Beyond the Six String Nation #5: Setting up for failure
A teenage ambition I thought of as bordering on hubristic may have hobbled me in ways I couldn't know.
Hmmm…. how do I write this without sounding self-pitying?
Well, I suppose the thing I have going for me is that I’ll bet most people know this feeling – and the constellation of feelings and fears that surround it.
I know that some people are waiting for me to spill the beans on my departure from CBC … and I will get to it … eventually. But it’s hard. There’s so much stuff to unpack and so I might as well start here. In 1980, age 17. Feeling luminous. Feeling like anything was possible. Feeling like I was about to tap into something much bigger than myself. And when anyone asked me what I wanted to do with my life I had a very ambitious but heartfelt answer (no less so for also being very practiced and oft-repeated): “I want to write one book, release one album and make one movie”. At the time, it seemed an eminently realizable goal. I had started my own alternative magazine at school, which included a review of Prince’s Dirty Mind album. Prince was four years and one week older than me and he was already on his third album but I still had time. My friend Bob Esplin and I had formed a 4-CasioVL-Tone/4 hands duo we called TALK. We considered it Steve Reich-esque and knocked on the doors of the cool kids on Queen St. with a performance/cassette-release in the legendary back room of the Cameron House Hotel. So there’s a writing career under way and a modest album release of sorts. As for the movies, I was devouring all kinds of cinema and borrowing mum’s car for late-night screenings of Kenneth Anger and Michael Snow at The Funnel, under the shadow of the Richmond St. off-ramp from the Don Valley Parkway. And I’d planned on attending the York University Film School.
So what happened? When I think with some embarrassment now about my pronouncement, I realize that it’s not because it was hubristic or too ambitious. It wasn’t ambitious enough. It was the expression of a budding dilettante. I had listed those accomplishments in bucket-list fashion. Prince made about 45 albums over his lifetime and who knows how many he would have created had he lived past 57. Barbara Cartland wrote over 720 novels and holds the Guinness World record for most novels written in a year: 23! Not great art, perhaps, but production. By the time you read this, Werner Herzog will have made 70 films. The thing you read all the time about all these creators in any field is that they are often remaking the same thing over and over again. Not in a bad way (although, Cartland ...?) Not simple recycling. It’s about trying to approach the same preoccupations from different angles; trying to explore the fullness of a persistent mystery; seeing the whole universe reflected in every shard and particle; peeling an onion a layer at a time. And with each kick at the can, some new skill is honed, some opinion becomes more pointed, some presumption is abandoned. It is the sculptural process of becoming oneself over multiple iterations. Did I expect to say all there was to say in my three great works? Did I hope to master each craft right out of the gate and move on to a life spent raking in the royalties?
I have said in my profile here and elsewhere that I believe we are all greater than the sum of our parts. This is a belief about society and about what it means to be human. It is a convenient belief for a dilettante, frankly. And although I sound like I might be beating myself up a bit for a shallow pool of accomplishments (of which I am nonetheless proud), I don’t mean it that way. I value the quality of having a broad range of interests and influences and tastes – it makes for an interesting life and a variety of avenues to explore. It widens one’s world. But I always envied those kids who had a singular vision and purpose and dedication that drove them on a highly particular path. Don’t get me wrong, that path can be fraught and can lead to dark cul-de-sacs. A friend of mine was an accomplished professional musician with a long career who decided that she didn’t know who she was without her instrument and wanted to find out. So she upended her life, put her axe away and set off on a journey of self re-discovery. But sometimes it seems like maybe the music wasn’t so much a veil over her identity as it was a compass – an instrument in the non-musical sense with which to navigate to a greater understanding of herself. Maybe that’s just me projecting myself into the shoes of someone with a specialty, with mastery.
Radio was perfect for me. It was simultaneously a way to turn focus on others, to make a broad survey of a whole universe of music and culture and perspectives and a craft in itself – the work of synthesizing all those elements into something (a show or a series) with a shape and an arc of its own. And in a way, that’s what Six String Nation has been too: a collection of individual stories and experiences given a collective structure – a guitar-shaped portal to an alternative appreciation of Canadian history, culture and identity that is both intimate and sweeping at the same time.
Alas, CBC ended my radio career for me and Six String Nation struggles day to day just to survive. There have been lots of big milestone achievements along the way that make for a colourful accounting at the very least. But I can’t help but feel sometimes that I aimed low and accidentally got what I wished for.