On the bicentennary of Beethoven's birth nearly 30 years ago, someone said that the best way to celebrate would be a musical season with no Beethoven at all. Only then would we realize what we took for granted -- not that we don't appreciate the Fifth Symphony and the "Egmont" Overture every time we hear them, but we always know we can hear them when we want to, which, unwillingly or not, makes us kind of complacent. And now we're, what? two decades? into having art yanked away from us. Not after it's made, as when a museum is bombed in wartime, but before it's made.

If you're here reading these words and those of the other contributors, you've probably already taken, or at least audited, AIDS 101. You know what the disease is doing to all the communities it touches -- basically, every community. You may even be HIV positive yourself. So I'm not going to preach to you or harangue you with statistics. I'm just going to point you in the direction of some art you might want to know about.

I work as music producer of a classical music program on NPR. It's been my pleasure to work on occasion with Charles Hamlen, founding director of Classical Action. Charlie gave up a career as one of the leading artist managers to devote his full atention to AIDS issues. Classical Action, which is an affiliate of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, enlists artists in the top echelon of the field to perform benefits.

For me, two of the saddest losses in the epidemic were writers -- a critic and a poet. I spent ten years living in Norfolk, Virginia as a newspaper reporter, and I remember as vividly as if it were yesterday going out to lunch early one afternoon, and sitting down at my favorite restaurant to read the Village Voice, and seeing that Vito Russo had died. I never met the man, but I sat in that restaurant and cried because of what he had done. If you haven't read the "Celluloid Closet", please do -- it's a brilliant summation of gays in film, and in the final analysis it's really not about film, it's about the broader culture coming to terms with homosexuality.

A writer I miss just as much is Essex Hemphill. I got to know his work though Marlon Riggs' documentary "Tongues Untied", which was a perfect showcase for his deliciously sensual, world-weary, loving, hands-on-hips, mama-talking-through-the-screen-door poems. And I saw him read once in Norfolk and ended up talking with him over crabcakes -- during which he professed his love for Taana Gardner's "Heartbeat." Oh, yes.

Every day forward should be days with art, so here are a few websites related to actual sites that I've found have healing properties. The first three are in Houston, Texas. The first time I spent any time in Houston was with my friend and radio partner, Carol Taylor, who was a patient at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. She dearly loved music and visual art. I took her to the Rothko Chapel. Like the notion of Day Without Art, this place is utterly simple and deeply powerful. It's a Philip Johnson-designed building with only huge, dark Rothkos, natural light and a few benches. Yet it's as powerful as a great cathedral. (If you can't make it to the Rothko Chapel, check out the National Gallery of Art's excellent Rothko site.) Near the Rothko Chapel is a recent addition, a gorgeous, elegant little chapel built to house Byzantine frescoes.

I was down in Houston recently and a friend of mine mentioned that he'd lived there for decades and never been to the Orange Show. So we went right then. I was both exhilarated and sad because I hadn't been able to take Carol. In the space of a small residential lot, retired postal worker Jeff McKissack built his tribute to the orange -- in the form of not one but two outdoor theaters, a "museum," an orange juice stand and all sorts of concrete, mosaic and metal work. It's loopy and beautiful, a fruit-based version of Howard Finster's Paradise Gardens (itself an installation that includes artworks by Keith Haring, an artist who died of AIDS).

Discussion of Finster shifts easily to music -- he's designed covers for R.E.M. (the new album, "Up", is damn good, and the band has been excellent on AIDS issues). In fact, R.E.M. is among the sponsors of an annual fundraiser -- and a hell of a party -- in Athens, GA called the Boybutante Ball. All kinds of people go, and all kinds of people do drag who don't usually do drag (I am haunted by the memory of an A-line dress made of laminated Monopoly money). It's worth a trip to Athens, and while you're there, eat at The Grit. If you can't get to Athens, get a little of the town's par-tay spirit though the B-52's, a band that has carried on since the death of one of its founding members, Ricky Wilson, from AIDS.

Two records have helped me get through a particularly tough couple of years. One of them is a CD compilation on the Nashboro label of country-style gospel by Georgia singer-songwriter Sister Lucille Pope and The Pearly Gates. She has this unforgettably slow, dignified and sincere delivery. "Every time I look around there's somebody gone who was here last year," she sings, and you know what she means.

There's also an album that seems to have been forgotten (or, more likely, has never been heard) by the current crop of alt-rock fans. And it's as timely in meaning and sound as it was nearly 30 years ago. It's "All Things Must Pass" by George Harrison, produced by Phil Spector. Originally a three-album set, it's been re-issued on the cheap as two CDs with little packaging. But my God, the songs -- "What is Life," "My Sweet Lord," "The Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp (Let It Roll), just to name three -- are inspired and inspiring. And if "Wah-Wah" isn't a Foo Fighters cover waiting to happen, I don't know what is. Here are a few lines from the title song:

Now the darkness only stays the night-time
In the morning it will fade away
Daylight is good at arriving at the right time
It's not always going to be this grey

All things must pass
All things must pass away
All things must pass
All things must pass away

In the past twenty years, many people and things have passed faster than we could ever have imagined. I hope that the music and art I've listed can help your pain a little. These songs and paintings may be dark, but somehow they're like that on-time daylight.


top

Mark Mobley is music producer of " NPR's Performance Today," a daily classical music radio program heard on more than 220 stations.





© 1998 
Day Without Art Web Action Project 212/206-6674 x201 staff@creativetime.org
dwa archives