There's Just Something Magical about the Second Saturday of October

Every year in San Antonio, on the Second Saturday of October, ArtPace holds an event called Chalk It Up. It usually closes off downtown Houston Street to have artists and families drawn on the ground, laying claim to the city they navigate, pulling us together in creation. The weather is usually pleasant. People are always in a good mood. It has over the years become one of my favorite things of the year. Even when I miss attending the event, I end up in some other adventure or some other business that turns out to be worth it all. Chalk It Up is just one of the ways that day just seems magical here. Perhaps the art walk that night is particularly crisp. Maybe someone has a really good lunch somewhere in the sunshine where a breeze blows in and a moment of calm defines how that whole day went. I've been Baptist for far too long for me to ever feel a connection to Halloween, try as I might now and then. But I've taken a fall holiday on of my own, for I celebrate the Second Saturday of October. They're always full of fun and adventure.

This year, ArtPace's Chalk It Up as invited me to make a mural as a featured artist in an augmented, socially-distanced version of the event. They're putting me at the Carver Library, the library I would use from time to time in my childhood on the Eastside, so I'm both honored to be able to do this again (this is my second go at this one and I have a probably more solid idea than I had last time at this) and I'm feeling an entirely different vibe of sentimentality going into this coming Saturday than usual. It's going to be a long, cool, maybe kind of weird day outside in the middle of a pandemic. The days kind of fill themselves as they usually do and I'm thankful to be able to still have crazy adventures like these.

This Saturday, October 10th, you should come by the Carver Library (3350 E. Commerce St.) from 8am-2pm, check out the work I'm making (spoiler alert-- yeah, it's text based, of course), and maybe I'll give you one of the masks I've been tie-dying this whole time. There's not a boring one in the batch.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Artistic Partnerships

I had intended for my next post to be about America's socio-economic economy, but I'll save that for a little bit later. I was just reading through my normal load of publications and I ran across a brief article that bothered me so much upon reading it that I just had to write something about it. NME reports this morning that John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page got tired of waiting for Robert Plant to make up his mind about doing a new tour with Led Zeppelin and they're just going on without him . Considering how late to the game I am to one of the best bands ever, I cannot feel right in saying whether or not this must stand, but I know this certainly bothers me. Maybe it's a matter of perspective, but at what is the art still pure from its source when the authors are missing? Is Led Zeppelin still Led Zeppelin if Bonzo's son is playing the drums and some other dude is doing all the singing? When it was 75% original band and things were kept in the family for the ot
Read more

To Be Young, Gifted, Black, and a Jazz Enthusiast: Apparent Needle in a Haystack

About a month ago, Patrick Jarenwattananon of NPR's A Blog Supreme  put together a group of lists of recent gateway jazz albums from prominent young jazz enthusiasts and bloggers.  The Jazz Now Project was a rather brilliant idea and opened up a lot of discussion and awareness about the future of jazz and really shows what the field looks like right now.  Early on the the culmination of this project, Jarenwattananon opened the submission of suggestions not only to those he specifically asked but also to other readers of the blog and on the email list.  So it didn't take me long for me to submit my own Jazz Now list .  (And special thanks to him for linking the post on the compilation of Jazz Now submissions. I got my highest hit count yet of 29 readers because of him. I really need more readers.) When I emailed him the link to my blog for submission, Jarenwattananon thanked me for my list and mentioned that I was the only black guy to have sent anything.  He figured that this
Read more

2022: I Lost My Father and Got Into Milton Nascimento

Image
"There are years that ask questions and years that answer." --Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God Folks have been bandying that quotation around the last few weeks on Twitter, the social network that just won't quit no matter what literal Apartheid-era Afrikaner and dumb Bond villain does to stomp all over it, asking what 2022 was for them. I didn't know after ruminating on it for some time, ultimately joking it was a year that made very pointed, declarative statements about how my life herein would go in some ways and made phrases that trailed off into nothing, leaving me to guess its intentions in others. It was a year of feast and famine as my years often are, and always interesting, as I often hope my life is. I wasn't not entertained, even when I was sad or even when I was irritated, and that's always been my hope to approach life that way. But I still don't know what this year was to me. Freelance music journalist Larry Fitzm
Read more