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Lindy Smith
Intermediate Wheatgrass, 2004, Wyoming

Lindy made these sunprints during her stay at Ucross.

Yesterday was all tangled knots and frustration as I was inundated with technical problems and my own short-sightedness. Questions like where was that damn cable?, why didn't I bring a hat?, and where is all the red wine I was promised? haunted me throughout the day and then the night. I had expectations that we would drink heavily, stay up late and meet some local cowboys—none of which has happened so far. It seems these artists are really serious, really hard-working, and doing serious art like writing novels or poems about nature or painting in oil. I feel like a clown in comparison, with all my hard drives and devices and plugs (or lack of them, as it turns out).

But then the dusk came and after a day of yelling at the computer, scratching my head and pulling out my hair, I stepped outside. Sure the mosquitos were in full force, and yeah, I suddenly realized I only had about an hour and a half of daylight left, but who would let go of dusk? Why aren't we all setting aside that time of day, every night, to walk outside, whether we are in the city and the gold light is reflecting on the sky scrapers, or in the country where the light casts upon the hills, the trees, the water and the meadow equally and without prejudice? Even if it is just for a minute, just long enough for the sun to dip, the color to shift from lion-yellow to cotton candy-pink, how can we ever forget the sun setting, the first star, and that ghost of a moon? It's enough to change your life, let alone your heart and those bullies of a thought.

For reasons that are unclear to me I keep listening to that Brian Eno/David Byrne album, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, inspired by the titular 50's African novel by Amos Tutola (which I haven't read). If you don't know, it's an early example of "sampled" music, or collaged music, before they actually had samplers—and after avant-garde composers like Cage, Reich and Bryars had already done sampled songs. They used found recordings from radio stations across the globe—angry talk show hosts, Arabic singers, empassioned evangelists—and put them to music. From the repetition, stacotto and emotion of these disparate voices, which they literally had to play by tape cassette against the music tracks, they made music. And music in which we as listeners found congruence and meaning both musically and emotionally. The author as curator instead of writer or singer. One thing Eno said that really struck me was that he was interested in making the ordinary interesting and in finding music where music wasn't supposed to have been. It's not a very shocking statement, nor particularly unique coming from an artist, but it pretty much conveys where I am coming from and how I see the world. How I, in fact, struggle to see the world, because it's hard, you know, day in and day out, to make the ordinary interesting. Even to yourself. How do you make the ordinary not just interesting but beautiful and important or if it needs to be ugly and dramatic? How to you imbue it with pride and dignity? How do you escape the monotony of the ordinary, that which we all are? How do you make the ordinary unfamiliar, and in so doing, make ourselves anew?