There's a movie scene that's been haunting me for months.
It's in Blaze, which stars Little Rock native Ben Dickey as singer-songwriter Blaze Foley, a guy I saw perform in Austin in the 1980s. He was a big rowdy dude with a history of self-medication who got shot and killed one night. Lucinda Williams wrote a song ("Drunken Angel") about him. The movie's out in some markets. It should be here soon, and it's one of, if not the, best I've seen this year.
The scene I'm talking about is one in which Townes Van Zandt, played with spooky precision by guitar player Charlie Sexton, is being interviewed on the radio about his songwriting. And he talks about how one night you finally figure out that you can just about do it, that you have a chance to be really good at making things that will resonate with people who are very much unlike yourself, but if you're going to go down that road it's going to cost you.
"It'll take blowing everything off," Sexton as Van Zandt says in the movie. "Family, money, security, friends. Blow it off. Get a guitar and go."
The speech is taken from something Van Zandt said in another movie, a 2005 documentary called Be Here to Love Me. I wasn't affected so much by the real guy saying it as by the actor saying it in a fictionalized context. Sometimes art works like that, a poem can be truer than the nightly news. (If it's any good at all it is truer than the nightly news.)
Anyway, it shook me up. And I started wondering if you really had to become that sort of monk to be an artist. If Picasso had to be a monster to be Picasso. Geez, I hope not.
And I can think of counter examples, people who have more or less healthy relationships with other people, who have achieved a measure of emotional and economic stability, and yet are still able to do true and deeply interesting work. But maybe they're only good actors, or maybe their apparent sanity serves as a governor on their talent. Maybe they'd be better artists if they were wilder.
Maybe genius is a kind of recompense for madness.
Most of us probably have the sense that a lot of artists have been gravely wounded. And there's something beautiful in the idea of people taking their hurt and processing it into something beautiful. Because all of us get hurt; it's part of the cost of doing business in this plane of existence. It stands to reason that the more sensitively tuned might feel the pain more acutely, which might lead them to look for relief in chemicals and outré behaviors.
I think of Townes Van Zandt drinking until his heart gave out and wonder if he bought into the romance of his problems. I wonder if you really have to seal yourself off from hope to be delivered.
You don't have to be a good person to be a great artist, but maybe you don't have to be a monster either. Maybe you can entertain decency. Everyone's circumstances are different, and there are artists who measure twice for every cut. Maybe some people can be gentle with themselves and others and still make ecstatic art. Others probably have to choose between taking care of themselves and following their muse. Like they say, there but for the grace of God ....
Grace suggests that we're not completely responsible for our own circumstances. And when people say someone has fallen from grace, it suggests that they had been in some sort of enviable position prior to making some sort of misstep. I'm not sure that's accurate.
The comedian Louis C.K. fell from grace about 10 months ago when he admitted the rumor that had swirled around him for years was true. He had behaved in a disgusting, possibly criminal, manner with several women. I don't think anyone who felt compelled to do the things Louis C.K. admitted to doing was ever in a place that could be fairly described as grace. I think you have to feel desperate and wounded and worthless to act that way. I think you have to be pretty miserable.
When Louis C.K. admitted he did these things, he made a statement that sounded contrite. He said he now realized that what he did was wrong because the women he misused were in no position to say no to him. They looked up to him because he was successful, but even more because he was a remarkable artist whose work was inspiring and piercingly honest. Louis C.K. delved into some dank and deep places in himself.
I was going to write a column comparing Louis C.K. with Urban Meyer, the Ohio State football coach who was given a trivial suspension for his role in protecting an abusive coach on his staff. But my editor--my wife--warned me against that, because the situations aren't parallel. And she's right. I don't want to suggest that Louis C.K. has been treated unfairly. I don't believe he has. Were I in the business of hiring people like him, I wouldn't hire him.
I might hire some of the people he treated poorly.
But that doesn't mean that I don't empathize with him, that I don't wonder what he might have had to blow off.
Read more at
www.blooddirtangels.com
Editorial on 09/02/2018