Tilt

Starting this fall we will have a series of artists and partners write for our blog about their experience and practices. We have loved collaborating with Chace + Smith for photography (they helped us with Pratt Street Ale House and Mercersburg Summer) and we are loving their amazing creative writing!

What does Americana mean for each of us? Where is that sacred space of nostalgic national identity we each hold in our hearts? Ryan and Larissa Smith of Chace + Smith Photography decided to try and find the answers to these questions on a month-long tour of the American Northwest.  Here is an account of what they discovered along the way:

When we wrote a summary of our Creative Highways Project on our website prior to our trip, we described our purpose as “searching for the last bastions of Americana.” What does this mean, and is Americana really disappearing? I believe our search uncovered more than a yes or no answer to this question.

Over the month of July 2009, we drove 7414 miles with our dog riding shotgun, searching for the “last bastions” of Americana. We found, in many ways we did not expect, that Americana is alive and well. We found it exists for the collective as well as within our own individual experiences. So, it is all at once what you see outside your car window, or from a high mountain trail, and how you see it in your heart and mind.

In essence, Americana is reinvented every day in this country through greasy diner culture, RVs crawling along precarious precipices, 5 cent coffee in Wall Drug, SD, being recommended a live reggae event by a Japanese sushi chef in Boulder, CO, and streaming indie rock via satellite radio in the middle of the Utah desert. Americana is a clash of tradition and contemporary artifacts and associations. It is at the same time disappearing as it is being recreated.

Americana is the essence of all great traditions, fads, oddities, rituals, songs, poems, vistas, highways, and ideas that make up this great country, all rolled into one word. Americana is what we make it, always there to experience whenever we want.

For now, we see it every morning when we look out our farmhouse windows at the mist-shrouded hills of Pennsylvania. We find it around a table at an Irish pub, passing the guitar, and swapping stories and songs. We hear it in the strains of church bells floating up the road, and taste it at our favorite Mexican taco joint, with all the ‘fixins.

We found it on the road, and we discover it again and again right here at home.

For a full account of our Creative Highways 2009 Project, please visit our blog.
Also, have a look at our website.