Songs for the Struggling Artist

I’m sitting outside the Tip O’ Neil Federal Building in Boston. I’ve got another hour before I can get in line to pick up my passport, which is the reason I’ve come here. Not just to this building but to Boston. I feel very sure that there is someone from Boston sitting outside the New York passport office at this exact moment. They can’t believe they had to travel all the way to New York to renew...

My friend and I enjoy coming up with more accurate names for performing arts festivals here in NYC. You like the Next Wave Festival at BAM? Me too! We call it the Previous Wave, though, because almost everything in it hit its stride 30 to 40 years ago. Which is not to say it’s not good! Pina Bausch’s company still performs her work with integrity and style. But Pina Bausch died 14 years ago and th...

Before bed, I was reading the third book in V. E. Schwab’s  Shades of Magic  trilogy. I had a hard time putting it down as our two heroes were in a very tight spot, battling a killer magician creature that could dissipate itself. How were they going to get out of this mess? And, maybe more to the point, how was the writer going to get them out? It took me a while to get to sleep as I was turning o...

As a child, I wanted to be an actor but I lived in a small city wherein my opportunities were mostly school plays and community theatre. This did not stop me hoping that some director or producer would stumble upon me and whisk me away to Broadway or the movies. I imagined someone like the Hollywood guy in  Cold Comfort Farm  seeing me somewhere and a light would shine on me the way it does on Ruf...

This is a rebroadcast of my second most popular blogcast. From the blog; My friend told me about some friends of hers who came to see her dance performance and were clearly pretty baffled by it. She didn’t take this personally because she understood that these friends of hers had no experience of contemporary dance or art in general. What was ironic about these folks with no art experience was tha...

While watching the new Perry Mason show, I heard one character say to another, “You just don’t get it, do you?” and I wanted to ring a bell. Ding, ding, ding! Every screenwriter’s favorite line! There was a bit of a stir around  a movie clip video supercut  a while back which featured one character after another saying, “You just don’t get it, do you?” As you watch, you can start to feel crazy as...

TRIGGER WARNING: This piece will devolve into (imaginary) violence and (imaginary) men will be the victims. Also, some strong language. * A few times in the last few months, I’ve gone to the theatre and found I was seated next to a young man. How young, I’m not sure – maybe 20s or 30s? But every time, I find myself contending with their young man knees pressing into mine. It drives me absolutely b...

I'm out of the country so I'm posting one of my least played blogcasts. This is the tenth episode! From all the way back in 2016. It features an original song that I gave NO context for whatsoever. I feel I must have explained it later? Here's the intro of the piece, though: Over the years I’ve been a part of various schemes that are meant to help artists. Most of the schemes in NYC ar...

I had to travel to Boston to get my passport renewed last week for this trip to Canada I'm on right now so I couldn't record the podcast in advance as I'd planned so I'm posting a replay/rebroadcast of my most popular blogcast. Next week I'll re-post one of my least popular - just for balance. I'll be back on the regular schedule when I get back to NYC. For the episode: For...

I had an idea. I was thinking about how funny Time can be. How an event can feel like it was just yesterday and ten years ago, all at once.  I wrote to myself, Time Is a Tricky Witch and I liked it. It made me laugh. Then, a whole narrative emerged where Time was a tricky witch who’d enrolled a nice old man with a long beard to represent her – so whenever anyone had a complaint, they went to Fathe...

When I was at the height of my  Teaching Artist  powers, I kept an extraordinarily erratic schedule. One morning I’d have to be in Jamaica by 8 am, the next day, I didn’t have a meeting in Manhattan until 4. The following day I’d be in the Bronx from 10 and some days, I’d have gigs in all three boroughs. Some days I’d have no gigs. I woke up at a different time every day, ate at a different time e...

This Part Two of a Two Part Series on my viewing of  The Power . You can read Part One  here . Here’s Part Two: Since I started writing this, I’ve watched more episodes – which hasn’t really improved my opinion of the show, though I am grateful that it has shifted out of exposition and into stuff happening. But as stuff happens, characters keep saying, “This is going to change the world.” And whil...

For years now, I have been hotly anticipating the TV version of the novel, The Power . I would occasionally search for it on IMDB or Google, just to see when we might get a televised version of this book that kept me going in some difficult years. I was advised to read The Power by a friend around about the time dragons came into my life and I feel a kinship with Naomi Alderman and the world she c...

My friend suggested we both apply to this artist residency in Greece. When I looked at it, I noticed there was a fee to attend and I almost didn’t apply – but then I thought about how much I’d love to be on Crete with my friend so I went ahead and submitted for it, hoping to maybe get one of the few fellowships they offer. About a month or so later, I got an email saying I was accepted to the resi...

For a while, I thought my interest in International Television was coming from a desire to escape, to be so far from my own world that I couldn’t even understand the language or the norms. That may still be a factor, but lately I’ve found that watching these things has revealed things about my own culture, the patterns that were underneath that were previously invisible to me because they were jus...

Once upon a time in New York City, my friends and I started a theatre company. We’d have readings and rehearsals at our apartments. We made molds for masks in my kitchen. We had snacks and drinks and a generally lovely time. We wrote our first fundraising letter at  Yaffa Café  in the East Village and rubbed one of their buddha statues’ bellies for luck. The bumps in the road were quickly smoothed...

At the end of the year, Spotify sends everyone (with an account) a summary of their year on the app/website. They’ll tell you your Top Song and your Top Artist – that is, the stuff you listened to the most. Sometimes it’ll assign you a personality based on this information. One year they told me I was  Adventurous  because I “listen to non-mainstream artists 100% more than the average Spotify list...

Last year, I wrote about my experience of giving blood  for the first time . I read it again in the process of preparing the 2022 zine – and it made me think about what has happened since. You may remember how genuinely terrible the blood donation folks were at welcoming me, a newcomer. It was clear they were set up for regulars. As soon as I donated, the one time, it was clear that I was now a re...

When I was going through the  Great Medication Refill Denial Crisis of 2022 , very few other people were aware of it, or involved. The receptionists and the pharmacy consultants knew I was struggling. Some friends and family heard about it from me. The doctor who denied the refill may have not even been aware of the repercussions of her actions. There was enormous drama happening in a very dark co...

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 publications like Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. Was it a smart investment to spend $175 to try and get nominated? If we’d gotten selected for the finals, it def...

Probably because I have now written TWO pieces about  Fleishman Is in Trouble , my friend sent me Lizzy Caplan’s  interview  where she talks about  the show , and her role as Libby. My friend figured I’d be interested and he figured right! Lizzy Caplan explains that the writer (Taffy Brodesser – Akner) created the novel as a kind of Trojan horse, a way to trick people into reading/watching a story...

Can anyone introduce me to film critic, Amy Taubin? I discovered her awesomeness when I went searching for some sensible criticism about the much lauded film, Tár , and found her on a podcast talking a great deal of sense. She said, “It has to be one of the stupidest movies I’ve seen in many a long year” and I could not have agreed more. I said something similar, out loud, multiple times, as we wa...

My artist friend was in artistic crisis. We all of us have them and the crises are so clever, they seem to always give us new takes on the theme. There seems to be an endless variety of artistic crises to be had. Knock one down, another, slightly re-framed one, will pop up to take its place. This one my friend was in was a hobby crisis. It’s one where she asked herself something like, “Is my work...

I was full of fury. I had so much I wanted to sort through, so much I wanted to unpack and so much to say. Normally, this is a recipe for a white hot blog post that comes streaming out of my pen. But I was entirely jammed up. I didn’t know where to start or how to dive in and I was frustrated, not just by the medical situation that was driving the post but also the struggle to write about it. In t...

The thing about Zoom for me is, I usually end up on the floor crying after the meeting is over. It’s either that or a migraine. I couldn’t tell you exactly why. There are a lot of reasons a human mind might respond negatively to this experience. Could be the cognitive load , the slight asynchrony , constraints on mobility or the many other documented reasons Zoom can be challenging. But all I know...