I started making a little video tour of my house. It was inspired by a conversation with a friend who is navigating some life stuff, but also in general by so many things I’m seeing in this world, people being economically precarious.
And I really have to wonder sometimes if the art and loveliness that is deficient in / missing from this world nowadays is at least roughly correlated with the amount of precarity that people are experiencing and therefore being impeded from stretching, taking a full breath, using their voices, doing their art.
Although art and creativity almost certainly thrive on various forms of tension, some sort of stability, usually in the form of cheap housing, is extremely helpful or possibly even necessary I truly believe. Looking back at various housing situation’s I have been in and witnessed, and the amount of art and creativity that were able to grow there.
The people I see walking around adrift, some probably in need of mental-health services, some very seriously in need of same — for a long time now I have been wondering if a lot of them are the missing artists.
And also, too, I’ll see some guy out there wandering the streets or just sitting on the ground and think hey, back in the olden days he would just have been herding sheep or something, having a useful function, getting to be himself and be considered a member of society but not having to fit himself into a harsh mold he didn’t fit into.
Or what about all the missing rug weavers, mat weavers, basket weavers, roof thatchers. And I wonder if you drew a line for them on a graph, if it would run roughly parallel to the line representing “invasive grasses,” “yard waste,” etc.
My house tour videos, the couple that I’ve done so far anyway, are posted on my YouTube channel @jennynazak764 . Yeah, I don’t know why they put the 764 after my name, it used to just be my name, but then at some point it changed to have a 764 on the end. Maybe I committed some YouTube sin like be too obscure or something.