PHOTO/HANK G
A weekly open mic show
CULVER CITY, CA — Flight School is a weekly open mic show in Culver City, California. The night started with an idea to have a place that artists from all over Los Angeles can come by and perform their songs and poetry with the element of a live band to back them up. The musicians and the open mic’ers don’t know what will happen on any given night and this makes for a surprise every week.
We live in this creative soup of Los Angeles as different ingredients and all of us have our own flavor to add to the mix, but we breathe the same air and see the same sunsets. Flight School is a congregation, a moment in time where we get a chance to share our souls and our perspective of life, love, injustices, frustrations and the like, with the option of doing it with a band. When you go on stage you become the captain of the ship, sailing in unknown waters, and the musicians are the crew. I think that’s exciting, and it really tests the artist’s ability to adapt to the moment.
I started playing bass seriously as a preteen and grew up in a musical household, always tinkering with the drums, guitar and keys as well. Having played in several bands throughout the years I’ve learned a lot about perceived success and failure as a musician. The biggest success one can have in music is to be able to transfer emotional energy through sound and word to an audience. To connect, as it were. Without that connection, there will be no momentum for the art. When the crowd feels it, that’s the money shot. Sing and play from the heart first, that’s not all it takes but without that you’re building a house on sand.
100,000 Poets and Musicians for Change has the mantra of “Peace and Sustainability.” What more do we need in life? To me that means utopia! Sustainability is a challenge but not impossible. We use water to flush toilets and to water our lawns. Grass is a fad from the past, public spaces should be used to grow edible or otherwise useful plants. We have the power to not be lemmings. However we must sit in the driver’s seat of our own lives and work at it every day. Peace to me does not mean a lack of fighting, it means an open forum society and action toward common goals. It means work, it means when we do fight we resolve it with communication.
Flight School, as the name implies, is a place where we learn to take flight; that is, as a metaphor for accelerating our dreams and elevating our game as musicians and poets. It’s an open runway to test out your craft.
