“Just my neighborhood and me”

It’s never been the institutions, it’s always been our neighbor. It’s always been, you know, the person down the street. It’s always just been us.
Ross Gay

The Collective’s inaugural issue emphasized our community space as a “garden,” a “mosaic,” a “wildness,” bringing together different people from different places. Following in that spirit, our Spring 2023 issue plays with the idea of neighborhoods. From real-life neighborhoods and living spaces to artistic “neighborhoods” constructed through conversation and collaboration, the articles in this issue explore the homes we make through our art and the strength we build when we come together within and across communities. And this Editors’ Corner recommends a few artistic works that traverse the US, investigating various sorts of neighborhoods and questioning the kind of art that brings value to them.

We hope you enjoy tracing this theme throughout this Corner, and the articles in this issue.

READ

Kenn Kaufman — Kingbird Highway: The Biggest Year in the Life of an Extreme Birder (2006)

Kenn Kaufman is renowned for his identification field guides on birds, mammals, plants, and insects; in this book, he shares how he fell in love with nature in the first place. In 1973, at nineteen years of age, Kaufman traversed North America trying to find the most birds to break the record for a “Big Year” — where birders compete for the highest number of distinct species tallied in one year of birding. The memoir is chock-full of insights about the birds he sees across the country, and Kaufman provides thought-provoking details about the birding community in the very different world of the 1970s. I was amazed by some of the facts, including that he traveled sixty-nine thousand miles in twelve months (and mostly by hitchhiking!). More than that, however, Kaufman reflects on the deeper lessons he learned that year, questioning the differences between art and science, the nature of competition, and what makes a meaningful life, all the while finding and building his community through those that accompany him on different parts of his journey — people and birds, both. Reading this book felt to me like the very activity of observing nature: innumerable sights and sounds to delight, but, if you really watch closely and wait, the unexpected magic of a dazzling moment will take your breath away.

WATCH

B.J. Novak (writer, director) — Vengeance (2022)

Ben Manalowitz (B.J. Novak), an aspiring podcaster from New York, is looking for a story, a good story, with which to impress a prominent producer he just met. He receives a strange call in the middle of the night to attend a funeral for a girl (Abilene) that he only hooked up with a couple of times, but whose Texan family thinks was his serious girlfriend. Unable to deter her delusional and grieving brother, he arrives in small-town Texas to play the part. When he finds out that her kooky family thinks Abilene was murdered, but with no evidence whatsoever, Ben eagerly calls his producer. He thinks he’s found his story — not one of murder, but one of small-town ignorant conspiracy theorists.

The film preps the viewer for the assumed ensuing comedy of big-city-guy-gets-one-over-on-stupid-small-town-folk, and there are certainly laughs to be had. However, the movie quickly turns that trope on its head; as the characters of this out-of-the-way Texas town become three-dimensional, and as Ben begins to care about them, he starts to wonder if Abilene really was murdered — but by whom and for what reason? I, too, found myself questioning reality, completely drawn in by the suspense and the unraveling of the mysterious circumstances surrounding this town and its people. By the end, I was moved by the deep portrait of the disparities of place, and stunned by the strikingly astute analysis of our politics, the social media landscape, and what it means to have a “voice” in America. Ultimately, Ben must decide what kind of “home” he wants to build for himself with his art, and what kind of neighbor he wants to be to his fellow Americans.

LISTEN

Ross Gay — Dilate Your Heart (2021)

Released in March 2021 by Indiana-based indie label Jagjaguwar, Dilate Your Heart features Ross Gay reading five of his poems in collaboration with five musicians. Just thirty minutes across five tracks, the album is a tour de force, a microcosmic artistic utopia that neighborhoods on numerous levels. Gay’s writing hinges on radical interdependence, critical joy, and the nutritiousness of neighboring. He writes about — no, proclaims, with incredible vividness — the earthy deliciousness of being alive, in a place, with other beings. A hand-twisted gate, a crawling compost pile, the saved life of a friend ready to be done living, a fig tree taller than you, the dripping joy of laughing till noses run, an orchard and the birds who live there, the love of ancestors who stole seeds for food — all tangled tightly together in a tangible, life-giving mess.

Jagjaguwar supports artists as world-builders, as collaborative agents in the unavoidable symbiosis of art- and community-making. And the musicians on the album all have artistic bridge-building and cross-genre collaborating in common: Grammy-winning Indie/alternative giant Bon Iver (a Jagjaguwar original); L.A.-based, Eastman-trained harpist-composer and recording artist Mary Lattimore; clarinetist-composer-pianist-vocalist-producer and afro-futurist artist Angel Bat Dawid; Chicago-based singer-songwriter/pianist-composer Gia Margaret; and saxophonist/musician Sam Gendel, whose music has been described as “spaced-out jazz.” Half the album is Gay’s rhapsodic “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude,” a gushing extolment of all things life, against a glowing, classic Bon Iver synth-string backdrop (listen below!); and the other half comprises Gay’s poems “Burial,” “To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian,” “Poem to My Child, If Ever You Shall Be,” and “Sorrow is Not My Name.” The whole thing is just good listening: the sauntering cadence of Gay’s reading — the way you can hear the twinkle in his eyes and the unvexed rawness in his voice — and the aural mosaic Jagjaguwar and the musicians have made together.

I love that this album incites, as Gay might say, listening — not just to the album but to the artists’ own worlds, to the words Gay offers in his writings, to Jagjaguwar’s other works, to the world around us. While it represents a consummate release in its own right, the album is also just one vine in a larger artistic tangle, a gentle statement about how art, the sources it draws from, and the neighborhoods it engenders all connect organically and unendingly like the unplanned shoots and roots of rhizomes, like the lives of the seeds Gay often writes about, shared amongst friends, yielding wild and wildly different gardens that feed neighborhoods, that bring neighbors together around the table in community, that inspire the kind of visceral joy artists live for. Listen!

We leave you this time with a lighthearted ditty by the son of Willie Nelson — a reminder that when we focus on building our own healthy homes and neighborhoods, we can find the strength to go out into the larger world again.

We hope this issue inspires you to (re)visit, celebrate, and reinvigorate the neighborhoods in your life. To imagine the possibilities of unexpected collaborations, to negotiate room for the home you really want (artistic and otherwise), to create neighborhoods of discourse in which future generations of artists can continue to thrive — neighborhoods that, like gardens, can survive the harshest conditions and grow into beautiful and far-reaching communities, home by home, street by street.

Thank you for joining us for Spring 2023 at The Collective, and we’ll see you in the Summer!