Happy solstice, happy new year
I've been going to Michael Zerang & Hamid Drake's 6 am winter solstice concerts for years -- not regularly, but enough so that I know the drill. (For those who don't: Michael and Hamid are Chicago-based percussionists in the jazz and experimental music world -- though they seem to spend at least half their time on tour in Europe. Both are master musicians, expert improvisers adept at conjuring music from a vast array of hand drums, shakers, gongs, and whatnot.) A beloved tradition in bohemian Chicago now in its 29th year, the solstice concerts usually begin in darkness and quiet, a host of people meditating sleepily in a room, seated in chairs and on the floor. The musicians set up in the center of the room, their playing space delimited by a circle of small candles. The concerts last usually an hour, and in my memory of concerts past often start out gentle -- a tap of the drum, a low chant perhaps -- and then build over the hour from minimalism to a crescendo of percussion as the sun rises outside and the room wakes to greet the day and the new season. It's great! It's hard to get up that early, but once I do, I'm always glad to have made the effort.
This year, I dragged myself out of bed at 5:25 in the morning after another of the sleepless nights that have become my norm of late and stumbling, coffee in hand but not nearly enough, went to go pick up a friend. We rushed up Western Avenue, worried we were going to be late, but when we pulled up at Links Hall at 5:59, our wooly brains were confounded by the sight of 100 or so people, including the artists, standing on the sidewalk outside, waiting for someone to come unlock the theater. Oops! My friend had told me in the car that she had dreamed that night that she overslept and missed my texts and missed the concert. Ha! Was it possible, she said as we huddled in the cold, that she had dreamed the box office person's dream by accident?
It took 45 minutes for, first, someone to arrive with a key and then for the musicians and helpers to get everything set up. Rather than meditative silence the audience was chatty and hopped up on coffee by the time it all started, and the sun was already coming up. It was all just ... wrong. And yet.
When the set started the music came out of the gate swinging and didn't stop. I'm no music critic, but I heard this urgent hour of percussion as a call to action and attention, a refusal to stay quiet, a denial of complacency. Don't take anything for granted, the drums said to me -- it could all get turned on its head in a hot second and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
Usually after these concerts Michael and Hamid talk a bit and this day was no different, though by the time it ended the sun was streaming bright through the glass brick window. Hamid told a long story about a recent tour that took the two of them to Hungary that involved a friend there making a knife for Michael that had some of his hair embedded in the handle, and then using that knife to cut some of Hamid's hair in the promise that next year he would be gifted a knife as well (it was complicated!). But the point was to remind us to actively appreciate and love our friends. Try even more, this year, he said, to live consciously and compassionately and to cherish and fight to protect all that is worth protecting.
The whole morning was a good, embodied reminder that more often than not nothing ever goes as planned. That life is messy and disorienting, that people may fail us out of malice or mere inattention, that things may just be eternally wrong, but we're still all better off being in it together. We're still better off showing up even it it's a pain to get out of bed. It was the best solstice concert ever.
***
This is the last newsletter this year. In January, I start not one but two new part-time jobs. One is as the managing editor of South Side Weekly, a new development I am very happy about. As you may have noticed I've been all over the place the past few years, and I am beyond ready and excited to stay home and dig in locally. The nice response here in town to the Chicago Neighborhood Guidebook fueled this decision, and It feels urgent, and fun, not to mention a step toward alleviating the loneliness of working from home, something I've had to really reckon with this year.
I've also picked up a gig teaching a course in "magazine writing" at Columbia College. I've guest lectured in other people's classes in the past, but I've never had my own class of students for 15 whole weeks. It's nerve wracking! But as we all try to figure out how to best effect change in the world, I've definitely wondered this year whether writing and editing (the only thing I know how to do, really) are the most useful ways to spend my time. I wonder, often, if I should put more energy into doing (something, anything) as opposed to documenting the doings of others. But as an academic friend pointed out the other day, teaching is doing -- and she's right. I'm eager to get going, and lucky to have the chance to work in community with new folks as well as old.
Because of course, this in addition to continuing to work with Belt. And, oh yeah! Soup & Bread starts January 8! So, things may be a bit hectic for a while. Who knows when the next one missive may be. But I'll try to keep you posted.
In the meantime, keep showing up for each other; I know I'm going to try.
Happy new year,
Martha
PS: The image at the top is of the candelabra in the Hallgrimskirka in Reykjavik, which I visited in January 2018. I wrote a bit about it last year here, and about the poem that accompanies those candles. "Light the light!" it urges and, well, I've always liked the winter rituals of light -- they both recognize darkness as part of the cycle but also honor the importance of illumination, and the active role we as humans have to take in making it. I wasn't going to have a tree or anything this year, because I'm going out of town for the holidays, but at the last minute this week I went out and bought a wreath for my window and decorated it with twinkly lights. It's been pretty dark at times this year; making the effort to bring a little glow into the house seemed like a good idea, and it was.