Art, Politics, and Beauty: Miyazaki, Ida, Tsunami
Black Cat, Washington DC
March 27, 2025
I’ve been thinking a lot in the month about art, and storytelling, and beauty, in the context of our overlapping political crises: the disaster facing our democracy, the runaway climate crisis, the ever-heightening disparities between rich and poor, what scarily seems to be tilting toward what William Gibson referred to as The Jackpot in his Peripheral novel series.
This is largely because I was able to experience two of the artistic figures who meant so much to me in the 1990s and early 2000s — the genius Japanese anime filmmaker
Hayao Miyazaki and the much-beloved indie folk duo
Ida, of Dan Littleton and Elizabeth Mitchell, with their assorted bandmates and collaborators in a joint tour with the equally influential 90s indie act
Tsunami, true thought leaders as creators of the self-sustaining Simple Machines label and its ecosystem of bands and audiences.
Politics, ultimately, are external manifestations of one’s internal values. And Miyazaki and Ida, creator of works of transcendent artistic beauty, epitomize that in very different ways.
Miyazaki’s body of work is an extraordinary testament to how a person’s life at the center of some of the most traumatic events of the 20th and 21st century can shape enduring art. He was born in 1941, the year the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. When he was four, the Americans firebombed Tokyo, dropped the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and razed Japan’s urban centers to the ground, with the exception of the cultural heritage of Kyoto. Later in his life, he witnessed the ecological catastrophe of Minamata and the devastation of industrial pollution, the earthquakes that leveled Japanese cities, and the meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear plant.
Almost none of these appear directly in Miyazaki’s animated films, but all of his work confronts the broader themes that have haunted him: Humanity estranged from the natural world, the dangers of militarization and over-consumptive capitalism, and the legacy of tribalism and the mutual destruction that it can bring.
Miyazaki: Spirit of Nature, the film I saw at the Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital, is all about these recurrent themes.
Miyazaki’s politics were formed by the human and ecological catastrophes of his day and his nation; he joined the Japanese radical left as a young man to protest the militarism that led Japan into disaster, and his ecological consciousness was formed in reaction to Japanese industrialization and the toll it took on the ecosystem, which divorced society from its traditional reverence and sense of connection to nature and the spirit world.
The movies he’s made have been cherished by decades of Japanese and global audiences: from early cartoons like
The Castle of Cagliostro to his beloved global hits like
Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, The Boy and the Heron, etc. etc. etc. It’s a body of work unlikely to ever be matched.
The interesting thing to me about Miyazaki’s politics is that while he never avoided direct, and indirect, reference to his political beliefs and values, he was simultaneously engaged in a remarkably successful way in the systems of business and finance and promotion. His films are expensive and time-consuming to make and market, so he marketed avidly to bring his work to American and European audiences. Despite his many misgivings over capitalism and consumption, he markets Studio Ghibli and its associated theme parks and museums. But he embeds his values explicitly and implicitly. Most of the Ghibli theme park is simply protected natural habitat in which wildlife species can recover. There is no parking lot; people arrive by train and walk in quiet isolation or small groups through the forests in which his magical creatures emerge. He’s found a way to create immense beauty in his films and associated products, on his own terms, while engaging in the political and cultural landscape around him. To me, that’s a rare artistic and philosophical victory.
A much quieter and more intimate art is the hushed indie-folk of Ida. Dan Littleton and Elizabeth Mitchell met at Brown University in Rhode Island, where their friend group included Lisa Loeb (Ida appears almost inaudibly on the
#1 hit song “Stay (I Missed You).”
Ida emerged in a densely intertwined network of musicians and promoters exploring a new independent means of creating, marketing, and distributing art; initially its leaders were closely tied to the intertwined cultural nexuses of Washington DC and Olympia, Washington, with some offshoots in Australia and Britain.
Today, when we say “indie,” we mean it as a subgenre of alternative rock music with a variety of aesthetic signifiers. But at that point in the early 1990s, indie defined the means of creation and distribution of art, and its political and economic vision was clearly defined. Ida was touring alongside Tsunami, the 90s indie band reuniting for this event. Tsunami — whose music has little obviously in common with Ida — was and is led by Jenny Toomey and Kristin Thomson. They, and simpatico peers like Ian McKaye in Washington, DC and Calvin Johnson in Olympia, WA, built up a political economy of musical creators linked by their shared ideals.
The political ideals of Ida, while never overt, undergird the sense of intimacy and mutual aid that in the music industry rarely existed. Instead of selling themselves to labels, Tsumami created its own. Instead of competing for scarce audiences, they invited Littleton and Mitchell to tour with them. Their ideals extended to Toomey’s subsequent endeavors as the founder and CEO of the Future of Music Coalition, and as a long-time program officer at the Ford Foundation. (I had meetings in her office.)
Tsunami didn’t mean a lot to me artistically in the 1990s or 2000s. Ida did. Their records create a universe of two — Elizabeth and Dan, musical and life partners — and the concentric circles around them of collaborators and fellow travelers. When we talk about “the personal is political” this is the kind of example I envision: Artists and creators creating a community around them of shared values, in families both traditional (their daughter Storey now plays lead guitar alongside them) and improvised. They are based in Woodstock, New York, a bastion of old-school communal hippiedom, living out their values at a modest scale.
Since the death of Mimi Parker of Low, there has been no band to epitomize a lifelong love affair in indie rock better than Ida (Yo La Tengo fans may quibble.) Watching Liz and Dan on the stage, sharing knowing glances and rolling eyes at private jokes with their daughter, is a truly beautiful thing. Dan’s brother Miggy, on drums, makes the band even more of a family affair. And Karla Schickele, their long-time collaborative songwriter and singer, is a tremendous foil; her cool, limpid alto a remarkable contrast with Mitchell’s airier soprano vocals. I always liked Schickele, both as a person and a musician, notwithstanding an awkward interaction in 2000 at The Milky Way, a club in Jamaica Plain, where she didn’t get my joke about bowling. (The club had a candlepin bowling lane in the back. Man, New England is weird.)
I won’t say I loved
the Ida setlist as much as I wish I had: They lost the coin toss with Tsunami, so they were the openers, and it wasn’t long enough, for starters. They also had a few covers that took some of their own beloved pieces out of the repertoire. But wow, when Ida are hitting their three-part harmonies, in ravishing songs like
Will You Find Me’s “Maybelle” or Schickele’s showcase “Poor Dumb Bird” from
Ten Small Paces, I don’t know if any other band in that genre mastered harmonies the way Ida did, and the interplay of vocals and stringed instruments (guitar, bass, violin) was tremendous.
Will You Find Me — was it really put out a quarter-century ago? — is probably their high-water mark artistically, and it was certainly the most orchestrated, but sometimes Ida is at its best when it’s at its simplest: Like when they took the stage at the Black Cat, unamplified in the dark, to do a song I’d never heard, “The Great South River,” a tribute to the Annapolis scene of Littleton’s youth, which has just emerged from
the 25th anniversary edition of Will You Find Me, which has come out with a daunting 34 additional tracks and a book by Douglas Wolk and was was released… today, as I type this, on the night of April 25, 2025.
That alone would have sealed the night for me but all the Ida set was great — there just wasn’t enough of it. And they didn’t do anything from
Tales of Brave Ida, Heart Like a River, The Braille Night, Lovers Prayers, or their other great catalogue. I could have come up with a dozen songs I would have loved just as much. Of course, I don’t know if any of these records would have justified the 20-year wait since the last time I saw them in Portland. I was honestly just grateful to be there in the presence of the band and the community it created around itself.
As it turned out, I loved the Tsunami set too. I don’t know their work that well, but Jenny Toomey did “Keeping the Weekend Free,” a stunning duet with Franklin Bruno, from a long-ago side project called Liquorice, and their friends and collaborators continued circling on and off the stage, including Ida and Mark Robinson of
Unrest, who had opened the set some hours before.
What emerged, in the Tsunami set, was the vital importance of creating one’s own community, commensurate with a set of well-defined values and at a scale capable of being sustained without exceeding its own resource base. (This is a very Miyazakian philosophy in its approach to striving for ecological balance.) Tsunami is an angry band at times, but the members of the band were unfailingly warm to each other and the audience. The in-group focus on mutual aid and warmth and the hostility toward outside forces could be seen as a sense of tribalism at its worst, but in the more positive light, it emerges as a kind of musical eco-socialism, keeping things as close to the community level as possible; where the connection between ideals and lived realities can be brought closest together.
Memorably, for the set-closer, Tsunami took the lead with Dan Littleton on guitar, with Elizabeth Mitchell and Karla Schickele gamely played tambourine, as Toomey did first a Lungfish cover, the stunning “Put Your Halo On,” and introduced a fight song, to meet the urgency of the moment in Washington, D.C. It was pure, old-school political rabble-rousing, a cover of Mission of Burma’s “Academy Fight Song” with its ringing post-punk urgency. I knew it first as an R.E.M. cover during the George Bush era, as a testament to its enduring political power, in an overt way quite contrasting but also a complement to the quietly covert positioning of Ida, and even Miyazaki, in its way.
Tsunami (and friends) setlist:
https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/tsunami/2025/black-cat-washington-dc-5b5323ec.html
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 04/26/2025 11:18AM by zwirnm.
