A Quote by Robert Pinsky

I think my first experience of art, or the joy in making art, was playing the horn at some high-school dance or bar mitzvah or wedding, looking at a roomful of people moving their bodies around in time to what I was doing. There was a piano player, a bass player, a drummer, and my breath making the melody.
Everybody besides my piano player has been with me since the very first day. We were a four-piece band for a solid two years. It was me playing acoustic and rhythm electric guitar, a bass player, a drummer and a lead guitar player. For a couple of years, we sounded like the Foo Fighters.
A bass player has to think and play like a bass player. A drummer has to play and think like a drummer, and stay out of the way of the vocalist. The guitar player has to respect everybody else.
Later in high school, I met Hillel Slovak, who was the original guitar player of the Chili Peppers, and we became really close. We had a band, and we didn't like the bass player, so I started playing bass, and I got a bass two weeks later.
It's tough at first. You realize in the NBA, it's not easy. Each and every night, you're playing against that player that was the best high school player, that player that was the best player on his college team.
Because I write the music, I write the lyrics, I write the vocal melody lines - I write everything. Just because I let somebody sing something doesn't mean they're more important than the bass player or the keyboard player or the drummer.
When I celebrated my bar mitzvah, there was no cake. Today, there is no such thing as a bar mitzvah in the United States without a special cake. It can be even more complicated and expensive than a wedding cake, because bar-mitzvah cakes are often based on a particular theme.
Making of poetry, music, dance and art as culture-making in the service of nation-making. You can find writings that make that purpose for art quite explicit.
To the question, ‘Is the cinema an art?’ my answer is, ‘what does it matter?’... You can make films or you can cultivate a garden. Both have as much claim to being called an art as a poem by Verlaine or a painting by Delacroix… Art is ‘making.’ The art of poetry is the art of making poetry. The art of love is the art of making love... My father never talked to me about art. He could not bear the word.
I was already playing the clarinet and the piano. My father's a piano player. But I wanted to play in a funk band, and the clarinet wasn't fit. So you was "Hey, man, can I sit in?" They're like, "No, man." So I started fooling around with the bass.
People need what they think of as a poem to be read at their bar mitzvah, their wedding, a funeral, whatever. And people are looking for hope and inspiration. I understand that.
The thing I like to do when I'm making records is to keep it exciting, as opposed to, 'There's a bass player, guitar player... ' Just a little variety.
I was on a TV show when I was 13, and I had a tutor for high school. Everyone was like "Oh, you're missing out on the high school experience," so I'd go with my cousins to parties where there would be a keg and people doing body shots and playing quarters. I was like, What a waste of time. I didn't want to be doing E [ecstasy] and making out with a guy three years older than me who's a loser.
There are so many people who have a training in art history; and if you've spent time looking at old art, you become attuned to what art does through materiality and so you begin to look to that in contemporary art as well. And anyway, I do think that matching one's experience with what you're looking at and questioning what you're looking inevitably involves materiality, just like it involves the sense of place.
That's what I like about the idea of the aesthetic experience, the idea of both enjoying looking at works of art and how they kind of talk to you, and also the process of making art, getting back to that idea of the aesthetic experience of making art is very important, It's another way of thinking. Instead of just using your brain, you're using your hands to think with. They're different connections, the brain that comes through the fingertips as opposed that comes through the eyes and ears.
I think that the first part of the art is making the art, but when art really becomes art is when it belongs to somebody else.
I've been in a band, so I understand the politics. Sometimes the bass player doesn't like what the guitar player is doing, and you have to sort of even that out. But I've also always loved the technology part of it. I've always loved the studio part. Making albums. Besides writing songs, which has been my primary thing, making records would be second. Obviously, touring would be third. Touring wasn't my favorite thing to do, but the first few tours were pretty fun. Seeing the world and everything.
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