Well, you could start with the Hearth...
I confess, I have a bit of a procrastination problem with YouTube. It's terribly easy to justify another minute and twenty-eight seconds of a movie preview, for example, instead of getting up and going to write the invitation to tomorrow's Papermancy Hearth:
The Papermancy Hearth is a biweekly, low-pressure, inclusive hangout where papermancers and friends talk, share, explore, laugh, and connect under the very-loosely-held theme of "paper-based thinking, craft, and tactile cognition." Come when you like, leave when you wish, we'd love to see you!
And yes, I did check to make sure this is definitely the right link. You can also learn more about the hearth in this post:
Gray Miller
But that movie preview had some gold, too.
Oh, maybe you thought it was a hypothetical? Oh, no. It's a preview for an artsy black-and-white film about the musician Bill Evans* (who I'd only vaguely heard of, he's even before my time).
I'm not a big jazz fan; in fact, I never really appreciated it at all until in my junior year of high school I started playing piano in two jazz bands (yeah, I was kind of weird that way). My tenure there was a case study of making up for lack of skill with an overabundance of enthusiasm.
I have started and stopped playing piano many times in my life, and always wished in that vaguely aspirational way that I would have kept it up. It's always lay in that "Oh, I can always do it someday" group of half-wishes that clutter the backburners of my brain.
Back to the movie...
But one part of this preview of Everybody Digs Bill Evans really grabbed me. The story is about his struggle to continue playing after the accidental death of his "musical soulmate" Scott LaFaro. At a certain point the voiceover says this:
"It takes every part of your person...pushing the world away, so you can think with your hands."
Even back in the '60's and '70's people were having that feeling of overwhelm**, especially when they wanted to find places of creativity, reflection, and personal expression. You often see those kinds of things mocked now – "hippy-dippy communes" and such – but really, it came down to the recognition that most of the stuff that gets pushed at us during our days does not actually matter.
What does matter? Well, to figure that out, then as now, you gotta push back. Sometimes, as the clip says, with "every part of your person."
But sometimes you can just take some time on a Sunday morning to hang out with some folks who may or may not be Bill Evans fans...but we really dig paper.
(this starts at the point of the quote - the link may not work in email)
*As I compose this newsletter, btw, I'm listening to the Bill Evans Trio live on the BBC from 1965 thanks to the Internet Archive.
** As I write this I feel like I can hear some of the Papermancy crew chuckling at me because they were there. "Oh, Gray, you have no idea..."