Short A Few Nutrients In The Ol' Petri Dish
by Your Diva, Robin Pastorio-Newman

Once upon a time in a place called New Brunswick, businesses closed at 5 p.m. and tumbleweeds rolled through the dark streets. Every night, after the suits deserted like roaches, quiet streets were overrun by thugs and prostitutes, bikers and college kids, the reckless underground artists and musicians. It was a tough town, where Glen Burtnick tried out new songs while dodging bottles and the fine artists painted and repainted barroom walls, bypassing canvas and taking their artwork straight to the people.

One day, the city fathers decided their filthy little town would prosper without its citizens. The city fathers opened the gates and sold their city to giant hospitals and corporations. For a time, underground people coexisted uneasily with bankers and realtors, politicians and others who did not love the filthy city's buildings and its history, and who thought new buildings without history would be better. As old buildings were gutted and torn down, fewer places remained where without grant money and university or corporate sanction artists showed their work, poets regaled cheering crowds and musicians played original music in front of people who really cared, despite the sailing bottles. Gradually, there was less room in the city for real art, real writing, real music - not bought and sold but made by artists whose lives often depended on the making. Buildings burned down, buildings continue to burn down in suspicious fires, clearing blocks for guiltless development. History crumbles with charred brick. Many people died without fanfare.

Somewhere along the line, new people came to town with more money than their predecessors. They did not care about the beautiful old filthy city or the people who had lived there or what happened before they came. They wanted the city to give them an easy life and treated others like servants. They made life harder for the people who loved New Brunswick.

Recently many bands that grew up in the slowly vanishing town played again. Your Darling, Your Diva, Your One True Love, putting in a cameo in this folktale, attended these shows. Your Beloved grew up as an artist with these bands but despises nostalgia, so she was surprised when the shows, mentioned on many Wednesdays since July, were brilliant. This is a measure of what endures but not of what originates or nurtures. The bands were not in the filthy city by themselves, and without what was there, then and all along, the music would have been different.

Let's be perfectly, completely clear about the golden goose: a scene is composed of all kinds of artists. No one, but no one, springs up fully formed and great at what they do. Musicians learn their craft in front of audiences. Painters and sculptors show their work and learn in whatever gallery form in which they exhibit. Poets and performance artists sink or swim in front of audiences and all audiences are mixed groups of all artists or - and no one should have to tell you this - no one goes anywhere. No one develops the slightest iota of skill. The saddest, most pointless thing Your Tasty Morsel has ever seen is an open mic where no one's listening to one another.

Anyone who tells a different fairy tale is drowning in his arrogance or he's selling the cow for beans. Anyone who says aspects of a scene are more important than others doesn't understand what happened anywhere that ever mattered. If you're going to a bar to see a band and you don't see hairdressers and hippies, skinheads and skatepunks, you're just seeing a band, and the band's odds are slim. Without cross-pollenation and a desire to see new things and new ideas - all genres and kinds of ideas - no one becomes a great artist at all.

The music matters, but the scent of money is in the air like a whiff of an Englishman's open wound on a giant's egg slicer. When ignorant people believe ONLY music matters because that's where the money is, other artists get the hint and get out, taking any real chance for a scene with them. And nobody lives happily ever after.

©2001 Robin Pastorio-Newman