FrontRow readers,
Fifteen years ago I was a senior at Dallas Christian High School in Mesquite, Texas, wearing bowling shoes with my school uniform and sneaking out during show choir practice to listen to the new Further Seems Forever CD in my friend’s car. I did not like most of my teachers and they weren’t particularly impressed with my performance, either. There was one I liked talking to: Mr. (Isaiah) Evans, who’d worked in TV news and subbed often in theatre classes. He saw my work for the school paper and asked me to write for his music website, Magic Bullet, which he ran then with Lance Yocum.
After a show they asked me to review, I shut myself in my room trying to find links between The Appleseed Cast and the jazz their drummer must’ve been listening to, the way both genres used repetition interrupted only by small changes. My brain had been wired by modes of warning common to a strict Southern Baptist upbringing and reinforced by a struggle with depression since my early teens. Don’t give your heart to things of the world. Don’t consider too deeply, lest you be led astray. But in my room discovering connections instead of lonely chasms, I could sustain my attention for hours, something totally new. Eternity was a different place for everyone. For me it was there, with Cobra and Art Blakey; it had been there as a kid with TLC’s “Creep” covertly in my walkman, with Jenny Holzer at the Dallas Museum of Art before I really understood what I was looking at.
Ann Powers and Evelyn McDonnell’s collection ‘Rock She Wrote’ gave me writers like bell hooks and Ellen Willis, standard-bearers for putting a work into crucial social and historical context. Nan Goldin showed me how the contradictions and chaos of being human can live inside a photograph in a way that’s loving and pure. Since then there’ve been more examples and more discoveries and lots of work. Fast forward to now, here, and, what I hope to do at FrontRow: find writers, photographers, and filmmakers who aren’t waiting for another location or time in their lives to try and reach the places their earliest influences have – people who take joy in working hard, hashing it out, and finding another way to say it true. People who, if they love this city – they don’t have to! – want to climb down into the most guarded parts of it and find its ills being wrestled with and reflected in the art being made here.
The vision I have for FrontRow includes sound and video; before 2018 hits we’ll launch a monthly podcast, and after the turn of the year, a monthly short-doc series. Seeing bodies and hearing voices is a vital step away from just reading everything filtered though a white-voiced editorial staff like the one at D; there’s still so much to do in allowing black and brown artists and writers to truly drive the conversation (as opposed to making room for non-white perspectives in a white-led discussion, which is not enough.)
We’ll perpetuate visual arts coverage and criticism by diving deep into single works on display here or being created by our artists. Same goes for music. If a single song is worth 800 words, it can have them. Commissioned poems on current events, parodies, conceptual photo essays: all these are game.
I’ve been given a level of freedom in this position. The only rule I know that’s hard and fast is that I’m not supposed to make any popcorn in this office. Don’t you want to do (pretty much) whatever you want? Don’t you want to pitch me and see what happens? If any of this speaks to you, I hope you will.
