BEN WEAVER IS SAVING THE PLANET SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO…
An Album Review Wrapped Up In A Mini-Rant About Laziness, Good Intentions And The Thankless Work It Takes To Do Something Meaningful With One’s Life.
By Brad Zellar
It isn’t easy to do any of the things — even the small things — that are probably necessary to save the planet, let alone to save the grubby gravy train that is America in 2017. A lot of us have good intentions, but it turns out that the really good intentions require the sorts of sacrifices — some of them merely practical and time-consuming, others costly from a career or economic standpoint — that most of us slaves to urban domesticity and all of its squandrous and willfully unconscious habits are too fucking lazy and preoccupied to make. I’m talking about myself, really, but I’m also talking about all sorts of other mostly well-intentioned people I know. We write checks to organizations we trust will do the grunt work we don’t have the time or energy to do ourselves, and then we turn right around and buy garbage from garbage corporations that are openly hostile to our professed values.
We write checks to organizations we trust will do the grunt work we don’t have the time or energy to do ourselves, and then we turn right around and buy garbage from garbage corporations that are openly hostile to our professed values.
Ben Weaver is a friend of mine, and like a lot of people I most love and admire he regularly makes me aware that I’m wasting my life, that the life I’m wasting is wildly out of whack with most of my highest professed ideals, and that the hobbled trajectory of my time on this hobbled planet has carried me a long and perilous way from the fierce dreams of my youth. Ben’s a poet, book artist, and musician, but he’s also one of those people who is in the salvage business in the broadest and most urgent sense. I think it’s fair to call him uncompromising, and he also might be sort of nuts. Those are both good things in my book. At some point Ben decided that he no longer wanted to play shows if he couldn’t get to them aboard his bike, so that’s what he does now. Many of those shows are hundreds — and sometimes thousands — of miles from his home, and they’re generally in unconventional venues in out-of-the-way places. That, of course, is no way to get rich in 21st-century America, but it’s apparent that isn’t Ben’s goal. His recent songs are concerned with our increasingly adversarial and rapacious relationship with nature, and with water in particular — the songs are ecological, I suppose, although that’s not exactly a term that’s much associated with pop music, or even much popular culture these days.
I generally find most overtly political art boring, but the stuff on Ben’s excellent and atmospheric new record, “Sees Like a River,” is more akin to the work of the great nature poets and essayists. Time and again the record reminded me of the great 19th-century tramp conservationist John Muir, and of Gary Snyder, Edward Abbey, Barry Lopez, and Wendell Berry — all heroes to me, and all earnest, righteous, and sincere. Those qualities are tough to come by in our current culture, and they’re too often sneered at by hipsters, ruthlessly interrogated by purists, and co-opted by political and religious frauds.
Time and again the record reminded me of the great 19th-century tramp conservationist John Muir, and of Gary Snyder, Edward Abbey, Barry Lopez, and Wendell Berry — all heroes to me, and all earnest, righteous, and sincere. Those qualities are tough to come by in our current culture, and they’re too often sneered at by hipsters, ruthlessly interrogated by purists, and co-opted by political and religious frauds.
Ben Weaver’s for real, though. He could choose to do a whole lot of things a whole lot of other ways that would be a whole lot easier. He’s chosen to do things the hard and righteous way, though, and I love him for that. I also believe that the work he’s doing is necessary and relevant to our current predicament, but it’s also strange, beautiful, and full of a spirit and soul that the world needs more of right now.
About Brad Zellar
Brad Zellar is an American author and journalist. Zellar’s writing often is accompanied by photographs; he has collaborated several times with photographer Alec Soth. The Coen brothers film A Serious Man, nominated for the 2009 Academy Award for Best Picture, took some inspiration for the visuals based on Zellar’s book the Suburban World: The Norling Photos.[1] His book Conductors of the Moving World was named in TIME’s “Best of 2011: The Photobooks We Loved,” and was the recipient of the 2012 Photography for Design Professional Award from D&AD (British Design & Art Direction).
