Songs for the Struggling Artist

At LA WebFest, one of the directors told an anecdote about being captivated by an artist’s work early in their career and getting to watch them grow and succeed. He was invested in this artist’s ascension and he recommended the practice of investing in young artists, in order to have the pleasure of watching them make it. It was a sweet plea to get on board with artists before it’s fashionable. To...

Rebroadcast of my first Gen X episode back in 2017 since I was at my high school reunion, hanging with all the X-ers last weekend! From the blog: Where was the rest of Gen X in this town? Were they all home with their kids or had the town been vacated by Gen X years ago? If this party was for Boomers and Millennials, where was the Gen X party? And nationwide, maybe even worldwide, where IS the Gen...

I’m at the airport on my way to an award ceremony in Los Angeles. Next to me, in a garment bag, I have the gown Ipurchased for the red carpet that will be a part of this event. It wasn’t easy to find this gown and the process made me think a lot about the way these kinds of clothes are categorized. I learned about a category I’d never encountered before: The Mother of the Bride dress. To read ⁠⁠⁠⁠...

There was an article in the Hollywood Reporter about the Best Actor and Best Actress Oscars and how they get distributed. In it, I learned that there has only ever been ONE Best Actor winner under 30. One! And there have been 33 Best Actress winners under 30. To read ⁠⁠⁠⁠Best Actor/Actress Ratios at the Oscars ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog. Episode 501 Song: One ⁠⁠Image of C...

As I saw the 500th episode of the Songs for the Struggling Artist podcast approaching, I wondered how I should honor it. 500 is a lot of episodes and such a nice round number. It is a big milestone! Then I got a notification that the blog had just surpassed 100,000 views. To read ⁠⁠⁠A Spaghetti Junction of Milestones ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog. Episode 500 Song: 500 Miles...

While watching this German mini-series about the Bauhaus School, I got curious about historical accuracy so I did a little googling. I ended up at an interview with the creator, who explained how he came to write it. He was saying he was interested in the period and the art and the school and was trying to find the right angle for approaching it and then he had his eureka moment. “The women!” To r...

I found myself in tears looking at the signatures on the paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck at her show at The Met. There was one where her name loomed very large in the corner. It was "H. Schjerfbeck" but still, it was bold and it was her name on the painting. Most of her work was signed with a discrete "HS" or not at all. So I was moved to see this a woman sign her name with ver...

At the café, two young women were having an animated meeting about something they were making. I realized very quickly that I’d made a mistake in sitting at the table next to them, despite my affection for people doing creative things together, because they seemed to be working on a piece about Medusa. To read Why I Got Weird About Medusa ⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠ visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog. Epis...

I almost didn’t go. If the wind had blown just a little harder in any direction, I would not have been there. But I went. And for the first time in a long time, it was worth the effort because I won big. Like biggest font at the end of the award list big. And it was an extraordinary change of pace. To read ⁠⁠⁠⁠ Inside a Big Win⁠ ⁠⁠⁠ visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog. Episode 496 Song:...

I'm in Los Angeles for LA WebFest so this is a re-broadcast of Episode 347. I'm posting this now so I don't say any of this out loud this week! Well – I paid $175 to be considered for an Ambie award for The Dragoning (in the DIY category for low budget productions). The Ambies are the podcast awards that the entertainment business seem to take seriously. They’re discussed in publicatio...

Two old podcast episodes were missing. In my search for them, I started to realize that I’d recorded them in 2016. Which means they were almost a decade old. I looked up the date of my first episode and discovered it was EXACTLY ten years ago. To the day. What kind of date magic is that? I recorded my first episode on March 20th 2016. And there we were ten years later. To read ⁠⁠⁠ A Decade of Podc...

Every New Year’s Eve, my friend and I wish we had a First Night celebration to go to. We both went to many First Nights in our youth and wish such a thing were happening here in NYC. It was a great way to spend the last night of the year and take in a lot of local arts culture in one big burst. It was a lovely way to bring a community together.  To read ⁠⁠ What Happened to First Night? ⁠⁠ visit th...

My allergies have stolen my voice for the day so I'm re-posting this episode from ten years ago, in honor of a decade of podcasting. This early episode has no song and the sound quality is a little chaotic. (No mic yet!) But if you want to hear what this sounded like in the beginning, here you go! To read Why Going Away for Inspiration Is a Good Idea visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist b...

The voice of the GPS sounds like a British man, with an RP accent, and he gives his instructions to turn right or left like he’s a butler guiding the staff. He mispronounces some things funny because he does not have local knowledge. For example, he’ll tell us to take the Ed Cock Bridge when everyone knows that, our former mayor, Ed Koch’s name is pronounced with a clear “CH”. To read ⁠ Pronounce...

This Timothée Chalamet story about his dismissal of opera and ballet, calling them arts nobody cares about might be too up my street to resist. Art that nobody cares about is kind of my beat! I am also an artist that “ nobody ” cares about so I’m well placed to discuss this particular controversy. To read Chalamet Gate visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog. Episode 492 Song: Opera Singer...

We had some men in the class but that day we were all women and we were playing a ball game of tossing the ball around the room, to music, trying to find the pleasure and searching for complicity in our classmates. Then our teacher, Jane , gave us the next task. When we caught the ball, we had to hold it up and say, “Look at me! I’m an actress in New York City!” To read ⁠⁠⁠ Acting Is Embarrassing...

Scammers know their scams are not believable. They know most of us we know that the Prince of Nigeria has not emailed us to help with his fortune. They don’t want to scam everyone. They’re looking for the most credulous people they can find and the Prince of Nigeria is a filter. They don’t want anyone who’s going to ask too many questions. They make these things hard to believe on purpose. They wa...

What’s funny is, I like editing. I’m not sure why I was dragging my feet around editing our book . I’d already made some major changes. The big re-structure had already happened. But somehow I couldn’t bring myself to sit down and fix up some details. I finally decided I needed to buckle down, though, and instead of getting into the document, I watched a movie made in the year our book was set. It...

If you felt a bit of a tremor in the fabric of the universe last week, you’re probably a clown. One of the most influential clown teachers made his exit and more people than I would have expected felt the impact of his loss. I never studied with Philippe Gaulier but I studied with several teachers who did. I guess I’m a second generation Gaulier clown. I think there are a lot of benefits to being...

Back in college, I took a class in producing, as I thought it might come in handy in my future theatre career. The class involved running the student run space with four other students. One of them was an egotistical narcissistic asshole so I quit the job and the class after the first semester of it. I’d forgotten most of this drama until I saw a friend who also considered walking away. She wonder...

When I went to go see my friend in a show at Jeffrey Horowitz’s theatre, TFANA, I had a wild experience with a velvet rope they’d set up after the performance. I wrote about it. But I didn’t name the theatre but now that I’ve read those emails from Horowitz to Epstein, I feel like the two things are connected. Because that velvet rope they set up was to cater to people like Jeffrey Epstein, if not...

My college has an alumni holiday party every year and it’s a fun opportunity to meet people both younger and older than me. At this last one, I met two groups of recent grads and I was struck by the difference in their approaches to the prospect of networking. It seemed to me that one group had a lot they could teach the other. They were all very nice – but the first students I talked to – let’s c...

His “About the Author” said he’d been a successful playwright so I couldn’t figure out why his novel about an actress should be so utterly devoid of any verisimilitude about life in the theatre. There’s not a single writer character in it until the very end and the actress is never in rehearsal, never onstage and we never see much interest in her work. We just hear about what an amazing actress sh...

Back in 2008, I wrote a review of The Heroine’s Journey on Goodreads. At the time, I was developing Mythellaneous , which was a clown hero’s journey, so I was very excited to read this book, which was meant to be a women’s version of the famous hero’s journey as described by Joseph Campebll. Unfortunately, The Heroine’s Journey was disappointing and generally kind of facile and old fashioned. It d...

A few weeks ago, I started receiving alarming emails about renewing my health insurance. “Renew now,” they said, “Or you risk losing your health insurance!” I can’t risk losing health insurance so I got right on it and logged into my NY State of Health account to take care of it. When I got into the system, it told me I could not renew for another two weeks. Several more panic inducing emails arri...