spent 9 days near grass valley, california with some beautiful artists. there were composers and poets, political to varying degrees, and about half were women.

as a singer, it's nice to talk with composers, but it's even better to talk with poets and composers. sometimes i think i started singing because i missed words. with the poets it was easier to talk about visceral beauty - the feeling of words in mouth, than it is with composers. also we had some film makers, talking about beauty with them too.

especially a certain young american poet of my generation who used rhythm, you could taste the lines, i guess it hasn't been bred out of her yet.

but i was thinking, what does a university job do to an artist? is that life too? is there fertility in that life? is there time? do we idealize that life the way some people's parents idealized the suburbs or going "back to the land"?

and what some may say is the opposite of beauty: politics, i remembered while talking to our elder statesman poet that All of the composers we venerate were serious activists. i mean, THROUGH their music, and the film makers too like Godard and the germans, Straub and Huillet. And they had serious emotions related to politics. There are so many images of war in those movies, in tight relation with the avant garde perspective. so why are we so shy now? i'm not sure i got a good answer.

there were women at this poto: it is always nice to talk with women, our form of discussion is so different. i feel we were there to support each other and learn about different ways to create art. the men tended to get into how their work fit into the history of art, how and whether they had made advances. i think men and women were concerned with both things, but perhaps we wanted different things from such a gathering. i liked it. felt less defensive.

one night we lay down in a circle on the floor with our heads pointed in and sang. i sang a drone for a lot of it. i noticed the more constant my drone, the more wildly everyone could improvise over it. so if pop music is the drone to our musical life, allowing improvisation in art and in other realms, then i wouldn't mind contributing to it. that's what they call a holding function in psychotherapy.