no.234 | Estrays, Bread, and Roses
Live at the French Legation in Austin, Texas
I tried to write this a million times. I was really trying to post this BEFORE our performance last Saturday. I ran out of steam and most crucially—minutes. The show was super fun. It was great to see so many folks come out on a lovely evening under the canopy of trees on the lawn of the French Legation.
I don’t know how to write this, meet the moment, or the best way forward. I don’t understand the efficacy of art. But I hold art as an invitation to feel and think; as Susan Sontag put it “Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.”
Despite the daunting challenges we face, we don’t need less art, we need more. Art helps us get out of bed, drag a comb across our heads, and put one foot in front of the other.
Rebecca Solnit, in her brilliant book Orwell’s Roses, tells us that George Orwell planted roses because beauty motivates us to do the hard work of being citizens. The activist Helen Todd said “Bread for all, and roses too”
In this spirit, we will continue to gather together to find strength in our expressions and communities and to create spaces for our values to flourish.
About the Piece Commissioned by the French Legation
We started preparing for this show in the Spring of 2023. PSO considers the intricacies of place and its depiction in sound and images. Getting ready for the show included conducting research, writing music, and making field recordings and images.
The French Legation is the oldest house open to the public in Austin. Its story is long and complicated. This house lends shape to memories, memories that become histories and articulations of values held.
Leaning against the wall in one of the rooms in the house there is a reproduction of a page from the “Estrays” section of the Texas State Gazette Newspaper from 1851. This newspaper was discovered inside the walls during a restoration of the windows. The “Estrays” section of the paper functioned somewhere between the classifieds and public notices. Austin-area readers posted notices about wayward horses, pigs, cures for insomnia, and most, disturbingly runaway enslaved people. The banality of the descriptions of people as lost property in the paper is the essence of the banality of evil that Hannah Arendt so deftly described. The Robertsons, who owned the house from 1848-1948, and from whom the east side neighborhood Robertson Hill derives its name, were slave owners.
I incorporated text from the found newspaper as lyrics to a new song entitled “Estrays,” and into the video we performed in front of.
In the video, I combined photographs I made in Bastrop (where, incidentally, Dr. Robertson previously lived) with archival images and photographs of the house and grounds that I made. Long crossfades blended the layered images into chimeric landscapes containing the past and present. Paul Stautinger joined me on guitar and provided endless atmosphere and melody. Mark Menjivar was unable to join us at the last minute but sent along a prerecorded activation of the Texas Bird Song Library, which joyfully accompanied mine and Paul’s guitars.
All stills of the performance by Bobby Scheidemann.
ESTRAYS
Thirteen hands high
Both hind legs are white
Crop and split right ear
Scar on his jaw
Supposed to be three years old
Lame in the right knee
About five feet high
Jersey sack coat
A black hat of wool
Slow Spoken
Shoes of his own make
Pistol on his belt
A House so old
Sheltered many souls
A House so old
Holds its ghosts close
Hard truths be told
Bodies were bought and sold
What is an old house for
A Reckoning
Nothing Less
Nothing More
NEWSLETTER BONUS: ReGrowth at The French Legation!
PSO INTERNET RADIO
