It Gets Lighter From Here is an initiative by Culture Central, a collective voice for arts & culture in the West Midlands, U.K. Please see below the explanation by Culture Central for the initiative.
About It Gets Lighter From Here
21 December is the shortest day of the year. It is also the last Monday before Christmas, the start of a festive season that is likely to be seriously overshadowed by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.
On the night of the 21st — the Winter Solstice, marking the shortest day and longest night of the year — we want artists and cultural institutions across the West Midlands to come together to provide multiple moments of happiness and hope under the banner: It Gets Lighter From Here.
This is why over 35 organisations are realising a number of digital micro commissions, each no more than sixty seconds long, which will be released across various social media platforms creating a region-wide celebration of hope, optimism and possibility for the future, and of the value in creativity and the arts.
The project aims to involve a huge cross-section of artists and art forms — from theatre and dance, to spoken word and music — from the most internationally renowned to the most recently emerged.
Content will be shared via the hashtag #ItGetsLighterFromHere, reaching substantial audiences and networks from across the participating organisations, artists, region and beyond.
Following the event on 21 December, the collection of work shared across social media platforms may be assembled into an online collection that will be available for sharing into 2021.
I was inspired to create my own short production based on the above initiative, I wasn’t commissioned to contribute, but I thought I would anyway.
There’s the joke about how everyone remembers where they were when they first heard The Beatles had broken up, even the people who weren’t born yet.
The Beatles broke up 50 years ago, and yet people are still telling their story, that’s how good they were.
Not only were they the biggest band in the world in terms of sales, but their music was also way ahead of everybody in terms of innovation. Not even the Rolling Stones could keep up with them.
We could talk about why that is. Sure, they were immensely talented. Sure, they were lucky to be at the right place at the right time, as a new, postwar era was opening up and needing new songs to fill the space. Everybody knows all that.
What’s less well known is the “grit”.
Like Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his book, “Outliers”, the average early-1960s Liverpudlian dance band was lucky if they played twice a month. But because The Beatles had that residence gig in Hamburg, they were playing 3–4 times a day, cranked out on speed, for weeks at a time. So they were learning their trade A LOT faster than the boys back home.
Then Beatlemania hit and they worked 20 hour days for the next couple of years, traveling the world, playing shows every night, doing dozens of interviews a week. They were young and they could handle it, but still, it was relentlessly brutal, on a scale unseen before.
Then around 1965, they quit touring. It had gotten too intense. Luckily they were making plenty of money off of record sales (Hey, remember those?) and their name was big enough, so they could afford to.
So while the other bands were living out of tour buses and smashing up hotel rooms, The Beatles could afford to stay home and write songs, reflect, and work on their art, allowing them to make progress at a pace other bands couldn’t keep[ up with. Their fame had bought them a lot of creative space, which they made good use of.
When their manager, Brian Epstein died in 1967, that would have been a good time for the wheel to fall off the wagon and the whole thing came crashing down, as it often happens with bands when a business is so violently disrupted.
But that didn’t happen. Why not? Because Paul McCartney stepped in.
Not a lot of people know this, but Paul was always a workaholic. This explains why, even today, being nearly eighty years old and with more money than Crassus, he still tours extensively. These kind of folk are like sheepdogs- they need to keep really busy or else they go mad.
After 1967, the Beatles were really Paul’s band. He set the agenda, everyone else just tried to keep up, including Lennon, who was content to sit back and chill in rock star comfort. But it was always McCartney cracking the whip.
A lot has been written about why the Beatles broke up. Personal differences, Yoko Ono, etc.
A big part of it was simply they were tired. They’d been at it full tilt for a decade, even before they got famous, and now they were burning out. Not to mention, they were all fabulously wealthy and could afford to call it a day. Their mortgages were paid.
When we look back on The Beatles’ story, we see the music, of course, we see the young men and the fame and the genius and the spectacle and the historical narrative.
What is less mentioned is the *grit*. The long, grinding, days involved just keeping the show on the road. It wasn’t glamorous or sexy, but in many ways, it was the most important part.
As John Lennon once said, “You have to be a bastard to make it, and that’s a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest bastards on Earth..”
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.” Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”.
What Hemingway wrote about one of his book characters, Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress says about the future of remote work (“Distributed Work”, as he calls it).
“On the distributed front, the future of work has been arriving quickly. This week, a wave of companies representing over $800B in market capitalization announced they’re embracing distributed work beyond what’s required by the pandemic:
Of course, a lot of the disruption that occurred to people we know was due to the kind of housing people had. Suddenly being told to work from home is a lot easier if you live in a big house in a leafy suburb, than if you rent say, a $3200/month, 800 sq ft sleeping cupboard in Manhattan.
And with all those newly-remote’d office workers fleeing the big city, what happens to all the service jobs that satellite them (waiters, bartenders, personal trainers, etc). And without those service jobs to gainfully employ the artists, actors, poets, aspiring filmmakers, and other bohemians, what happens to the arts? What happens to culture?
Matt’s contention (and many people agree with him) is that “Distributed Work” is the future, all the C-virus did is accelerate the inevitable.
Which is precisely what most big change does, after all. Plus ca change…
Originally published by Gapingvoid Culture Design via their email newsletter dated August 12, 2020. You can also subscribe to their email via;
It no longer makes any sense to post on Social Media. What purpose is it serving you? Are you advertising or are you showing off? At some level it meets a need in you to be recognised, looking for affirmation or even looking for attention. But all the content you have posted in the past 10 years has been lost, you are not able to retrieve it, unless you are writing on a site like this or on your own blog. This will be my strategy going forward. Writing in places where a permanent record is kept, where I can download my writings, which after all are precious and I have invested time, effort and thinking time towards.
