a Spotify playlist of all the nerdy hip hop I was obsessed with in the early 2000s, and my nostalgia has a particular flavor of optimism about the possibilities of art and language that dovetails with the Fall Festival of Shakespeare.
Growing up in the 90s, hip hop was a ubiquitous part of my cultural landscape. At that time, pop music was all but synonymous with rap. But it wasn’t until my late teens that I began to think about what made hip hop different from other art and to understand that it was important to me in a way that other art wasn’t necessarily. I went from a casual consumer of whatever rap happened to be popular on the radio to a hermetic student of hip hop’s alchemy.
I spent hours in the used section of Plan 9, my local music store, eventually buying my favorite artists’ whole catalogs at $5 a piece because I was too broke to pay full price for CDs. I still remember my excitement at finally finding a Used copy of 2pac’s first album, the last one I didn’t own yet. I scoured MP3.com for undiscovered indie artists that I could introduce to my friend Ty, the only person I knew who was as into hip hop as I was. My enormous CD book was organized by record labels and collaborations instead of alphabetically. I read books and watched documentaries. I became a regular at a local hip hop open mic called Ingredience, befriending a cadre of local artists.
I have never stopped appreciating hip hop; my love of it has informed so much of my Shakespeare work But my single-minded scholarly study of it has necessarily waned as I’ve developed other interests.
Some of the artists I started listening to during those years in my late teens and early twenties — like The Roots or Jedi Mind Tricks — have played consistently as my music library migrated from CDs to WinAmp to iTunes to Spotify.
But some of them — like Aesop Rock or Murs, for example — while still being enjoyable, never quite transitioned into artists who end up on the kinda playlists I still listen to consistently. Those artists are therefore a kind of musical time capsule.
Listening to a lot of those “backpacker” hip hop artists transports me back to a time when I was delighted by the novel and unexpected things that artists could do with words. The first time I heard Aesop Rock or Jemini, I was blown away by the sheer possibilities of words. It seemed like they were simultaneously speaking English and another language entirely. It was like the first time I read Faulkner. I felt like art could be boundless while also being coherent.
Over time, some of that luster has worn off as I’ve become less impressed with art that is driven by virtuosity for virtuosity’s sake.
But listening to that time capsule of a Spotify playlist, I am reminded of a time in my life when language felt powerful and unexpected, when it seemed like there were artists doing exciting and new things with the same basic words I spoke everyday.
It’s funny how music from a specific time in your life can put you back into your younger body with all its dumb feelings. Listening to Aesop Rock and El-P (and attending Fall Festival performances) has me walking around with the absurd idea that art is worth making and language is a powerful medium. I’ve been wanting to write slam poetry about my complicated emotions and speak to people about issues that are important to me. I’ve been feeling like I can sleep a little less and squeeze in time to be creative in spite of a shitty day job.
As my Shakespeare basics teacher Michael Hammond is fond of pointing out, I have a tendency to end everything on a downward note, and as I wrote this newsletter, I caught myself about to wrap everything up with something along the lines of “this optimism won’t last because I’m a grouchy old man and not a 17 year old nerd,” but not only is that not how I’m actually feeling, but it doesn’t fit with the overall theme anyway. This newsletter, insofar as it is about anything, it’s about language containing the possibility of new, novel, unexpected ideas that subvert your expectations of what comes next.
So rather than end down, let me end up by saying that for the time being, I am feeling inspired by art and language in a particular way that I’ve not felt for many years and that I am hopeful that it will yield productive and interesting work.