In Defence of Making Messy Public Art
Open Mic Mondays in Parc Jeanne-Mance have just entered their seventh year and at this point, they have it figured out. Bring your picnic blanket, bug spray, and set yourself up on the side of the hill overlooking Duluth as the smell of barbeque and weed rolls over you. It’s a Monday evening; what else are you doing? Sign up starts at 6PM, and if you’re lucky golden hour hits just as the performers get going. You’re in the grass, you know enough to have brought several beers and a book to roll your joint on. Kick your shoes off, run into six people you haven’t seen since last June. Bugs will catch the sun and glow as they fly lazily through the air, drunk on being warm and alive. It feels like you’re mainlining summer. And then the music starts.
The music, you have to understand, is mostly terrible. If you go to Ultimate Guitar Tabs dot com and check out the Top Tabs>All-Time, you’ll get a pretty good idea of what is in store for you. But the organizer, Dirty Eddy, has a proper sound system set up, and they get a couple performers who know what they’re doing in the action, and it’s a free opportunity to sit in the park and see what people want to do in front of an audience. And it doesn’t really matter to me if what’s being performed at the open mic is good or not.
Performing at an open mic is kind of like going in front of an audience of (consenting) strangers, unzipping your pants, and presenting your genitalia flattened against a piece of plexiglass. Audience members might think “aah!”, or lean over to whisper something devastating to their friend, which can be hard to take. They might also say, “I respect the bravery it took for you to put it out there.” Or, “Okay, you’re being kinda goofy with it and I’m entertained so at least there’s that.” At their most generous the audience nods and goes, “Huh. Not half bad.” Whatever you do at an open mic, it's not supposed to be good, is supposed to be in progress, and yours. I think you should try to make it to at least a couple of these Monday events.
Bear with me for a brief political defense of the open mic.
Some of my friends who grew up in Montreal take certain things for granted. They obviously know better than I do what’s so fantastic about this city, but they seem to think it’s standard cultural fare to get to have a little drink and go listen to people make noise in public. Which is great. It should be standard.
But if, like me, you come from one of these places that have been taken over by puritanical culture-hating demons who have made it illegal to have an open can of cidre in a park, you know what I’m talking about. Some places are run by extremely boring (and also evil) demons who enforce bylaws that demand you file paperwork before even thinking about playing music in public, who want culture run exclusively by multinational corporations, who shut down venues because of one gentrifier’s noise complaints. If you’re from one of those places where it’s so goddamn expensive to live that most people don’t have the energy at the end of the day to lug an amp and a generator to where the people are, then you might understand why I am struck with a certain RoC awe by the Montreal Summer. This is a place where people care about art. It’s so incredibly important that we fight tooth and nail against the creep of corporatization, and noise bylaws, and everything that takes the power to make art out of people’s hands and puts it into the hands of Shiller Lavy, or a Bell subsidiary or a water guzzling AI chat bot or whatever the fuck next evil thing is coming for us.
I’m still talking about the open mic.
We need to make loud, not great art in public. We can’t be afraid to make embarrassing stuff in front of each other. It’s that insecurity that drives people to ask ChatGPT what the next lyric in their song should be because they don’t want to risk writing something that sounds wrong or silly. They’d rather chew the beige cud of the slop machine than try and fail. The safe and welcoming space of the open mic is the antidote to that kind of insecurity. You go, you play, and you get better. That doesn’t mean you’ll really ever get good, or that people shouldn’t look critically at what you’re doing up there. With the exception of those with the kind hearts and patience of elementary school art teachers, people will judge you up there. But as long as there’s a mix of support and critique, you might be up for the possibility of doing it again and doing it better next time. Or doing it worse, whatever, but either way that’s excellent because it means you are part of something.
It’s your political duty to make music, art, and bad poetry, in front of people. So the puritanical culture hating demons who hate noise and mess and poor people don’t win. There are other things you have to do to make sure they don’t win but hey, performing at the open mic is a non-zero offering to the push against the corporatization of our art scenes.
I will say, I’m not talking to the people with the white person locs and culturally appropriative performances. Don’t come to the open mic, that's actually another public good. Take a moment to consider if the performance you were planning should really be done by a white person. Shave your head, fix your heart, and then yeah, whatever.
For me, going to an open mic is kind of like showing up for jury duty. But in the park and after taking an edible. There is a social responsibility we have to show up to the open mics, which are an absolutely essential part of any robust artistic ecosystem. It’s an awful fact of life and particularly of performance that you really can’t get good at something until you brutally embarrass yourself doing it a couple of times. If you embarrass yourself at the open mic, you can look into a sea of faces and know that’s exactly what they signed up for. You’re there to get better at something, or to have fun, or to show off this new song you’ve (almost) learned on your acoustic guitar to the friends you’ve wrestled into coming with you.
I have a lot of pent-up earnestness and enthusiasm that I’ve been coming to terms with for a good portion of my adult life, mostly because I was never a theatre kid and I don’t enjoy board games. And yet, I can earnestly and enthusiastically enjoy watching people trying to make art for the first time. It’s not that I like watching people be bad at shit, or that I like making snide comments about what’s going on onstage (I do like that though, I’m sorry); it’s not even because it makes me feel less alone in the crap that I put in my notes app. I just get real and genuine joy from the way that people want to share how they feel, what they think, what they’re just trying out with the people around them. I think it is beautiful. I’m clapping, and most of the time I’m not doing it ironically. I think it’s the same way I like when someone nervously mixes up their words when they’re trying to flirt with me. God, I just love to see people trying.
The great triumph of the Monday Open Mics is that they’re so reliable, and they take place in such a gorgeous public space. If it’s not pouring they’ll be there. If you spent Sunday doing laundry, or working, or recovering from a hangover, and you don’t feel like a person any more, come out on Monday, hang out in a gorgeous park, maybe play your stuff, read your poem, go on a rant. Or, come out and watch the light fade as the sun goes down and the bats fly above your head. Listen to the music. Watch the people try, support them, note down that maybe you shouldn’t play Toxic next time because someone already did that pretty well. Get the name of the person with the drum sticks compulsively drumming away to every set because your drummer is off tree planting. Come see people try. It’s the easiest possible way to be part of this community.
It won’t be perfect. It might not even be good.
Isn’t that the point?
WHAT: Open Mic Mondays in Jeanne Mance
WHERE: Parc Jeanne Mance, Duluth & Esplanade
WHEN: Every Monday @ 6-9PM
METRO: Sherbrooke/Mont Royal (Orange Line)
DETAILS: Facebook
