Arts Professional Story: Robby Zar

I.
It is April Fool’s Day, 2008. I am standing in the living room of my grandmother’s house as mourners attempt to make light of a difficult day with conversation. A stranger approaches me and, although I try to avoid eye contact, manages to appoint himself at my side. He says to me, “What do you do?”

Of course I know what he is asking, as all of us do. “I am a grantwriter,” I say, purposefully, no hesitation, hoping to get back to staring into space.

He winces like he’s just been stabbed in the eyes and leans in closer so I can see the hearing aid. “A what?”

“Grant writer” I say, deliberately spacing the words, adding ridiculously, “I write grants.”

The old man gets even closer and in a surprisingly angry tone asks, “For what?”

“For a theater company.”

He thinks this over for a moment and then replies, “Get any?”

I feel at this moment an anger welling up from my gut. I turn the other way and pretend to become intensely interested in a painting that has hung on my grandmother’s wall for years, a three-part landscape in violets and blues. I sort of like that painting, I think to myself. Huh. It’s…nice.

II.
I often wonder what it would be like to answer that ever-present icebreaker (“What do you do?”) with a Fight Club-esque disdainful reply. Something like, “Oh, you know, watch T.V., masturbate, sing songs in the bathtub…”

But I don’t think anyone would get it. I don’t think anyone would second-guess the fact that our answer to that question is always related to our daily 9 to 5.

Is this how we want to be defined?

Seriously. Ask yourself at this moment how you want to be defined. Franz Kafka was an insurance officer. Stephen King was a janitor. We can allow ourselves to be defined by what we do in order to make money to care for our basic needs, or we can define ourselves by what drives us as human beings. Maybe it’s writing, maybe music, maybe visual art, maybe collecting things…

As a grantwriter I spend most of my day begging for money. Perhaps that is why my job title elicited such distaste from an old man I didn’t know. To me, grantwriting is very much a job. There are days I enjoy what I do, and there are days that I don’t. And I can say the same for my music. There are days when I am practicing an old song, or desperately trying to force myself to write a new one, and it just isn’t working. I get angry. I get confused. If I am able to at these times, I try and remind myself that playing music is just as much a job as grantwriting. So why don’t I call myself a musician?

I think the answer is that I would rather call myself a grantwriter (following up with a short synopsis on who I work for and how much money I raised last year), than face the questions that come from the “musician” response: “Really? What do you play? Are you a full time musician? Are you in a band?”

Over the past weekend I went to a house party and was again faced with the same frustrating dilemma. Thinking that I was in a room full of “artists” I was sure I might be able to engage in a metaconversation about self-identifying with our day jobs. I failed miserably. Maybe it is just easier upon meeting a stranger for us to ignore our passions and focus on the mundane, the eerily unremarkable.

But for most of us, how we earn our daily bread is not how we would like to be remembered. I am fully aware (as I was that night) that there are those among us that do not share in this problem. I have never met an actor in my life that self-identified as a telemarketer, waitress, or (god forbid) grantwriter. Actors instinctively remove their daily occupations from the view of strangers. The rest of us should take this to heart.

It took my mother fifty years before she was able to identify herself as an artist. Not a glass beadmaker, or a lampworker, or a metalsmith, or a teacher, or a jeweler. Certainly she is all of those things and more. She is the most deserving person I know of the title of Artist. She lives the life of an artist, she creates worlds with her hands, and she teaches so that others may learn from her creativity, but it took her fifty years to feel comfortable with that moniker.

So let’s take back our lives. Take back how we talk about our lives. And let’s not wait. Let’s do it now.

III.
I’m working on my answer.

“I make things.”

“I’m in construction.”

“I create. Music. Words.”

“When I wake up every morning I try and do fifty pushups. After that, I brush my teeth if it’s a Wednesday. On Friday mornings I generally eat a spoonful of peanut butter and then make prank phone calls.”

“I am this close to constructing a hydrogen bomb in my basement. Are you free this Friday?”

Robby Zar is an artist, although this will be the first place he has committed that moniker to print. His various forms include music, words, installation, and sarcastic and brooding articles on what it means to be an artist. In 2007, he released his first full-length record, “Belief in a Tragic but Happy Horse,” and is hard at work on the creation of his second, whose name will be equally baffling. This year he celebrates ten years of rocking out at clubs, coffee houses, lakefront beer gardens, farmhouses, grain elevators, and creepy loft spaces overlooking the river. To hear some of his music, check out www.robbyzar.com.