Write the Power - Thoreau Society Annual Gathering

 

In the essay “In Wildness is Thoreau,” scholar Lewis Leary calls Thoreau “... a revolutionary of absolute faith … who started a one-man revolution, which has overturned worlds – not through what he did, but through what he wrote.”


That’s the spirit of my piece “Write the Power, No. 1 – Thoreau,” a mixed media collage which began serendipitously as I sat on the couch listening to music while reading, writing, and researching my idea to synthesize the worlds of Henry Thoreau and punk rock. The phrase “write the power,” stems from the 1980’s Public Enemy hip hop anthem “Fight the Power,” and I envisioned a power salute fist holding a pencil. Both punk rock and hip hop can be considered cultural and political revolutions of a sort, and a cultural revolutionary is a lens through which I see Thoreau.

Pondering that image of the fist and pencil, I imagined a series of mixed media pieces featuring revolutionary writers, artists, and musicians, celebrating the power of language and the written word. I even imagined variations such as a fist throwing a punch or flipping the middle finger, as I envisioned different writers and artists ranging from Frederick Douglas and Mark Twain to Chuck D of Public Enemy and Joe Strummer of The Clash. But I started with Henry Thoreau who was a true revolutionary, as significant, in my opinion, as any Founding Father, in his questioning and criticism of America in the early 19th century for failing to live up to the promise of its premise.

Scholars Laura Dassow (Dah-soh) Walls and Bob Pepperman Taylor emphasize how Thoreau’s work intentionally challenged America in relation to the ideals of its revolution. Revolution is also fundamental to my Thoreau-Punk alignment for both the man and the movement are grounded in what Walls describes as Thoreau’s belief that “The American Revolution was incomplete: inequality was rife, materialism was rampant, and the American economy was entirely dependent on slavery” [and injustice]. Walls says Thoreau’s “dilemma [was] how to live the American Revolution not as dead history, but as a living experience that could overturn hidebound conventions and comfortable habits.” Bob Pepperman Taylor echoes this idea in his book America’s Bachelor Uncle asserting “No writer has more powerfully portrayed the American betrayal of its own commitment to individual liberty.”

Thoreau was indeed a revolutionary with a pencil – and interestingly he also was a revolutionary pencil maker. His personal innovations literally changed the industry and made “Thoreau & Son” pencils the premier American pencil. That idea is behind my image of the pencil, and the phrase “The Power of the Pencil” is written in a style mimicking Thoreau’s more legible script. The pencil covering Thoreau’s mouth clearly draws attention to his face but also symbolizes that Thoureau did his talking on the page. Granted, at his time, his many essays were delivered at the Lyceums. But the written word enables them to live on long past the night of the performance.

The collage style for this piece and for the planned series blends text and images, emphasizing the power of words. With Thoreau in regards to this year’s theme, collage can reflect both the messiness of revolution and of art while also presenting a mosaic of the complex ideas behind Thoreau’s words, their impact, and his legacy. Graffiti style text is intended to invoke a punk rock spirit, a renegade art form. The power salute fist clutching a pencil resembles a classic tag, and of course, it is a revolutionary symbol used by many protest movements. You’ll also notice in gold paint pen various scribbles mirroring Thoreau’s looser handwriting style, which I display with several versions of his original text, the lower left being the most freeform example.

Background images making up the collage include the cover of the original edition of Walden over which I placed the fist, and the cover of the play The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee. Published at the time of the Vietnam War and subsequent protests, it’s reflective of the revolutionary spirit behind Thourea’s protest and subsequent essay known as “Civil Disobedience.” In the upper right corner I have an image of another of my Thoreau artworks which is the minimalist “Portrait of Henry David Thoreau” by Swiss/French artist Felix Vallotton over two Thoreau selections, “Walking” and “Civil Disobedience.”

The cabin in the bottom right is obviously an iconic image associated with Thoreau, and the simple act of building the cabin and living there was a revolutionary act, as Laura Dassow Walls notes in her exceptional biography, Thoreau: A Life. The cabin truly unsettled the people of Concord. I’d describe it as a punk move precisely because it agitated others and disrupted the status quo. I also included an image of the sign and quote at the original cabin site.

Thoreau was determined to be a writer, and he honestly hoped to change the world with his words. Writing is power, and we all remember the origin story of Thoreau’s epic two million word journal – Emerson asked if he kept a journal and he wrote “So, I start today.” In my research I’ve pulled countless quotes which evoke to me Thoreau’s revolutionary punk rock spirit, and I incorporated them in the piece as banners and slogans, and more are painted around the outside edge of the piece.

So, with all that, I give you “Write the Power”

Thoreau, Punk, & the Art of Nonconformity

Both Punk Rock and Henry David Thoreau are grounded in the simple act of nonconformity. Walden, a Life in the Woods is at its heart and in its central thesis an exercise in nonconformity. It truly was meant to be and remains a guidebook for nonconformists. The same is obviously true for the subculture, nay culture, that sprang up around and because of punk rock.

Mike Royko and the Art of the Column

Just a thought: Mike Royko is one of America's greatest writers. Like, definitively a Top 10 artisan of the craft across the board, with no regard to ranking based on genre.

I grew up the son of a newspaper feature writer and editor, and I had the benefit of three newspapers in my house everyday -- The St. Louis Post Dispatch, The St. Louis Globe Democrat, and The Alton Telegraph. And from an early age I learned to appreciate, value, even love the art of commentary and the daily newspaper column. From Erma Bombeck to George Will, I gleaned so much knowledge and insight about the world through their deft knack for language and the concise medium of "the column." And I'd probably rank my favorite columnist of all time this way:  Mike Royko, George Will, David Brooks, Bill McClellan, and Erma Bombeck.

But my highest respect, admiration, and praise goes to the gritty Chicago voice of Royko. 

Write the Power -- Thoreau

In addition to the writing I have been doing with Thoreau and Punk, I have also been working on some Thoreauvian-Punk-inspired artwork. This piece -- "Write the Power, No. 1 - Thoreau" -- has been accepted to the first ever Thoreau Art Show for the Thoreau Society's Annual Gathering in Concord, MA on July 9-12. This year's conference, Thoreau's Revolutions, included a call for art to be be featured in a exhibition which "will focus on Thoreau’s revolutionary ideas as well as personal reflections on revolution in the context of his life and work."

Coincidentally, I had recently produced several pieces of Thoreau-inspired art for another artists call, and so I took a chance and entered this show. While I have long intended to attend the Thoreau Society Annual Gathering, I did not expect to go this year. In fact, I hoped to go once I finished my work and could potentially present at the conference. Alas, I will be able to "present," for the conference has scheduled an artists' talk for the show on the morning of July 11, and I will be speaking about this work and my ideas regarding Thoreau and revolution. My artist's statement for this piece follows:

“Write the Power” began serendipitously as the artist sat on the couch listening to music while reading, writing, researching, and sketching an idea to synthesize the worlds of Henry Thoreau and punk rock. The phrase “write the power,” which stems from the 1980’s Public Enemy song “Fight the Power,” sprang into his mind with the image of a power salute fist holding a pencil. The artist envisioned a series of mixed media pieces featuring revolutionary writers, artists, and musicians, celebrating the power of language and the written word. This piece is the first one completed in what he hopes will be a large body of work.

Thoreau, Graffin, & the Punk Ethos

Clearly, an anti-establishment and authority-defiant approach is fundamental to both Thoreau and the punk aesthetic, and perhaps the most obvious connection between the two men and movements. In a scholarly book length follow up to his punk manifesto, Greg Graffin expanded on the punk ideal with Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion in a World Without God. In it Graffin explains punk’s challenge to the tyranny of institutional authority warning that “If people unquestionably give in to the massive force exercised by the oppressive institution that is the government, they will enable the people in power.” This criticism mirrors Thoreau’s assertion in Resistance to Civil Government about the relatively few bending the government to their will with the Mexican War. 

Prior to Graffin’s book Anarchy Evolution, Bad Religion’s song "You are the Government" had decreed “when people bend, the moral fabric dies,” and that concern is the essence of Thoreau’s abolitionist stance and the development of his most significant and enduring political work in the art of “Civil Disobedience.” Thoreau’s original thinking on government and the integrity of the individual who dissents began as his counterargument to William Paly’s “Duty of Submission to Civil Government” from The Principals of Moral and Political Philosophy. While scholars and historians widely acknowledge the lineage of Thoreau’s ideas running through the anti-colonialist revolution led by Mohandas Gandhi and the American civil rights protests led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the defiant beliefs can easily extend through the 1970s and 80s with the rise of punk. 

Granted, no one is aligning the historical struggles for abolition, independence, and civil rights with the kids raging in mosh pits during the early 80s. That doesn’t, however, discount the connection of the punk ethos linking back to the ideas of Thoreau. For, when Graffin “warns against blindly accepting the government directives and blindly conforming to their ideals,” he is channeling the transcendentalist concepts of self-reliance and civil disobedience. Graffin, Bad Religion, and the punks of the Lower East Side would certainly “accept the motto that government is best that governs least” and might even agree that “when men are prepared for it, that is the type of government they shall have.”

Thoreau the Educator

In Laura Dassow Walls' sublime Thoreau biography, she describes 1839 as a time when Thoreau's life truly blossomed. Coming out of the harsh economic market facing young people when Thoreau graduated amidst the Panic of 1837, which led to the country's first and most serious economic depression lasting nearly ten years, Henry and his brother opened their school, and he "rose to a position of standing and honor in his community." The Thoreau school was truly an exemplary model of education, extending far beyond the rote memorization of early America's classical liberal arts foundation. 

In a letter to Orestes Brownson, Thoreau had pondered why we should "leave off our education when we begin to be men and women? ... It is time that villages were universities," uncommon schools where citizens could pursue liberal studies for the the rest of their lives, banding together to fund the arts and learning, and make not a village with a few noble men, but "noble villages of men."

Thoreau: the Economist

While Henry Thoreau is often thought of as an environmentalist and a nature writer, based primarily on the reading public's knowledge his work Walden, or Life in the Woods, fewer people see Thoreau through his philosophy on work and economics. In fact, few people think of Thoreau as an economics writer even though the introductory section to his opus, Walden, is titled "Economy." Truly, Thoreau wrote at length on the natural world and man's relationship to his environment, but his retreat to Walden Pond was specifically designed and chosen for him to have time, space, and a viewpoint from which to critique a dynamic and changing economic situation in Concord and America at large. 

In the study Henry at Work (Kaag and Van Belle), Thoreau is portrayed as one who above all else "realized the power of money to warp our lives." Having graduated from Harvard in 1837 during the most serious economic crisis the young nation had yet faced, Thoreau both witnessed the rise of the consumer commercial economy in which surplus was a new concept, at the same time he experienced the dire fiscal situation facing many young graduates. In fact, as Robert Sullivan points out in The Thoreau You Don't Know, young Henry "went to the pond to make a point about work." Thoreau was actually an incredibly hard worker and industrious young man whose talents ranged from innovator of a new superior pencil lead to trusted surveyor of the Concord landscape.

And, "If you think Thoreau as anti-work, that is because Thoreau questioned "why we work" (Kaag and Van Belle). In embracing the natural world and being in tune with, rather than at odds with, his environment, Thoreau even challenged the Biblical notion of the work week and the Sabbath, opining that man should work one day a week and rest the other six. Imagine the views of church leaders and inheritors of the Puritan ethic with that one. Yet, Thoreau was no "do-little," as he is often mistaken to be and criticized for.  While Thoreau explains that his "purpose in going to Walden was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly, but to transact some private business the fewest obstacles," he was working to explore and develop an economic critique.

And despite those stated intentions of transacting private business, "an important part of of Thoreau's experiment turned out to involve basic economic questions: What is the best way to earn a living? How much time should be spent at it?" (Thoreau's Living Ethics, Cafaro). Few people ask these questions, though Henry believed people should first and foremost draw their own conclusions, rather than submit to standards established by institutions. For he believed the point of economics is not how much wealth an individual produces, but what sort of people that work and wealth makes us.

An interesting connection to punk culture, especially in the second wave California bands like Black Flag and Minutemen, is the serious work ethic exhibited by these musicians to simply work on their terms. Because the punk economy was small, most bands lived quite sparsely, often "hand-to-mouth," and that fiscal reality was fundamental to the band Minutemen's philosophy and ethic of "jamming econo," which basically meant doing things "as cheaply and efficiently as possible" (White Boys, White Noise, Bannister). 

FoCoMX 2025: Standout Performances, Discoveries and Memorable Musical Moments

"The streets are alive with the sounds of local music ..."  I was so excited to attend and write about this event for the second year in a row. Life is good in FoCo -- literally dancing in the streets

Every April, the streets of Old Town Fort Collins are filled with the sounds of live music. FoCoMX took center stage once again April 18-19, amidst cold, snowy weather that earned the event the nickname SnoCoMX. Its official nickname is "America's biggest little music festival," and this year's edition featured 400 acts representing every imaginable genre performing at thirty-plus venues across town.

My wife and I joined the annual celebration for the second year in a row, starting on the crowded, slightly snowy patio of Equinox Brewing, where singer-songwriter Michael Kirkpatrick kicked off the festivities with a solo set. The musician whose voice was once described as "an anthropomorphic brontosaurus that has popped out of a children's book to teach kids about the danger of playing with matches" set a warm, welcoming tone with folksy narratives about life, love, community and spirit.

... Read the rest of the story at Westword.com

Thoreauvian Punk Philosophy

Henry Thoreau is widely cited as an inspiration and patron saint by many diverse groups and varied ways of thinking. Far from simply an environmentalist or an abolitionist or an activist, Thoreau is a significant American philosopher. And the scope of my ongoing work "The Punk on Walden Pond" is specifically about viewing Thoreau and punk as belief systems. They offer distinct but common thoughts on "how to live."

The connection runs through themes of American history, specifically in writing and literature. For, Thoreau's essays, Whitman's poems, and Huck's narrative all can be considered precursors to punk philosophy. As punk scholar and curator of the St. Louis Punk Archive has noted, "It's a matter of intent," as opposed to rigid guidelines about the sound of the music or the style of clothing or the demeanor of the audience.

One need only look to the earliest underpinnings of punk culture in the late 1970s on the Lower East Side and a music venue/bar called CBGB's. With the Ramones, Talking Heads, Television, Patti Smith, and Blondie all playing at the same time, in the same venue, among the same scene, you have to see punk rock, especially American punk, as diverse and absolutely inclusive, and not just about a three-chord downstroke.

Kick off the Summer Music Season at FoCoMX in Fort Collins, Colorado

I was so excited to write this preview for FoCoMX, the "biggest little music festival in the country."

As the weather warms in Colorado, we can't help but think of music festivals. One of the largest and earliest festivals to kick off the season happens in downtown Fort Collins each April with FoCoMX, or the Fort Collins Music Experiment, which was created by the Fort Collins Musicians Association in 2008. Taking place across Old Town from Friday, April 18, to Saturday, April 19, this event features more than 400 bands at thirty-plus venues, and we have the lowdown on everything you need to "FoCoMX in style."

The festival kicks off at 3 p.m. on Friday, April 18, on the patio of Equinox Brewing with a solo set from the rich baritone voice of renowned Colorado singer-songwriter Michael Kirkpatrick, FoCoMA's 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award honoree. After a brief proclamation from the mayor's office acknowledging April as Music Appreciation Month, Kirkpatrick will croon his soulfully whimsical folk narratives, and the festivities are off and running.

The key to a successful downtown music festival is a collaborative relationship with the community and businesses that support a nearly all-volunteer effort to spotlight Colorado music. "FoCoMX has become the quintessential Fort Collins weekend," says Karla Baise of Odell Brewing, a longtime festival sponsor. "The vibe runs high from the center of the floor at Washington's, our largest venue, to the sidewalks as people stop to hug each other, crossing paths on their way to see bands and friends play across town."

Read the rest of the story at Westword ... 

How Fort Collins Music Association Built a Thriving Scene

In my latest piece for Westword Magazine, I explore a unique music organization which cultivates the thriving indie music scene in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Fort Collins is a hotbed for live music with a diverse collection of venues that host national touring acts and local bands. And the key to FoCo's thriving music scene is a unique grassroots music nonprofit that feeds and cultivates the area's love of music: the Fort Collins Musicians Association, or FoCoMA.
The organization officially launched in 2007. It was simply a means of “the right people at the right time,” according to co-founding member and board president Greta Cornett, who is considered the driving force, glue and spirit of FoCoMA. Cornett, a CSU graduate, has been heavily embedded in Fort Collins local music scene since the mid-90s, playing trumpet in the band 12 Cents for Marvin and volunteering as a host of KRFC's Live at Lunch show.

In the early 2000s, numerous Fort Collins music venues had closed for a variety of reasons, and local musicians were struggling for places to play. Many bands were displaced, with national acts often bumping them from the few spots at bars and theaters.

So Cornett, Peggy Lyle, Dennis Bigalow and numerous other local musicians began meeting to discuss how to support each other and the music community. Lyle, who is now FoCoMA’s executive director, was working as the event director for the Fort Collins Downtown Business Association. Bigalow, another co-founder and current board secretary, was the music director at Fort Collins indie radio station KRFC, which is where he met Cornett.

The musicians would have Sunday afternoon hangs at Route 34, a local bar and bike shop founded by two CSU grads. What began as simple conversations sharing knowledge about the industry eventually became more formal education panels, professional development programs that the association continues to this day. At Cornett’s suggestion, the spot added live music to its offerings, becoming a new venue for musicians to gather. Those Sunday afternoons discussing goals for FoCoMA "opened our eyes to so many different scenes,” Cornett reflects. “We have great music up here, but no one knew about it."

... Read the rest of the story at Westword.com ... 

The Wild: from Thoreau to Punk

In a 1972 essay titled “In Wildness is Thoreau,” delivered at an annual literary conference, scholar Lewis Leary opines to have “us think briefly about the Thoreau who was a wild man, who let his hair grow long, … who dressed as he wished, and did exactly as he wished.” That wild spirit of resolute and uncompromising individuality is foundational to both Thoreau's thinking and the philosophy and motivation for punk rock and punk culture. 

Musician and rock journalist John Robb describes punk rock and punk philosophy as “the wild spirit, that outsider cry.” A key component for understanding that spirit is to separate it from the term "wilderness," which people often mistakenly believe Thoreau was referencing. It wasn't the wilderness, which is outside of us; it was the wild, which is within.

In the critical analysis America’s Bachelor Uncle: Thoreau and the American Polity, scholar Bob Pepperman Taylor asserts “... the heart of Thoreau’s revolt was his continual assertion that the only true America is that country where you are able to pursue life without encumbrance” (3) And “Thoreau exhibits a young person’s rebelliousness,” an insight with which Emerson would wholeheartedly agree. And similarly, nowhere and at no time is rebellion more about a youth than it is in punk rock culture. For Thoreau was attacking the complacency of the emerging American middle class, just as second wave punk Bands Bad Religion and Black Flag did in the 1980s Reagan America.

Albert Camus famously asserted "The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion." And like Thoreau in his experiment living in society but simultaneously outside of it, Dicki Hebdige said of punk in his book on subcultures, “No subculture has sought with more grim determination than the punks to detach itself from the taken-for-granted landscape of normalized forms …”