Meet Your Heroes

They say you shouldn’t meet your heroes. Joseph Fink tells me this, with irony, during advertisements for “I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats,” a podcast in which he talks with his hero, John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats about the album All Hail West Texas. I’ve met him twice – Joseph Fink, not John Darnielle. The first time another podcast of his, Welcome to Night Vale, came to the Kentucky Center the writers and some of the cast signed posters; last year I went to a Night Vale book signing in Ann Arbor. It was incredible to get to tell these strangers whose work means so much to me that their stories had helped me just be a queer kid, helped me with my grief. After, on the way home, there was a secret, guilty sense of disappointment that crept up. I was just another face in just another city, and the monumental sense of intimacy I had with their story, at least, was revealed to be illusory, unidirectional.

This is the stupid thing about meeting your heroes. Either you meet them briefly and your own investment in their heroism – what they’ve done, what they’ve made – is suddenly shattered by the insignificance of your connection in that moment, or you know them long enough to have it shattered by learning more about them at an interpersonal level and you discover that you really didn’t know them at all. Some level of disappointment is inevitable, and that is a hard thing to reckon with.

So with that in mind, here’s the project plan for this year: I’m going to meet my heroes.

Louisville is a really weird place to live if you are into this particular kind of stupidity. The difference between a stranger and an acquaintance is you do not know where a stranger went to high school. Everybody does not know everybody, but the mythicism that we all do and the way people I’ve never met will turn out to know my cousins sets this really informal, communal tone for interacting with strangers. This includes people I think of as my local heroes, because while I do not know these people, the weird interconnectedness that drew me to documenting the local arts renaissance and that Louisville likes to take pride in makes it very different from meeting a world-travelling podcast writer.

The truth of the matter is that I am far more likely to be eating lunch at a coffee shop near my work and upon being asked to take a photo of two artists, one of whom had just come forward to say she loved the other’s work, discover I actually admire both of them very much and exchanging information with both of them end up doing an interview than I am to be disillusioned by a local arts hero. (Thanks Kevlen and Semi!) Even when meeting on purpose is awkward – returning a DVD that in part documented Teddy Abrams’ first year here in front of him might make his first impression of you more memorable but mostly it is extremely embarrassing – I have yet to come away worse for wear. Tempering daydream expectations is easy when there is the comfort that while this person won’t just become your best friend because you have now met they do their work in the same place you live your life, and for however long they stay you will have a love of what this place can be in common.

I’m going to spend the second half of this year celebrating exactly that by collecting interviews with local artists of all mediums about being an artist in Louisville. I want to recognize the contributions of both well known and up and coming artists in organizations and communities here. I plan on taking pitches for articles from other Louisvillians about their experiences with the arts as an audience or artist, and paying them for their work. I’m also gathering ideas and plans for other venues for the project: zines of where to find free art? a video of trying to find as many public artworks as possible in an hour downtown? a podcast about the vanishing act that robbed the Louisville Orchestra of its historic record label? How do I afford to do any or all of that for free so it’s financially accessible to everyone while being a disabled part-time food service worker/volunteer librarian? Step by step, I am going to document the vibrant, inspiring, unique network of people and art so that the people who live here have greater understanding and access to the arts.

This year, I’m meeting my heroes. I hope you’ll find a few new heroes of your own.