Snail computer voice: Welcome to TCI transmissions, an experimental soundscape of things that sound nice and might help you make other things. In this episode, Creative Content Director of TCI, Willa Köerner talks to Hudson Basilica’s Melissa Auf der Maur about leaving a career in music and her life in New York City to move to the riverside city of Hudson new york. They discuss starting a creative space in a huge old industrial factory, and learning how to use her platform to help build a community that benefits everyone. I started my adult life as a bass player. I played bass in first the band Hole, then as I left Hole, I did a farewell global chapter with The Smashing Pumpkins. After that stint, I made two solo records, so I basically had a 15 solid year music career, and then I, in the last 10 years. I became a mother and needed to get off the road. I am now co-founder of Basilica Hudson, director of the operation, which is a reclaimed 1880's factory in Hudson, New York aiming to be a platform for innovative voices and independent voices, and connecting arts, culture, humans and the question of sustainable existence and coexistence off the beaten track on the fringe of not large cities. I believe the future of the world lies in small cities and small operations that can be in tune with their local community, local issues. I have found more and more in the last 10 years of living in a small city and eight years of having an arts and culture center that I really just work on the three blocks that I live in, and that's pretty much what I do with my day-to-day life. As the national and global shit gets weirder, and more hard to imagine the resolve and fix, the more concentrated and committed I am to the three blocks that I live in. The central muse is the 1880s former forge and foundry of steel railway wheels was the initial operation, but it had many, many boom and bust things that went in and out. It looks like an old ancient church, or an old industrial era factory. The building itself is so, so glorious and so impressive, that it has been left standing because most of these buildings have either fallen apart or been knocked down to make new buildings, It's an incredibly beautiful building with the backdrop of the Hudson River painter, skies, the Catskill mountains, the Hudson River, and a lot of industrial derelict abandoned world feel. Both the location and the lost era of industrial failure inform what happens in the building, and informs the always evolving program that happens where we're trying to have a little bit of all humanity in one gathering place, and it evolves with time. We started it with the focus on film and music, because I'm a musician and Tony, my husband and co-founder is a filmmaker and we had no money to run the program, which had this cool building. Q: Can you take me through maybe year one of starting the Basilica? Actually, year one was sweet, because it was small enough that it was ... Q: What was the first spark of let's do this, let's do [crosstalk 00:10:05]. Well, so what happened was that the crazy and inspired man who took over that building in the year 2000, when it was a frozen in time glue factory. We met him when we first moved here. He was about 10 years older than us, or something, and he had seen the potential of it. He had been having this really interesting kind of new agey, he's sort of like, burning man generation before events, mixed with a vision for a community space outside of cities. He had done a ton of work on that place, in that he had gutted out a glue factory. It took him two years just to empty it out. When we met him, because we see the building from our house, we met him and we offered, "If you ever want to do things there, we'd be happy to do some film screening, some music shows." Tony ended up shooting some things in the space because it's so beautiful. I ended up rehearsing for a tour in one of the spaces. Then next thing you know, he still owns the mortgage today, and he asked us, gave it to us basically, made us an offer we couldn't refuse, which is telling us he thought we were young enough or something, to like, "Why don't you guys take this over?" Totally crazy idea. I still actually am kind of, it's like a blind spot in my mind of where, how that ended up being. Other than the building was so unbelievably beautiful and we were absolutely living here. We bought a house in here that seemed like a destined calling, that's all I can describe it as, because it was again, not logically, it didn't fit with any plan that I or Tony had ever had. The first year was parallel to my pregnancy, so it was also that we were getting ready to settle down. I was pregnant. We started the Basilica. We acquired the building. During the entire pregnancy was the renovation. Actually, the spring of 2011, which is when River was born in the fall of 2011, so 2011 was our first full program year. We opened with, we needed an event kick-off idea and it was Will Oldham doing a reading of local Hudson infamous hero Rudy Wurlitzer, a screenwriter, author, incredible man of ... I mean he's an icon in his own realm of the Dennis Hopper world. He wrote Two-Lane Blacktop, and his wife Lynn Davis is a legendary photographer who her and Patti Smith were the caretakers of the Maplethorpe Estate. She's a remarkable photographer. They were part of the first wave of New York City exodus. You know, loft buy-outs, moved to Hudson, buy a crazy old house. When we moved here, they were sort of our mentor. They moved here to make more time and space for their work and lives, and were very supportive of what we're doing. Rudy Wurlitzer, they put out an audio book of one of his incredible, incredible books called Slow Fade. A really cool label Drag City out of Chicago were releasing it as a, they were sort of re-issuing a beautiful forgotten book, and Will Oldham was reading it, so we just hooked it up. We're like, "Why don't we do your inaugural event with this interesting book reading?" Which an example of we want to connect film and music, and literature in one opening event. That was our first, and then every single thing was like that. A friend has a movie, we'll put up the screen, we'll figure out how to ... It was really like just DYI hand-to-mouth small events that worked out really well. Albert Maysles came later, and then the Maysles brothers legendary documentary filmmakers, Tony's friends wife was managing the archives and the, so we got him. Every one, 200 people would show up. Q: How do you feel, you started growing the space and then maturing it. How did you see that movement from this thing you were just, kinda like you said, I don't know what you said mouth, hand-to-mouth or something. Yeah, hand-to-mouth. Q: This thing that feels at this point. Yeah, so I'm at the other side of the epic, this is our eighth season. This is me sitting here with you before godspeed, never happened before. I have never, ever not been at a sound check, production, set up, ever in our eight years. Q: Well congratulations. Thank you. This is the turning point. It all started two years ago. It was really, really difficult. A) Mainly, it wasn't that the Basilica was difficult, it was that having a baby and having the Basilica at the same time was absolutely retarded. The worst decision. Anyone who has had a child will agree those first few years is, you're hit over the head. You had no idea that it would be such a transformation and such a radical, I mean it's just change. Total, total change, and you're falling through the hands of time, understanding humanity in a way that you never understood it before, and the relationships go through all this crazy stuff. The fact that we are growing the Basilica while growing our daughter River, and the vulnerability of both after being lifetimes of people who are definitely collaborators. We collaborated with people. I don't play music alone. I don't play bass alone in my room. I play with people. I've always been a collaborator, but the vulnerability of both of those collaborations at the same time was hands down the most vulnerable time I've ever had in my whole life, as far as I know. I've gone through death and pain obviously, in the realm of just a very, very lucky life. I've seen darkness. I've seen despair. I've seen, but this kind of vulnerability of essentially not knowing how to do it at all. I mean, and having other people being at the other side of it, of you must deliver mothering. You must deliver a partner, and you also are doing strange public events, and trying to listen to a place that you live in that has a population of 6,000 people that are as diverse as this country itself, and trying to not do the wrong thing, and leave anyone out. There's blind spots everywhere. Small towns, also never lived in one. Had no idea what that small town drama was like, until I lived in Hudson, New York as far as you know all your neighbors, you see them all around, but you don't really know each other. You don't. There's this sense of closeness. There's a sense of responsibility to one another, but also a deep, deep drama that happens within. It's definitely, I mean the only experience I guess I can ever compare it to is like school as a child. You're trying to co-exist in this thing. It's like being in a small ecosystem. I'd been in bands, but I did not know what dealing with a local government of the type that it was when we first arrived here, what a lot of, I think people go to small towns for either peace and isolation, or to be very involved.. Q: I'm curious about the tension of dealing with the city of Hudson, and also you've managed to navigate it and it seems like the space has really clicked in to a groove and you've kinda got something figured out at this point. Yeah, we are clicked in a little bit. Actually, the big click happened kind of like the tipping point when day-to-day operations were really, really impossible for five years, and I had this very small child. That was really just nothing but challenge. Then at a certain point, I understood something about business, which I had never known, because I had never run a business, making records and going on tour, especially my type, I was not ... I still don't have unpaid German royalties. I did not do good business for myself. I was a very, very hands off musician, so if I had had a company, I would not have hired me. Now, I would because I learned the hard way, and I also learned the hard way while I was in all those bands too. I just came out on the bottom every single time because I don't like money and I don't pay attention to it. We had to get very real in that way, and when I understood something about business, which is that you need to outsource specific things that I'm not good at. I spent all of last year being an advocate for the creative economy to the state of New York. That's when everything got really nuts and different, because that's when I realized, oh great. I thought it was hard to run a business, now I have to understand that we have to actually make impact on how towns are being developed in the future. so I've learned a lot about just municipal politics and state politics, county politics. Small town politics is mainly just whoever's father's friends and whatever were serving before, or volunteers that want to ... That is really hard to navigate through in terms of planning and long term goals, because nobody is looking long term, and no one does have experience in urban design, urban development, city planning... In this community in particular, because it's so diverse and its actual demographic, it's very had to get on the same page. Q: Can you talk a little bit more just about the city of Hudson and about you see going on here, kind of broadly, for anybody who doesn't really know. Yeah, what's amazing about the city of Hudson. It's two squares miles, it's 10 blocks by 10 blocks, population 6,000 people. Imagine 10 blocks by 10 blocks of some of the nicest, or half decrepit, half nice, east village, west village plopped onto the Hudson River, and then surrounded by a slice of strip malls by the neighboring municipality, and then a lot of rural. Then within it, it's a very unique population of radically diverse demographic not common in small towns in upstate New York. Big cities like Albany, Poughkeepsie, cities in upstate New York, because that's the difference is that Hudson is a city, but the size of a town. Cities in upstate New York have a lot of poverty, a lot of subsidized state housing, a lot of crises, a lot of violence. Small towns generally here are a little bit more sleepy and generic in their not diverse. What's interesting about Hudson is all that diversity that is America in the tiniest lot. There's an interesting evolution too, because it's like old, old Hudson families, which are at this point the smallest population here, because most of them have cashed out or moved out in the last two, three, four decades because it got so ... At one point, there was only 2,000 people in Hudson in the '70s and '80s, when it essentially was a ghost town. The New York state urban renewal which created all the subsidized housing towers, plopped itself in Hudson like it did in every other major city in this country and in New York City, in this tiny block, like grid. Prior to that, there was still a booming manufacturing in the '50s and '60s, so before things really collapsed, there was still manufacturing. Q: As you've been here, how have you figure out how to be an agent of change? What levers have you figured out? I honestly do keep, not that we keep to ourselves, because it is a public venue, but we have not gone guns a blazing swinging with answers, because there is no answers. There is so much challenge here that is not gonna come from individual small artistic projects, but there are ways where we can hope and inspire programs that the city of Hudson themselves have to initiate, such as job training, future pie ... Right now we have New York state is very low on unemployed. Hudson New York is one of the highest per capita unemployed in the state, so Hudson New York has not been taking care of its population. If they can't help 30% get out of poverty. Hudson, New York's government needs to be reformed, but it's been a slow reform. Like I said, I've been here 10 years. I knew about the 10 years prior to that by the friends I made when I first moved here, so we can't do anything but slowly reform the government, and make connections with our neighbors, try to be a gateway to the many different things happening here. Have we done it perfectly? Absolutely not. I've been an anti money person, an interesting new language is economic stimulus, economic impact is the big thing. If Basilica brings 40,000 people to Hudson, New York every year, that's economic impact. It's also confusing for people too, because some people like tourists coming here, not everyone benefits from that. This has been the new tipping conflict, us trying to get more involved in local politics and planning, is that the housing market's insane. It's going bonkers, so it's too expensive. The fast gentrification, bad things are happening, the displace, people not being able to afford, the taxes are going nuts. There's some very, very tough things that we alone cannot change, but we certainly can demand that we all vote, get great electable people. if I know one thing about the bad national election that happened, is Hudson and upstate New York in general is activating in the way that you would hope that it is across the country, but all I know right here, is the amount of new and engaged non politicians getting into politics is very real, very good, and we have a fully reformed government after a decade lock of Republican essentially, people who were not helping the issues that this city had, which was no future economy and no plan for it. Lots of racism and bigotism and some unpleasant things that have been changing. Q: Can you talk a little bit too about how you feel like running Basilica has given you a platform and you've been able to, for what you'd like to do with it, to kind of work on some of those issues? Yeah, I mean working on it every day. Every day I try to think of a new way that we can create a platform for these issues. Right now, as I explained, I just came back from Scandinavia, experiencing a heat wave in a place that's never had heat, and hearing what's happening in all the neighboring countries, climate change is real. We've been focused on environmental things up here. Hudson Valley is a birth place of the environmental movement. For example, coming home from there in the past 24 hours, like I said, I've been focusing a lot on the three blocks I've been living on. Other than the green, the environmental movement is amazing here. It's very, very focused on the Hudson River, because they too are focusing on the three blocks they live on. They can't fix China's coal problem right now. We can try to get the PCB's out of the river. We can try to deal with the fact that these bomb trains, the crude oil being transported on the Hudson River, so we can participate in that way and we do. It's hard to imagine how we can all engage together and work together, but with music and art, we bring solace to each other. With music and art, we could bring lots of change and plans together, but you need to start the conversation and stimulate. I think for the past 10 years especially, gentrification is often associated to arty things, and there's been a really painful shame in arts being a luxury for the privileged people, and I of course, even myself in a small city like Hudson, because not everybody does have the luxury to think about avant-garde music and art, so it's been very, very confusing because I deeply believe, having grown up in a socialist country that supports the arts, that that is what makes change and helps people be empowered to make change, and to create change, and to create community. This country in its polarized politics is getting gross. It's so scary. Also, with the corporate psycho stuff that just ruins music and ruins art, so the industries that ruin all these things have made art a dirty fucking word. Just like they made music and films a fucking pop culture piece of shit. I need to figure out how to fix our planet, and reclaim art that art is actually about communicating and creating togetherness. It is tragic that that narrative has turned into, in the liberal bubble at least, and around here, because when of course there's ... Who has luxury of art if you can barely eat? I understand that, but somewhere in there, we will build communities so we can actually elect a fucking good person who will try to create a program to help that person eat. We're not gonna create that out of a bunch of political, hateful debates. We're gonna create that out of creating space that people want to be in. That's, I guess, how we're hoping to lubricate togetherness to address real issues, but it can't be political forms in the way that we know it, because that is generally polarizing and hateful. Q: I feel like there's something, there's a really interesting lesson here when you talk about the scale of Hudson, living in- Yeah, what is the scale? Its doable. Q: ... a three-block radius, you have this kind of like center. That is what has hooked us to Hudson and to Basilica, was that we saw there was a manageable scale and it is hard every day. Hope is something I was born with, and I very much have it in every environment I've been in. The two bands I was in, there was a lot of addiction, a lot of pain, a lot of death, a lot of dark darkness, and I am not a drug addict. I am not depressed. I do not know doom. I only know hope, because I believe so much in humans and our ability to be together and to make things better than when they're bad. I believe in that, and Hudson, having a space, bringing people together, learning that it really makes an impact. When we saw that impact can be made that was bringing, creating something, not taking away, creating something, of course we have to do it mindfully and carefully to make sure that we don't be directly someone who's pushing somebody out of where they live. Of course we're not going to, and we are so tuned into the challenges of this little city. We hope that we make ourselves available and accessible. I mean, I can't walk up half a block without talking to someone who lives in Hudson, so I'm at all the local meetings. I'm accessible, so we try to hear and figure out what that space can do to help. What's great about having a non-profit is you really can't be that political and crazy. You actually, there's one law, which is you can't support political candidates, but you can make yourself available for people to speak. What's good in some way, we're protected a little bit by our mission, which is being a place for human gathering, and expressing opinions, and we're not ... The challenge has been how do we do really mindful sustainable community building while not being outright political activists. I guess it's like with all this struggle in this country and with the rise of all these hateful divisive things, it's wondering how can we protect not being part of that, while trying to change that and be part of it? It's very tricky, but it's ... Q: I'm curious about two more things. One is if you imagined five or ten years from now for both Basilica and Hudson, what do you hope to see? I hate it when I hear people say, "Gentrification is inevitable." That is not what's ... Change and development is inevitable. It is constant and it is going on everywhere all the time, other than the few remote, but even that, climate is changing. Mindful development, keeping an eye on mom and pop, like individual focused, whether it's a fancy restaurant or a non-profit political group, we must work together. We can. It has not been easy, because most of us are running our own tiny little microcosm in this tiny little town where everyone's suspending for their own like daily, because not many people are here for profit. Most people are here to create a unique new life for themselves, and be engaged in their community. No one's a master at it, but so if each one of us starts, so the goal in the past year has been, how can we work better together as small non-profits? Food and that kind of tourism components, the retail people, the other non-profits all together leveraging one another to figure out how to tackle unemployment here, figure out what are the next big projects in the next two years. With us it's figuring out a job training program to build a future workforce for all these entities locally, so figuring out a job training program in the creative economies. As I went through the state government last year, trying to be a spokesperson for creative economies, I learned just how amazingly, whether it's a farmer, a ceramicist, a restaurant, these are all creative economies that are building up almost 50% of the economy of upstate New York, none of which have been banned together in any way, because they're all individual tiny projects. I've been very active in an upstate wide creative economy group called An Alliance for the Creative Economy. They can create a network to learn from each other, help from each other, but mainly connect each other. That's in a state and regional area wide, and I go and I learn from that, then I come to Hudson trying to figure out how we can do that locally, because we're getting better since the local elected officials have become more representative of the actual city. There are gay people, black people. There are people who have never been in politics, there are artists. There's like an actual diverse elected body, so it's really exciting. Now, we just have to work together, so jobs for locals and a well mother-fucking developed town for sustainable, for climate change, for the people and for not gross rich and corporate desires. That's as good as we can do. I hope we can do it. I feel pretty good about it. That's the next five to 10 years. Q: For somebody who would be, is hoping to do something, launch their own thing, take on government, do something that makes positive change but is feeling overwhelmed- Yes, terrifying. Q: What advice do you have for them? It's unfortunately just like when people used to ask me that when I was in bands, it's just fucking do it. There's no template. Not doing it is the worst thing you can do, so you just do, and do, and do. If you're not cut out to be doing, doing your own thing, find another group that's doing it and help them. Just do it. I would just urge everyone to try to, and the main thing is be realistic of the fact that it's hard, hard, hard work. It's like, know who you are and know what you're good at and do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, and make mistakes everywhere so you realize, oh actually, I wasn't really good at that. Which is what happened to me half way through Basilica, but what's interesting is now that I did figure out how to allocate certain things to people that are better at it than I am, because I didn't even know it existed. I didn't even know that system existed to file fucking papers. Didn't know that existed. I'd never done it. What's cools, is I actually learned, and by doing again, doing things you're not good at. You sort of learn that maybe there was stuff that you were good at that you didn't know. Yeah. Yeah, but I'd say no matter what, do not be lazy. Do something every day all the time. That's my hope, because we've got a lot of work ahead of us, and make kids that do the same. Snail computer voice: The transmission is now over. Basilica SoundScape 2018, co-presented by TCI, happens on September 14th. If you want to learn more about Basilica Hudson or TCI transmissions please visit us at the creative independent dot com . Signing off .