By Jamesha Caldwell

My pen will enter before I do. 

It is invited. 

It is honored. 

It is granted agency, 

the type of agency that only exists in the intergalactic. 

My pen will enter before I do, 

it is invited. 

it is honored. 

it is granted above all things because it is equipped with the legacy of masters. 

Masters who used words righteously rage-ous. 

Masters who used words callously courageous. 

Masters who used words to free. 

masters who used words to be. 

My pen will enter before I do. 

It is recognized because it is multilingual, and I can’t speak a lick. 

It merges diasporic evidence 

evidence of centrality. 

My pen will enter before I do because I simply cannot. 

But somehow, my pen has Roman..roaming ability. 

I mean real Mongolian leverage. Pillage every page until the eternal speaks only that of honor. only that of fear, only that of humor that empires seem to embrace. Because that pen knows that pages are not consumed by text that attests to the honesty of the wordsmith but only the words of the egomaniac. 

I am not manic until my pen summons that mechanical ego. 

ordained by the lonely, my pen will enter before I do until the machine guides my pen and not the self. 

By Bry Reed

they don't prepare you for the flurry of bees 

outside your window.

they will gather slowly at first 

before committing to the bit and 

working ceaselessly to defeat the brick wall. 

they will throw themselves against windows

because sometimes they confuse the barrier for the sky. 

smack!

they don't prepare you for the light brigade

launching their restless charge against cement.

they are unconcerned with your minute domestic theatre.

darling please understand that these are bees

sometimes they confuse your apartment for the hills.

smack!

one day when you return home from a reasonable trip to the gulf

you may come back to find that a single bee in all their triumph, glory,

and honor

stumbled between the cracks

moved through the crevasse

sometimes they confuse the windowsill for rest

boom.

River talked to creatives Devin Ocampo (Faraquet, The EFFECTS, Medications, and Smart Went Crazy) and Chad Clark (Beauty Pill, Smart Went Crazy, MidMountain’s board) about being ahead of your time, the tension between chasing the magic of imagination and turning it into reality, their connections to MidMountain, the uncertainty of artistic creation, and how their relationship is still growing after decades of playing music together.

(This interview has been condensed for length and clarity, but is still long and there’s so many interesting tangents we had to cut… Huge thanks, also, to John Bergmayer for literally providing helping hands to edit.)

Beauty Pill is a band from Washington, DC with music known for its sonic and lyrical complexity, but it’s not just a band—it’s an ongoing, multi-decade, multimedia art project whose work has always felt, to me, eerily ahead of its time. 

Although Chad is Beauty PIll’s musical epicenter, it’s a massive collective effort–including five regular members, plus an occasional horn quartet. In Beauty Pill, Devin primarily plays drums, but he is also working on an exciting solo project—one shaped, in part, by his long collaboration with Chad and the challenging year they weathered together in 2022. 

I caught up with Chad and Devin across two interviews in January 2023, just as everyone else was catching up with some of Beauty Pill’s past work: We spoke right after the release of an anthology called Blue Period that covers music released in the early aughts.  

The Blue Period Anthology featured Unsustainable Lifestyle, an album met with a lukewarm response when first released (especially in comparison to the band’s acclaimed follow-up Beauty Pill Describes Things as They Are—also just re-released on Chad’s new label FINDINGS!) only to receive accolades from Rolling Stone, NPR, and others as part of its latest encore. 

But being a pop culture time traveler can be a little bittersweet.

Chad: I had to be talked into [the Blue Period Anthology.]

I did not want to do it.

It helped to have other people reinforcing this idea that there's a hunger—there's a love for this music.I didn't really buy it and was sort of reluctant to go back to that time in my life, because it was a painful time that the Anthology reflects.

And I'm happy for the attention, you know, because I'm an independent artist and just for economic reasons attention is important because it helps me sell my work.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about it and some pain associated with it and some ambivalence about it. 

It should be fun but it's not that much fun to be told you're ahead of your time. Maybe it's my personality, but I focus on the feeling of "it's not your time." 

I've been feeling out of place a lot in my life, so to some extent the Project Blue period has made me a little neurotic.

I don't even make sense to people anymore.

I want the music to be heard, you know. I like making people happy. I don't do that very often.

You can talk to somebody—-you can see in their eyes that you're making them happy, and that's just a nice feeling.

But Devin and Chad’s story starts before the Blue Period and even Beauty Pill, back in the 1990s, when both were deeply connected to DC’s punk scene and Devin joined Smart Went Crazy. 

Devin: The first time that we engaged, actually, one-to-one is Beauty Pill. In Smart Went Crazy... I was a fill-in drummer at first and then we got pretty intense...

Chad: I don't think that's accurate, Devin. I think that you transformed Smart Went Crazy in a radical way—Like, your musicality, and your style, and your vision, and your fire that you brought to that band is not inconsequential.

I think it's radical and I would say that you are a core architect of our last record, and a core reason why it's fucking great.

Devin: I appreciate that. I do, and I don't mean to downplay what happened after I got in the band. But my introduction to the band was just [as] a replacement.

I didn't know you guys at all as artists or as people. We had a mutual friend in Travis Morrison.

Chad: That's true. That's how it happened.

Devin: He thought I was a drummer. It was a total misunderstanding… I wasn't looking to get a gig as a drummer.

It was Travis that said, “that guy's a drummer” because I was practicing next to them. 

I was playing drums because no one else would play drums.

Chad: I forgot all this.

Travis Morrison was the lead singer of the popular indie band The Dismemberment Plan, a band Chad worked extensively on the audio engineering and production side. Beauty Pill also toured with Morrison after he went solo with the album Travistan. 

The sour critical reactions to Morrison’s debut solo album and Unsustainable Lifestyle both seem in retrospect like the result of reviewers baffled by artists exploring new directions–in Chad’s case, music that diverged from the punk and hardcore material they expected from based on his affiliation with punk DIY label Dischord and prior work with Smart Went Crazy.  

For reference, Pitchfork originally rated Unsustainable Lifestyle a tepid 5.7, but recently rated the Blue Period anthology that features the album a 7.4. 

Devin: I think making this Blue Period record—which theoretically has nothing to do with me, but is my whole introduction into the world of Beauty Pill—is really interesting to me.

The key is that I was just a hired gun structurally. I was given no responsibility as a band musician, as a band member.  You don't have to make decisions or whatever. Chad was just like, “I need someone to play drums and guitar and do some stuff, or just come in and play stuff, and then also help out…” because it was self-engineered at that point.  

You were just starting out with what became Silver Sonya. You were putting in a lot of infrastructure while we recorded that record. (Silver Sonya was a second little B room that was connected to Inner Ear.)

We made that record in flux.  I think some of it we actually made in the A room, right?

Chad: Yes. [Inner Ear] is the foundational recording studio for Dischord Records.

Nearly all of Dischord's records were recorded at Inner Ear. It’s run by Don Zientara who is a very unusual, interesting, sweet sweet guy who's beloved by Ian MacKaye who was the head of the label and the leader of many of its most well-known bands, and I worked there for basically about 10 years. 

And I actually had a parallel studio, which was called Silver Sonya in a smaller room, which largely focused on mastering, but also did other other recording audio stuff.

A note that Inner Ear actually lives on, just not in the building the current MidMountain piano was rescued from and where generations of rock and punk classics from Bikini Kill, Fugazi, Foo FIghters, Jimmy Eat World and others were recorded.

(That building was somewhat ironically torn down to create a new arts district in Arlington, VA.)

Don was very zen about the whole thing when I rolled up with a last minute box truck rental to grab the piano and basically pick over the remains of the studio like a starving vulture on a fresh carcass the day before he had to be out. Now the piano, some furniture, and a trove of other minor artifacts including a VHS copy of Harold and Maude and a magnetic master from the debut album of Coriky, a supergroup including Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye and Joe Lally plus The Evens’ Amy Farina, now live at MidMountain.

Don continues to produce music—but now from his basement again, which is how the studio started, ARLNow reported last fall.

But even before the piano rescue, I reached out to Chad—an internet mutual—about finding a way to bring Beauty Pill out to get involved in MidMountain… And hopefully, make something weird and beautiful on site. 

Chad: We want to do things in an unusual way, and in a way that feels like an adventure. 

Our last full-length album was called Beauty Pill Describes Things as They Are, and that was recorded as a public exhibit at a Museum called Artisphere which unfortunately does not exist anymore. It was in Arlington, Virginia, just across from Georgetown in Washington DC, and we made a record as a public exhibit.

We allowed people to watch us as we were working, invited people to come to the window, and observe us as if we were just another exhibit in the museum, even though we were musicians at work. And I think that record is infused with the energy of that circumstance. And that's partially why it's a strong record. It's a very strong record.

I think it's certainly the strongest thing that I have done.

I want to top it, I want to beat it, basically. 

I want to continue to do things in an unusual and exciting way, and the idea of coming out to MidMountain and creating or recording music was very exciting to me.

After connecting with River over brunch, Chad became the first creative to come check out MidMountain in late 2021, days after we closed on the space.  

Chad: Everything about it was beautiful to me, and exciting. I didn't know how easy or hard it would be to make a record there, but I very much wanted to do it.

Then the plans were complicated. 

Chad: Here's the story. We had planned for Beauty Pill to go out there and work, and unfortunately, I got very, very sick and we could not do that. But I was very profoundly sick. I was near death's door. For those who don't know anything about me or my history, in 2008 I had a freak virus that got into my heart, and infected my heart. 

And when you get a heart infection, you usually die pretty quickly. The heart does not have any defenses against infection unlike, if you get an infection in your lungs, or an infection in your liver, [or] your kidney, or pretty much anywhere else in your body. 

The body has defenses set up for that, but the heart is never expecting to receive intrusion. And so if it does, it's usually very quickly fatal. And somehow, I managed to survive that. And ultimately was given a mechanical heart to replace my original heart.

To learn more about the defects in robotic heart from Medtronics, read this ProPublica investigation. 

Chad: I had this mechanical heart for basically a decade and I was warned that it had been recalled by the manufacturer. I think their behavior was unethical, but I'm not going to get into that here because there's pending litigation. I will say that I don't think they handled it very well.

I knew there was a possibility that something might go wrong.

We made the plans anyway, and we were optimistic and unfortunately, I was hospitalized and told that we had to get this machine out of my chest so that I could have a heart transplant. 

This is all very dramatic and intense.

But in addition to the stress and the fear associated with that experience, I was really dismayed that we weren't able to move forward with our MidMountain plans.

I mean, comparatively minor concern versus dying.

But I was disappointed, you know, because I had this vision of what we were going to do and how it was going to feel and what we were going to be able to achieve—and it was dashed by my medical reality.

I proposed to you and Devin that Devin… could replace Beauty Pill at MidMountain with his solo project.

And so Devin took over our spot and it was a happy thing?

Devin: It definitely ended up being useful and inspiring. 

I would back up at this point, because now the stories converge.

The solo record really starts with Chad, actually, because he's the one who suggested that I make a solo record. 

I have always been in my whole musical life in groups, and primarily my material that I would say is sort of my life's work, or whatever...things that I write have been created for, and with in mind, a trio format for the most part.

My main three bands would probably be my work with Faraquet, a band called Medications, and then most recently a band called The Effects on Dischord. Separate from that, and I guess the side work I'm most known for would be Beauty Pill, and then my work with Mary Timoney, on a couple of her solo records, one of which I produced.

But although Devin works professionally in audio, he hasn’t made his personal art projects the focus of his career.

Devin: I've had a lot of jobs throughout my life to support myself as an artist, and I try to be, if not the best, the best that I can be at anything I try to do. So every job I've ever had I try to do really well at it.

Chad: I do think that is a characteristic of you, which is a kind of consistent excellence.  I mean, I know it sounds like I'm flattering you, but actually that's it. That's actually an accurate description. Devin as a guitarist is known as a guitarist's guitarist. Devin is known as a drummer's drummer.

I do a lot of things and I got a lot of attention for Beauty Pill, but Devin is the kind of person who can pick up any instrument and probably make music with it within minutes. He’s just one of those people. 

It's kind of annoying actually.

And that was a huge boon to Beauty Pill.

Devin: I think for the first period of our relationship musically, that I was sort of the side man certainly, but I tried to be the best side man I could be—and the guy who could realize certain things that didn't seem possible. I'm also sadly the one that says it's not possible, usually.

So that's also my role, which I think can get overplayed on either side. I can get too forceful with it, and it hurts Chad, you know, maybe more than it needs to. We found a good balance with that, I think.

Sometimes Chad is excited about something and it's not that it shouldn't be exciting, it's just that it's not realistic.

Chad: It was really hard for me to sell the band on... recording in public [at Artisphere.]

Devin: Yes, and it barely worked!

There was a whole like back and forth that happened—you know, a lot of legalese right before that actually happened. That said, when I doubt right before… then I am a hundred percent down. 

Because when we did Artisphere, which is what I think you're talking about, it was like, "this is just crazy. Is it really gonna happen?"  And then talks got further. "Okay, Okay. This seems like it's gonna happen..." Then there was a moment like this not happening and I went "oh, there you go!" 

And then somehow that got worked out last minute and then we were in...

By Clarke Bedford

Alternative histories, also called “fictive art” among other things, are an enhanced version of real events that seems to the author a more satisfying reality than the objective version. I was, for instance, in a car accident in which my description to the insurance agent unintentionally deviated far from the actual sequence of events because I misinterpreted what I saw, a fairly common occurrence apparently. Now imagine the “alternative” description was intentional, elaborated, creative, possibly humorous and at it’s extreme delusional. Then take those attributes and write a narrative, include documents, photographs, invented personas and so forth and you have an alternative history, more to one’s liking because it conforms to a projection upon the world as what should have happened even if it wasn’t.

I live in an “art house” for instance because I feel that is a more “right” house to live in than an ordinary house. I don’t feel it is peculiar though I objectively know it is, but rather a typical house seems to me peculiar because it is without expression, (and no door color or evenly spaced bushes doesn’t count).

I constructed a scrapbook based on the invented suburban marriage and life of a Civil War General and a prehistoric fertility symbol because it is more illuminating about suburban life than a more typical pairing would be, the truth lying in absurdity and exaggeration. Similarity a sub-teen brilliant conceptual artist, idiotic Victorian art collector and a history of modernism keying off the motif of an argyle sock strike me as authentic in their own screwball way. So call the “alternative narrative” wish fulfillment of the restless and disappointed mind. Or make up something else to account for it, but remember to document fully! 

By Maven Kahn

“Mary Greenlee died of late. Straight she went to Heaven’s Gate then Abram met her with a Club, knocked her back to Beelzebub.” We are the birds before the coming storm pecking at the carcass of the old world where this place was once a house of a slave owner, a woman who benefited from white supremacist culture. This is now a house of liberation, a house of art, a house of creation. We are the flowers, we are the maggots clearing out the rot, we are the new earth turned over, we are building a new world in the skeleton of the old. 

As you look towards the ceiling, you will see wired together bones that have been ethically sourced and gathered from deceased animals; cleaned, and re-purposed to make a macabre sculpture donated to the Mid Mountain Arts Collective.

When I was making this piece, I was thinking about rebirth. In tarot, the death card does not just mean dying, it means a part of yourself dies so a new part can be reborn. So too with abolition; it’s not just burn it all to the ground, it’s build a new world in the shell of the old. It’s a house that once was inhabited by a slave owner now being inhabited by artists, creators, and people who want to work for a liberation and a better world.

By Mariam Baksh

By John Bergmayer

blank paper found left out,

evidence of fingers,

I miss even the shout

when it lingers. 

and even the missing 

(I see them around)

parts of my heart,

love unbound — are grateful. 

worth the wait for.

We are grateful  to have many fantastic neighbors at MidMountain, including Karen and James Pannabecker, talented artists who are on a parallel journey to reclaim space with art just down the road. Here's the Thunder BRidge story, via James!

Thunder BRidge is transforming a former Civilian Conservation Corps camp and progressive juvenile corrections center into a cultural arts center and campground. Thunder BRidge campground opened in May 2022, offering the kind of camping many baby boomers remember from their childhoods, with large, private campsites and centralized bathroom and shower facilities. The property includes screened cabins, log cabins, and cottages for those who prefer beds and some of the comforts of home.

Six visual artists maintain studios at Thunder BRidge, with more rooms available for creatives of all media, including musicians. The owners have been rehabilitating a full-size gym, commercial kitchen, and additional cottages as part of a creative arts and special events venue. 

Purchased in June 2021, the property consists of 100 acres and more than 30 buildings the Commonwealth of Virginia boarded up in 2009, when it closed its Natural Bridge Juvenile Corrections Center. The Center provided teenaged boys with high school education and skills to return to society as productive adults, such as carpenters, woodworkers, masons, auto mechanics, barbers, gardeners, and cooks.

Thunder BRidge has reopened the buildings and begun tackling renovations one-by-one. By Fall of 2023, it hopes to have facilities available to host workshops for 10-20 overnight participants. The gymnasium may also be ready for performances.

Thunder BRidge includes an 8-acre pasture with two ballfields and an obstacle course; a pavilion for weather-protected dining, arts endeavors, ping pong, and other games; a horseshoe pit; and two creeks on its east and west borders. The adjacent national forest to the east offers the popular Belfast Trail, Devil’s Marbleyard, an enticing swimming hole known as the Straw Pond, and access to the 65+-mile long Glenwood Horse Trail. The Appalachian Trail, Blue Ridge Parkway, Natural Bridge, and many other attractions lie within easy driving distance.