The Lonely Palette

"The deeper you go, the less indulgent it will be.” - Helena's stickie note

Helena De Groot is an audio maker, but, really, she’s an audio artist. Her series, Creation Myth, just dropped in full as part of the CBC’s show, Personally. Personally is about the most personal experiences that audio makers that probe within themselves, laying themselves bare, for our benefit, as the best memoirs do.

Creation Myth is, ostensibly, about the question whether or not to have kids. But as you’ll hear, both in listening to the series, and to my conversation with Helena today, it’s about craft and memoir, parenting yourself and parenting others, care and compassion. It’s a masterclass in the creative process itself - that is, creating. Creating life, both your own and another person’s. Creating stories. And creating art that reaches people, sometimes in surprising places.

Music used:

The Blue Dot Sessions, "Aourourou," "Lina My Queen," "On Top of It"

Episode webpage

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Earlier this year, I had a really, really great conversation with Dr. Lara Ayad, host of the podcast The Cheeky Scholar - and I'm proud to share it today. We cast our net really wide, talking at first about the role of artists in society, my favorite museums, but then we got into it. We got into it. Because Lara and I are both, in the parlance of the moment, free speech bros. And if you’re going to be a good artist, or a good art critic, you can’t be afraid of censorship, and you sure as hell can’t practice it. 
Lara and I talk everything from Anselm Kiefer to Dr. Seuss, and what we came to realize is this: you have to open your mouth. You have to look at world with open eyes and an open mind. And nothing shuts all those things – mouth, eyes, and mind – more than fear. Fear of offending. Fear of saying the wrong thing even when you’re trying to say the right thing. Or fear that full-on disagreeing will put the whole of your values, your entire moral compass, in question. What will people think of me? Am I still allowed in the club? Am I still a good person? 
Full disclosure: it’s this fear, and these questions, that made me almost not share this conversation. But that’s nuts. And when you listen, you’ll hear why. Freedom of speech is one of the most foundational tenets we have in a liberal society – and this has always been the case, regardless of who had the cultural power to cancel whom.
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It's September, and time to get back to work. That means defending public radio against federal defunding, exploring its core values, and taking an honest look at how we got here. 
I'm proud to share this conversation between my Hub & Spoke colleague Erica Heilman, host of the exquisite and unflinching Rumble Strip, and her buddy Jay Allison, founder of Transom, producer of The Moth Radio Hour, and generally one of the most stalwart producers in the industry, about why public radio matters.
Episode webpage.
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"You don't go look at a Rothko; you go inside a Rothko." - Claire, visitor, National Gallery of Art
Modern art. Two little words that strike so much fear in the heart of the average museum goer. When you're used to straightforward, legible paintings and sculptures, Modernism can be pretty destabilizing. Pretty weird. Canvases are now spattered with paint, or lined with grids, or barely containing the shapes that seem to want to float away. A car tire is cut apart and reassembled. A giant mobile floats in the air, catching the breeze. 
And it's natural to ask, well, what does this mean? What is this piece about? How did I just go from Post-Impressionism to Fauvism to Cubism to Futurism, when the subject matter of these paintings all kind of look similarly shattered and rebuilt and hastily glued back together again? How could I ever understand the nuances of this stuff without a graduate degree? 
But I promise you, you can.
Learn more.
See the images.
Music Used:
The Blue Dot Session, “Tall Harvey,” “Highway 430,” “Ranch Hand,” “Cornicob,” “The Melt,” “A Common Pause,” “Within the Garden Walls,” “Basketliner”

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"Questions and the search for answers, and the appreciation of beauty, and then wanting to share it with other people, to go look at it closely together. Then you realize you've got something that can feed you for the rest of your life as a career." - Emily Pegues, curator, National Gallery of Art.
Museum curators are an intimidating species. Those experts with their degrees. How could they possibly remember what it was like to walk into a museum for the first time and feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of history on display? How could they imagine what it’s like to be a visitor who doesn’t care about a landscape with cows? After all, we’re not born knowing the stories these paintings tell, or how to seek them out.
In the second episode in our series, we’re going to explore how a long look into an artwork can inadvertently engage another sense: hearing. Hearing the stories that a painting can tell. And the curators at the National Gallery are here to help. Help put us in the best possible position to receive these stories; help us listen to what these paintings are saying to us. And how to imagine these stories moving through the centuries, embracing us the way they once embraced them for the first time, and making them want to do what they do.
Learn more.
See the images.
Music Used:
The Blue Dot Sessions, “Gentle Son,” “Pinky,” “Origami Guitar,” “Arizona Moon,” “Tangeudo,” “The Melt,” “Lina My Queen,” “Brer Rhetta,” “Georgia Overdrive”

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