Barry Zimmerman is everywhere at once. At least you might get that idea when you walk around town and try to tally up the sheer amount of his chalk drawings you see on the sidewalks, walls, streets, doors, etc. But it turns out these drawings are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Barry’s creative output. He is just as prolific a poet, musician, and philosopher.
Resonator’s Poet Clark caught up with this creative whirlwind and sat him down for a discussion about life, art, poetry, music, Norman, sports, roller skating, and numerous other tangential topics.
Like Barry himself, it’s a trip…. strap in and enjoy the ride!
Barry Zimmerman: Poet, Artist, Musician.
Poet: I’m here with Barry Zimmerman, doing an interview for the upcoming show. Thank you so much, Barry, for being here.
Barry: You bet!
Poet: We’ll just jump into it. Could you share a bit with us about your life and how it led you to poetry, art and music? We know a little about your background. You grew up in Idabelle, Oklahoma and played sports in school. Then moved into creative expression through written words, art and music.
Barry: Yeah. So, the art thing was just always there. I've been writing poems since I was a little kid. My mom used to, when we'd go on trips, my mom would give me a blank notebook and a pen and just put me in the back of the station wagon and I would just draw and write and be quiet.
And, there's a super duper football tradition in my family for sure where two of my cousins played on The Arkansas Razorbacks in the 60s when they won the national championship. Terry Dunn and Lloyd Wade Phillips. And they were like the Selman brothers here. They were both defensive guys. And Lloyd Wade won the Allen Trophy that year when they won the national championship. And my dad was Allstate in Texas in the 50s. There's all these guys.
It's crazy.
I was born in the late fifties and early sixties, doctors gave ladies, pregnant ladies, a drug designed to like, not make, let them not have morning sickness. And it caused a bunch of birth defects. And I'm one of those kids. I was born in 1963 and my retinas just did not form all the way.
They're white. And they should be pink. I see very clearly, but it's very small compared to other people.
20 /50 is legally blind where you can't drive a car. In high school, My good eye, which is this eye, was 2, 600. Oh my gosh. And this one was like 2, 800. And I'm 60, so they have to be worse.
I have to read books with a Mac. I didn't read a book until I was 19. Because I couldn't see the chalkboard in classes. I passed class. I went through Idabel school system, just listening, and that's how I passed classes and tests. And every day going to school, this is part of my heavy anxiety, is that every day I go to class, I didn't have homework because I couldn't do the homework because I couldn't read the thing to do the thing.
It just became this constant every day. Just oh, you don't have it again. Thing. And then I just had one really shitty bad grade going on all the time. Usually math. I could pull together B's and C's and everything. Like English and all that stuff. Just by listening. But you can't learn algebra by reading, like by tape. You have to see somebody... how it works.
And I actually had a friend of mine. Brian Schipp. He was a friend of mine. He was one of my really best friends through that time period.
And he would change tests with me like halfway through and do mine. And then we would turn them in. He was so awesome. He was like the smartest dude I ever knew. He's one of those guys that, like, in third grade, was reading the fifth grade textbooks and stuff so he can finish this very quickly.
As a matter of fact one time I did get an F in a math class And me and Brian went up to his dad's office. And it's the first time I ever saw anybody use a copy machine , like, for outlaw purposes, where he made a copy of my report card. And he said Barry , I'm going to give you a C. And nobody ever questioned it . That was awesome.
I got caught with a bunch of bad grades, but that one was like " thank you, Brian". Just had a better day.
But , in sixth grade, we did a play thing and I wrote that . Do you remember the Mr. Jaws 45 single? When Jaws came out, there was a 45 single that was on the radio every once in a while. It was a funny thing. It was written by a DJ. The Beastie Boys cited it as a very important thing. I loved it. I used to listen to it all the time. “This is so and so down at the beach. We're going to interview Mr. Jaws. Hey, Mr. Jaws”. And the answers to the questions would be like a chunk of a song. Like from the top 40, all the top 40, 70 songs that were going on at that time.
So I wrote a thing. It was 1976. And we were doing a bicentennial thing. And I wrote a thing where ... historically, they would ask questions about George Washington or whatever. And then the whole, our whole class would sing the answer, which would be like some song from the radio.
And then once I did that, I went to lunch. And I came back and everybody came over to my desk. They all had ideas. It was awesome. That was like that first moment.
(Thinks a moment and changes direction.)
I was class president, my senior and junior year. In junior high, I had a real big football years where I was a leading scorer, leading tackler in eighth and ninth grade. And then my eyes just made it where I couldn't, I just couldn't play. Plus it's not just my eyes. I could not understand weightlifting as like a thing to do for whatever. It just seemed like that's manual labor. And I had done manual labor, but there was nothing fun about lifting weights. But I did like to run.
I was big. And I was into track real bad. I can remember in eighth and ninth grade where I could run until I just wanted to stop. It was one of those things where I just was, like those movies where kids are in that total athletic mode, I was totally there. I just loved it really on some level.
I think it's like an early drug thing or an early zen thing. Early Buddha thing in a weird way. Where you get going and all you can hear is your feet, but you're not aware of moving them really after a while. It's just like that. It's just quiet at night running.
And our thing was a circle. I'm just running around. It was a mile and like 0. 1 and we just run around it and around and it was just so awesome.
Then like I remember…I was just thinking about this today. Other Zen Buddha things. Like where my dad was a big hunter. He liked to hunt. My dad was raised with a sharecropper's parents and they would give him two bullets.
He'd be like eight years old. They give him two bullets and a rifle and he'd go out and if he didn't kill anything, they didn't have meat that night because they were sharecroppers. So they had all this vegetable stuff piled up. But so he started hunting as a kid. So he had time on a farm and he had a total different way of looking at animals than I did, for sure.
Yeah. There's that thing where I've heard a theory about the generations, like where the grandfather works and that's all he does. That was my grandfather. All he did was work. He had a slumped over shoulder from pulling that thing where you have that strap around you and you do this (motions with his arms) with a horse and you plow ground.
He did that. And he just worked. He never went on vacation, never went anywhere. He just he had a wife and he had kids and he watched pro wrestling and fished. He loved fishing. But then my dad, the next generation, would be where he worked his ass off too, but he partied and he had fun and he went on vacations.
My dad was awesome. My dad was a real party fella, but he was also the weirdest kind of country philosopher and stuff. He was just this very interesting, fun guy, but he worked his ass off. He was always working. He didn't have, like, dreams. I think about me having dreams. He had, “how am I going to do this thing better? This store better? How are we going to do this?”
And then the store went under when Walmart moved in. He had a store called Poor Boy's Discount. And which was where the old skating rink was. I remember, that's one of my early memories, was my dad taking me to that skating rink. He'd say, we're gonna put a store in here.
And I was like, alright. It was probably like 1968. Seeing kids in there skating. I was a little kid. That was the first time I was in that building. But it was like, that's a real cool memory. There's a lot of cool memories of that Poor Boys. But anyway, my dad went to work for Weyerhaeuser.
Weyerhaeuser started. Weyerhaeuser Paper Company. That’s down and out of nowhere. And so my dad had lots of friends that were really from all over the world. All these people, engineers and all these people, moved to Idabel to work at the Weyerhaeuser.
The plant is invalid. And it smells. Very badly. And all the people that work there, they mostly all live in Idabel. Idabel was the county seat. Where Saturday nights all the kids from all the little towns around would come to Idabel. We were cruising and on own feet a lot. That's so fun.
But then I got a guitar and got into bands and stuff. I bought a guitar and a pen. I wanted to start writing songs. My whole thing was I was gonna be punk rock Bob Dylan. I would get as loaded as I could get and still walk over to the Deli.
I had to walk a mile and a half from where I was living. I just moved up here with a friend of mine. I was sleeping on the I was sleeping on a air mattress that I would blow up every night and when I woke up it would be empty. I hate that you're like on the floor.
My whole thing was, man, I come from that era of…I graduated high school in 82 and I definitely come from a time when dudes like me that wanted to be artists, wanted to be rock stars and wanted to be poets are, or had that in them already. Threw themselves into drugs as a way to, I don't know, make…there’s a lot of reasons why you would do drugs to make your art better.
And a lot of it has to do with making your life worse or harder in a lot of ways and in an abstract way.
But it's mainly about opening up shit.
In the middle of one of my worst depressions ever. At Norman Music Festival, a friend of mine had heard I was having these bad…I was just bad.
And I get where the big ideas are on me. Yeah. And he brought me some mushrooms. And I had one of those trips. Those mythic trips that you used to hear about back in the day. Yeah. It was like, I could…it felt like God's voice. Light going through me in all directions.
It was Norman music festival. Rainbows are Free were playing and I shoved my hands in the air and I was just like, “Oh my God, I'm having that deal”. And I was just like, there's a thing about being that amazed and untroubled. It's so incredibly awesome. Especially to a dude like me that's very…that has struggles with that.
My depression is a thing that is a low constant buzz. It comes up and goes down, but it's always there. I never have any time when it's just like completely gone. Except, when I'm super high or when I'm drawing. There’s a super highness there (when he’s drawing), but I do draw sometimes when I'm sober.
When it is happening, when my art is happening, and I get lost in it…like when the thing, when the pencil is touching the paper and it's moving, that verb is going on, and art is a verb instead of a noun, and how inside of that, it's just action, and inside of that, it's like…I heard something the other day about if you hum, your mind can't talk to you.
And there's something that's going on with me when I'm doing that.
Especially when I have music.
When I was in second grade, for some reason, my mother came home with a eight track set: two eight tracks, Beatles, 62-66. That one where they're looking down from above with the young haircuts.
My favorite album. And all those songs came out in second grade. I listened to it one time. My mom had read the children's Bible to me and those Jesus stories and the Beatles songs are stressing the same exact thing. I put that all together when I was a kid.
This whole thing is tied to where inside of those stories it said you shouldn't seek occupation and you should be spreading the love and peace. And I really do feel like that's what I'm doing.
I was a janitor my whole life, but it had to do with my eyes because I couldn’t do college. I had jobs at Homeland and all I could do was sack because you gotta see to be able to run a register or to stock.
When I go into McDonald's I can't read the menu, so I usually just get…if I get one thing (at) places I usually just get that cause I just remember that place and that thing.
And it's just so limited, but it's I can't remember what I was talking about.
Poet: You were talking about the verb.
Barry: Oh, verb of art. Right on. How the silence of the verb…man, yeah.
How there's a thing inside of art.
I don't know why.
I don't know how it happens, but like when I'm playing guitar, when I hit the E… man, there's something that happens in my brain where I can't think about another thing.
I can’t. I get lost in it.
It was the same thing that used to happen to me when I was a kid. I grew up in the 70s, where you didn't have a clue, man, what anybody looked like band wise. You had heard the radio, and there was radio hits, but then you would go to the store and there would be these albums in there that you had never heard of. And it would just be like, take this home.
I've never heard this before.
Like that Pink Floyd moment where I brought home Pink Floyd. It wasn't like, later in the 80s, 90s…where everybody of my ilk had heard Pink Floyd. And it had been exposed. I got my record player when I was 16.
I had a friend I met and he was from California. He moved to Idabel and he brought his record collection and his drums. And that was the first time I was ever in a room with that. Just…Holy shit.
The day I met that guy, he played “Lumpy Gravy” by Frank Zappa. You know that record? It's two tracks, side one, side two.
It starts off. It says it's Frank Zappa. And he says “Barry, this is gonna be a dynamite show”. And then the record starts.
And it's just, like, commercial sized bits of stuff. It's my favorite record of all time. And when I was done, I was so blown away, the guy said, “Dude, I've got two copies of this record, you can take this one with you”.
And I still got that copy. But what that record showed me, and that was early on, was, you can do anything, in art.
Art is an open. It’s beyond even the word. Open space. It's, anything can happen in there.
And it is…we are trapped in our time. I would think of different things if I was a hundred years from now. If I grew up in a hundred years from now. We are of our time.
And I'm punk rock. But I'm a Beatle Punk. There's a bunch of us Beatle Punks. We’re The Beatles and The Clash, man. What I love about those guys, all those and the punks, is the commitment to it.
I was in my band thing, for six years. When I was doing that, I wake up every day and I'm on the clock. I’m just on the clock. It has to do with my parents. Nobody moved from the bed to the couch in my family.
They got up, and got dressed, and they left. They ate, or they went to work, or went and did something. My dad would get up and go fishing. He didn’t get up and go into the den and watch tv. And so I got that in me. And so during the band I wrote for six years a song every day. Every day I wrote a chunk of something or a song.
The reason it stopped is just because I stopped.
And now it's on this thing I'm doing, which is poetry and drawing. And now I can't stop and I'm doing it every day. I’ve been doing it every day of my whole life, but this chalk stuff started when I worked at OU and 2012 is when it started on Facebook.
I was working in the Blender Building. Cleaning chalkboards. I cleaned every single chalkboard in that building. This is a math building.
I know which, I know every chalkboard on every floor…the first, second, third, fourth, fifth chalkboards, and the eighth, and the eleventh, and tenth. And they told me they'd find these Sidewalk chalks, and they said, “Barry, you gotta throw those away. Those professors cannot use that sidewalk chalk on those chalkboards. They’re gonna ruin them.”
And I've gone through, there was a time at OU where there was no beef with keeping what you found. And forever when I was working at OU, I did a bunch of art like where I'm not gonna buy any art supplies. I will just use what is put in front of me, what I find.
And that kind of was during that time period where I was like…I just have books of flyers. I would take two weeks and collect flyers and things that would be left on desk when I was cleaning the desk and stuff. There would just be schedules or like weird flyers about certain clubs or just phone numbers that have been abandoned. “Somebody take all this stuff.”
It was, like, a story of the Blender for that two weeks. And I got it together in a thing. And when I started, I was like, “what can I do with this chalk?” And since I am on all the time, I was doing art at my house. I was doing art there.
I just started doing art in between. Yeah, writing on the sidewalks.
(Thinks, changing directions again.)
The band thing broke up. I had the classic Pink Floyd thing where the band stopped playing, started playing different stuff.
But then I went to work for the Gazette. And then I went to work for the Transcript. And I wrote for a magazine out of Los Angeles called Scratch that just reviews records. They just send me a giant stack of CDs every year, every month. And then I would write reviews of shows I was seeing in Oklahoma City and stuff. During that time period, there was a lot of great punk shows going on up there. But then that ended.
When I was doing that, I was just (doing it) like I'm doing my poetry now and my art. I would get two or three stories a week going, and I would just basically burn myself out on things and then I'd have to go do another thing.
That's it. And I burned myself out on that and started doing a shitty job.
And then I just had nowhere to send my art. And I had no outlet. I was still making it.
I would stop writing songs. When that band thing stopped, I hung my guitar up. I had played it every day for just years and years.
And it just got dusty. It was sad. It really hurt me. I felt like I'd left. I had written a bunch of songs and felt like I let them all down. Like I made them and…
(Trails off, lost in thought.)
Actually right now I'm in a band again. This friend of mine, who was in high school back when I was in the band Soul Shaker and he was a high school kid that liked our band, about six months ago, he said he got a hold of me. He used to follow us around, come over, and hang around.
He says, “Hey Barry, I'm learning a bunch of your old songs. And I want to start a band and I'll teach you your old songs”. And that's what's been going on. We've learned about five of my old songs from, like, the nineties and we're playing them right now.
We we remain nameless because we're hard heads. We can't figure it out.
But then (referring again to when he stopped playing guitar) I didn't have an outlet when all that fell through and I burned out and I just, oh man…all my life, I’ve had this, I don't know, dark thing going on.
I am 100 percent open. I share all kinds of my shit, where I get in deep trouble with my mom all the time about, “Barry, what are you doing?”
I'm like, there's a reason why I'm having to do this, and it has to do with something that's going to happen in two weeks. (Points to the gallery walls) You’re just gonna have to not look at my drawings for a week or so.
I went through a whole period where I was just drawing like penises and vaginas all over the drawings and they weren't doing anything. They were just penises and vaginas. And oh this upset my mother so much. And my sisters too. They were just both like, “Oh, Barry, do you hate women?”
And I'm like, no, I was there.
It could have just been hands and noses.
I have to work through my life in my art. And I also have to share my art. And people come and contact me all the time and go, “Hey, what am I doing in your poems?”
And I'm like, “Hey man, you stepped in. And if you want to stay in, you're going to be in them.”
And if you don't want to be in my poems, then you just need to not mess with me. Because this is what I am. I am a machine of poems.
I have written poems about that I installed a thing on top of my head where you could push my stomach and poems would come out.
And let's fill the sky with poems. And I do love all that stuff.
Later on I got tuned it into Bashō. Bashō was 1400s, I believe. He was in Japan. He would walk up and down Japan. And he would write haikus on rocks on the sides of rivers. He changed the whole thing of haikus.
Haikus used to be like this fun puzzle thing. Like, all the numbers and stuff. Like seven, five, and seven syllables. Bashō said, because they were just saying, just meaningless things and just following the rule. And Bashō said, y'all are doing it wrong. Which I always loved that artist that steps forward and says to thousands of people, you are doing this wrong.
We need to put…this needs to be about nature. His haikus were prayers. But not prayers in the sense of Christian prayers, where we're asking for something or having a negotiation.
His prayers were to be proof of Divinity. He would be walking up and down Japan and there he is…he’s sitting, looking at a river and he writes a haiku about a river and he writes it on a rock next to the river and the next person comes along and they're like, what is this written down?
And they said to sit down to read it and it's about the river.
I found him through Kerouac. Through Jack Kerouac. I discovered him (Kerouac) and I just got lost in all those books and started reading all those beat writers. I was already a poet. I've been writing poems since I was a little kid and I said, Oh, I can live like this. I already was.
Like, when you see the shadow of a bird on the ground go across and then climb a fence and disappear. It's that's like a little poem to me.
Those were prayers, his haikus, but they weren't asking for anything.
What they were doing was showing proof of God or divinity.
And these guys were just like living for that, making art instead of…I don't know. I don't want to sound judgmental when I say looking for a job. Cause there's plenty of people that are career oriented and I have no judgments about that whatever. But I'm stuck in a situation where because of my eyes, I could not seek a giant occupation because I just couldn't do it.
And so I was always doing these bucket and broom jobs. And it put me in a situation where I could totally concentrate on my art. Because you don't have to worry about those jobs. And you don't have to, even when you're doing them…they’re not jobs that require you to concentrate on them.
You're just mopping the floor. And I would listen to…I listened to a million books and stuff. Just music and all kinds of stuff. And I was writing all the time. And I started doing drawings on chalkboards on my lunchtimes and and breaks and just drawing. It was those jobs that allow you to do that.
And really people ask me like what should I do? What should I do? And I'm like, fail.
You should stop trying to do what you're doing to do and do art.
That's the thing.
Art is the thing, if that's what you want to do.
But everybody doesn't have to be (doing it) every day.
And on this thing, I'm on…I’m on fire and I've been on fire my whole life with this…there's prices.
It's dark, man.
And I do a lot of pondering.
I don't want to be one of those guys that sits around talking about how smart he is because I'm not. I didn't do good in school and it was a thing.
But in my poetry and stuff, I can really, I think, articulate in a way that people can really like…they see it on paper, even in my funny stuff, and they can feel my heavy or my insight or my puzzle device thing or whatever I'm doing.
Poems are like…writing poems to me on some level there's lots of different ways to do it, for me even.
But for the most part, I allow a sentence to occur to me.
And something will occur to me and I write that down.
And then, okay, now it's on. That's the puzzle. I start it.
Okay, now we're here.
What is this thing you've written? What does that do? And okay that does this.
And then I'll start writing it all down and then start going back and add… cause I read out loud and your brain will go like…you’ll come to a line you've written and instead of saying that line, your brain will say another line that will rhyme with the one above it.
Like it's caught it. It's caught the thing that's going on. And then you start just connecting dots and there's a point where it'll go bop and it stops.
And you can go shop bop if you want to, and I used to do that all the time, but I don't do that anymore.
I stopped doing that little…searching for another line you could write that would be for the people to go, “oh dude, you are so clever.”
So, there's a lot of ego involved in this whole thing where you have to really stop trying to be a thing that is…(slows down to consider what he wants to say)
There’s something about being an artist, in my mind, that requires me to take on the darkness.
And to be the person that is going to do that for those that can read it and go, “Okay, wow. I relate to this”. It’s not fun (going into the darkness).
It's interesting. And I do love it and I do hate it.
I relate to the blind swordsman. That was a thing in Japanese culture. There's a bunch of movies from Japan during the 50’s and 60’s…the Blind Swordsman. And did you ever see Kung Fu, the TV show?
Poet: Yes.
Barry: Remember his his teacher was blind? (I nod) And that's the whole blind swordsman. A thing where he could hear him moving for him. And I think there is something to my blindness… that it did something. It did something to the way my path…the way my brain works. That’s it, it seems to be.
So, that's that thing we were talking about earlier, where if I could drive somebody else's car for a five minutes and drive around in their head for a minute, I'd go, okay, everybody does that maybe, or everybody doesn't do that.
There's such a complexity to all the different lives and all the different ways of thinking about every single thing that goes on and how understanding works from person to person.
And it's that's the funny thing about my art, which is I put song lyrics or things that are going. Everything that's going on.
If I write “Imaginary dogs love Led Zeppelin” on the sidewalk, I am listening to Led Zeppelin as I'm on the sidewalk writing that.
I'll actually be walking along and will have a song will be on and I'll go, “Oh, I should write that.”
And if I don't come across a place where I could write it before the song ends then I won't write it because I want it to be all to be happening.
Absolutely as it's happening. That’s one of those things that Kerouac got me into, with poems and stuff, and this is a haiku thing, is to just eliminate cleverness from it and just say what's going on.
Even if it's imaginary. No need to show how cute the writing can be. The writing, the words will explain it.
I had such low self esteem. That's one of my big fights because I did so bad at school. I sometimes I felt like my writing…that I was writing in a way for praise more than writing from an honest artistic place.
I was writing from an honest place, but it was just needy. It was a needy place. And it would like, “Oh, Barry, where'd you learn that word?” instead of being like, “Oh shit, I relate to this.”
That's what happened when I moved over here. And I think I'll never stop (making art and poetry).
I just can't imagine what would have to happen for me to stop.
I do plan to when I can't walk. I'm on these streets every day. I walk to the energy building from my house that's over here. It's like a mile that way and a mile that way and I go, I'm all over the place.
That's another thing outside of my eyes that's helping me with. They forced me to get a bunch of exercise. I am a bull. When I go to the doctor, they're just like, “Oh you're totally healthy. You're a bull.”
It's in my DNA. I used to say that one of my great grandparents must have introduced a donkey into our DNA system because we do not get sick and we are just bulls, man.
My dad was never sick. Yeah. He was just never sick and he was just always up. My dad could drink all night and get up and just you wouldn't even know it. You just never would know it.
(Pauses to gather his thoughts again)
I began to be able to publish…share my art every day. And also the chalkboard thing just took off. I started getting shirts going with that Norman Music Festival. I've had two Normal Music Festival shirts.
It’s all going so well. I got another book together for Curtis. I am never short of material. It's not like when I was a kid, when I would just shit stuff out and think it was all pure gold because I hadn't read anything. When I was 19 I could write stuff, but it read like somebody that had never read anything.
Then when I got my little magnifying glasses, I was just reading everything. I was just like finding the hardest shit I could find to read because I felt like I was behind. And so I'm like 20 years old, I’ve never read a book and I'm like trying to thumb through content.
You just luck on to the writers that do things for you, which is, (what happened) with the Frank Zappa song and my friend having the record and just, “oh, here you go, have this.”
And then I was just like sold on that and the Beatle thing. And like when Jack Kerouac came along and I got into those books, I realized this is my country too.
This is my world.
I'm a person here too.
This isn't the government’s.
We're not defined by wars. We don't have to be.
We can say we are, and you can act like that's the truth.
But we're also defined by art.
We're also defined by our kindnesses that aren't bombs. The opposite of bombs.
We're defined by those things too.
And those things are just equally as notable as what is in the white house.
What some kid is drawing in Iowa is just as bad ass as what some gallery artist in LA is doing if they give a shit. That’s all it amounts to.
That's all art is about.
‘Cause art doesn't matter. The world would be fine without it.
The world is not there. And to care about it and to give yourself to it, there's there's some benefits, but it's not like when I was a kid.
In my band, there was like, there was a thing where it was like three or four conversations with girls.
If they just saw me play one time, like where they were that comfortable with me, and then suddenly they’re talking to me.
I can't see across the room to people. I got a five foot circle. So girls that are in that circle, I could talk to. Girls that are across the room, I don't even know they're there.
And the guitar and my songwriting and stuff, being that guy, started making girls come to me instead of me just missing out on them. And It was where my art started being beneficial: it was benefiting me socially. Even just meeting people that were across the room.
When you're in bands, the next thing you know, all your friends are in bands. And so suddenly you're at people's houses and going, “Hey man, what's in your record collection? Oh shit, I've never heard of this.”
And then they have ideas. You're around something, you're immersed in artists. And that is so good to be immersed in a room of artists where it's not people that don't understand it and feel like they could judge it.
It’s not about whether you like stuff or not.
It's about does the person give a shit?
I heard somebody say the other day that they don't like country music and I said you know really I like anything but it's got to make me feel something that's I don't want to feel. Something that even if it makes me feel sick that they have done something.
I saw a Picasso painting in the city about 10 years ago and when I got in front of it, I started crying. And I don't know what was going on. It was like I just could feel the ability. It’s that's the thing with the Beatles.
Those guys, man, they…I just got tingles. I still do. I'm never not blown away.
If you take the records, it's nine hours of stuff. Nine hours. It's barely like a work day of this information that these four dudes did on tapes. During their 20s. And we got it forever and it's so powerful. It's just so badass.
This gift these four dudes gave us, man. When shit sucks so bad, I do know when you put those Beatles records on, they're exactly the same every time.
There's something about that. When you look at Picasso, they're still, and they've been done.
They're nouns now. That's the great thing about the Beatles, thinking about when they were verbs. Thinking about that shit in the air, in those studios, yeah.
Have you seen the movie, where, the recent movie, where it's them in the let it be sessions, and you can see Paul McCartney's in the background, and you can see, they're talking to Ringo? ( I shake my head)
Paul's back there and you can just hear it. Like he's starting to write Long and Winding Road. And he's doing the piano thing, but he can't think of words to say. And you're just like, “Oh my God, look at him. He's thinking of…Oh my God, Paul, look at you doing it.”
It’s wicked. I love that about art, man.
When like people can really fucking do it.
You can feel that thing on it. It's the care.
But even caring isn't enough.
There are people that can really do it. It has to do with commitment. And just having some imagination or the way your brain works or whatever. Able to articulate it onto a thing.
I would say that's what my stuff is. So randomly about different things as far as all the different words and stuff on there. The people will look at them and think, “Oh, that's that's about this.”
And no, that's not what I was thinking. But once it is a noun, what I think about it doesn't have anything to do with it anymore.
It's out of my hands and it is completely a noun.
I don't want to have an opinion about it really, other than I'm just working my ass off to try to be better than I was yesterday.
And I can see that.
When I get my memories on my Facebook of my older (drawings), my drawings from like last year, I can tell that I'm better now.
Yeah.
Because the only way you can get better is doing things.
That's it. That's the only way.
And I see people that, they would have liked to have been drawing every day for the last 20 years, but it's something you gotta do.
Yep.
(Thinks for a moment)
I loved track when I was a kid.
And the thing I love about it is there's no judges. The dude that breaks the tape wins.
And that guy, as a rule, worked harder than everybody else in my mind.
That's what I would like to think.
(Sits quietly as he considers what he has just said)
Poet: I could listen all night long to what you have to say. Do you have anything you want to close with? Anything you want people to know?
Barry: What we're doing is, they're going to paint these things black and I'm going to chalk them.
And then were going to have the art show on second Friday (Art Walk). And then the third Friday, we're going to have a poetry thing in here. Where this band Squeaky Burger is gonna play. I love that. And I'm gonna do a bunch of poetry. And everybody should come out and I'm very excited.
Not to be an ego crazy person, but I'm just gonna knock this fucking room out. I am. And I'm gonna be right here. I'm gonna be right here. I love this.
Look, (gestures to the gallery) it's so big and you can draw guys this big (holds his finger and thumb an inch apart), like, just tiny little fellas and you can feel it. It's gonna be so fun.
Oh, it's gonna be so good.
