Bushwick Asks: What’s Your Apocalypse Plan?

Tonight Bushwick artists will take the Annex Theater stage and perform songs inspired by Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. The book takes place in a post-apocalyptic America. The subject matter started me thinking about what I would do when shit goes down. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I would not survive to see The Traveling Symphony. I’m not well stocked. There aren’t gallons of water stored in a special survival closet. I don’t have any weapons. I don’t even have cigarettes to use for currency. Do other people know what to do in the face of the end of society as we know it? I checked in with tonight’s artists to find out and asked, “What’s your apocalypse survival plan? How do you plan to start a new life that includes your art after life as we know it ends?” Here is what they have to say.

Levi Fuller

LF: The real answer is that, relying on my people skills and my finely-honed ability to write a song about almost anything, I would probably not survive a week. If the apocalypse waits until my son grows up to be big and strong I might have a fighting chance.

KG: Start training him to be your bodyguard now, Levi!

Wes Weddell

WW: I’ve always carried a certain amount of pride about my ability to adapt and prove resourceful in a pinch, but I’m starting to fear that identity isn’t as current as it once might have been.  This is a good prompt to get back on it!  That said, I can’t envision community without music and art; we’d include it somehow (if I survive) – every culture has thus far.

KG: I thought for sure your response would involve a baseball bat, Wes! Wes has a set at Folklife Sunday (5/28), 11:40a-12:10p on Fisher Green Stage and is also co-hosting the Emerald City Songwriter Circles at Folklife Sun/Mon, where *anyone* can drop by and share an original song!

Scott M.X. Turner

ST: Carrots.  They grow great, have plenty of vitamins, and bands of savage roaming brigands mistake them for weeds.  I don’t believe in guns — they make us crazy and paranoid already and a dystopian world armed to the teeth will end humanity no matter how many carrots I plant.  As for art, well, I’ll travel and play “the old songs” (mine, Strummers’, Petula Clark’s) until I break that sixth and final string.  Music stores will be looted early on — partly for building materials, the rest out of spite for John Mayer.

An unarmed carrot-growing two-string geetarista…I’ll fight as possible with my gal, dog, cats and chickens, but I might be an early exit.  Long story short — I won’t do to others what got us into the dystopia in the first place.

Remember…you can do a lot with just an E and an A string.