An Evening of Irish American Songs with Melanie Beth Curran

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Thank you everyone who came out on August 2nd for our first show of the Irish American songs from my songbook zine! It was a blast. You are the best fans and enthusiasts a gal could ask for. Thanks especially to Eli Hetko on Bozouki and Mandolin, and Jaden Gladstone on Fiddle. Thanks a lot to Jalopy Theatre in Brooklyn and all the folks who work there and make it happen! Thanks to Nicolette Gold for the beautiful photo for the flyer.

Pre-Order My Zine!

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ZINE 1: The Mary Wallopers & Arena & Vaudeville Clairsentience in NYC

This zine will blow your mind, feel good to touch, and rest wonderfully in your hands.

It concerns Irish American and Black American performance in NYC, specifically two shows I saw in fall of 2023.

Show One: The Mary Wallopers and Sam Shackelton at Irving Plaza.

Show Two: “Arena”, by Artist Derek Fordjour, Choreographer Sidra Bell, and Composer Hannah Mayree performed at Petzel Gallery.

Seemed like the Vaudeville was alive in well, but in a way that felt very surprising and releasing. The possibilities for a collective de-colonial explosion seem high. Are the forgotten vaudeville thoroughfares - The Bowery, 14th St./Union Square and Tin Pan Alley - actually still running shit?

FIND OUT!

Lyrics to "The Belle of Avenue A" by The Fugs

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I couldn’t find the lyrics to this song anywhere online and I thought they were hilarious. So I did my best to figure them out as an act of public service. I guess this song is from 1969 and I can literally smell it. The vivid descriptors and hyper specific references to era-specific objects truly entranced me. I loved how I never knew for sure when the refrain will come around again.

“The Belle of Avenue A” Song Lyrics by The Fugs

This is a song about a man from Junction City, Kansas

A truck driver for the Red Ball Express

who decides he has to go the Lower East Side to get some Hippie Nookie.

It's called "The Belle of Avenue A"

He was just a lonely truck driving man driving all night long

but did he know how soon his tears would fall for the Belle of Avenue A?

He drove through the tunnel in his big Mack truck

driving hard from Kansas

He told all his buddies at the Junction City Truckstop

he was gonna get some hippie nooookie

but did he know how soon his tears would fall for the Belle of Avenue A?

He saw her standing in a midnight-blue lace gown

He saw her standing in a midnight-blue lace gown

He could see her pretty naked nipples under the mesh

and she had a button, "Love is God", pinned to her sleeve

and he started talking to her in hieroglyphic hitchhikes (??)

and he told her she was the prettiest girl he'd ever seen

waving a wand of incense

burnin on Avenue A

Well his heart was beatin like a bumpy butterfly

his stomach was an empty fire

but did he know how soon his tears would fall for the Belle of Avenue A?

Hey they walked together talkin, and she reached out to hold his hand

and he trembled with joy as she scratched his lifeline

with her silver Tibetan fingerstall

and she asked him to come up to her house

and he leaped up her steps like they was on fire

and she had an Indian hemp plant blooming on the windowsill

an electric toothbrush by the bed

and on the stroboscope was a tiny push up bra

made from the eyelids of an elephant.

He was just a lonely truck driving man

driving all night long

but did he know how soon his tears would fall for the Belle of Avenue A?

They kissed! And passed between their mouths a silver-tounged marble

and he went out of control.

Fell to his knees

and she touched his zipper

and recited a sex charm from The Book of The Dead

and she caressed him with her feet

and somehow she got his Levi's off with her toes

and then she wriggled out of her lace

covering herself with Reddi-wip in a spiraling flourish

and she stood there and she had a white pebble in her navel

and she said to the lonely truck driver:

"Love me and pray to my body

Love me and pray to my body"

and the lonely truck driver to her in reply did say:

"I don't want no other love

I'll be true to you

you're the prettiest gal I've ever seen

my Belle of Avenue A"

She lay back into the zebra-skin rope harness

and pulled her truck driver lover

down into her entwining arms

and she wrapped herself around with hundred of bright ribbons

and she beamed in on him with a tube torque

and he painted pretty prairie flowers on her stomach

with a suma (i) brush

and later on they lay in a bathtub of Mazola oil

and final he grew exhausted and fell asleep

in her lovin' arms

while she stared onward into the night

drinking from her Aramaic chalice

and thrilling herself with an onyx-handled tapir snout

He told all his buddies at the Junction City Truckstop

he was gonna get some hippie nooookie

but did he know how soon his tears would fall for the Belle of Avenue A?

When he woke up he told her he loved her

and that he wanted to live with her forever and ever

and she looked at him

and she held his hand

and she dealt out the tarot cards

and she studied I-Ching for many minutes

and she asked him what his sign was

and finally, looking deep into his eyes she held his hand and said:

"It's not in the cards

all things say 'Adios'

and the purple flower

s and the green flower

s melt in the void."

Well he reeled in his dick and he headed for the door

filled with an awful love-

sheee - she can suck on a purple donut buddy I'm gonna head for home-

but the misty tears fell down his face.

He drove through the turnpike and he headed South

driving hard for Kansas

But the misty tears fell down his face for the belle of Avenue A

Yes the misty tears fell down his face for the belle of Avenue A.

He never thought the tears would ever stop for his

midnight

lace dress

incense

goddess

The Belle of Avenue A.

Writing New Jersey Cultures - Course Syllabus, Spring 2023

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This semester I am teaching my dream course. I’ve it called Writing New Jersey Cultures.

Course Description

New Jersey real, New Jersey imagined. New Jersey is thrown around in speech and popular culture, though it is seldom understood. The effort of our class is to write New Jersey as we understand it. To do this, you will conduct ethnographic research on a New Jersey Culture of your choice - most likely one that you are personally a part of. Through vast amounts of in-class work doing writing, and through the drafting, revision and research processes, you will produce original research projects. Your final drafts will be shining examples of undergraduate fieldwork. The skills you glean here will be transferable to the rest of your college experience, as well as to your careers as writers, thinkers and citizens.

Just as New Jersey is indeterminate, is undefinable, is a place of possibility and marshes and hauntings and sprawl and language and music, so too will our course be a shifting realm of potentialities. Be prepared to write by hand, try out automatic writing, explore multi-modality, and experiment ethnographically.

Welcome to Writing New Jersey Cultures*.

Full PDF of Syllabus

View on Academia.edu

Camilo Jose Vergara

*Inspired by Writing American Cultures, a course by Nancy Koppelman, Chico Herbison and Sam Schrager at The Evergreen State College, 2012.

Readings

Our class will use the free, open source textbook called:

Engaging Communities: Writing Ethnographic Research by Suzanne Blum Malley and Ames Hawkins.

Find it here:

http://www.engagingcommunities.org/

I will assign readings to inspire and inform our work together. I will provide PDFs of any text assigned, via Canvas. Readings may include:

New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of ’58 by Sherry B. Otner Lifeblood of The Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn by Alyssa Maldonado Estrada

The Body and the City Project: Young Black Women Making Space, Community, and Love in Newark, New Jersey by Aimee Cox

Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science by Carolina Alonso Bejarano, Lucia López Juárez, Mirian A. Mijangos García, and Daniel M. Goldstein

Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen
The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones by Amiri Baraka

I Drum, I Sing, I Dance: An Ethnography of a West African Drum and Dance Ensemble by Marissa Silverman

Dr. Smartphones: An Ethnography of Mobile Phone Repair Shops by Nicolas Nova and Anaïs Bloch

Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture by Michael Moffatt The Destabilization of Italian-American Identity on Jersey Shore by Sara Troyani

The American Diner Waitress: An Autoethnographic Study of The Icon by Heidi Liane Hasbrouck

Gentrification Down The Shore by Mary Gatta and Molly Vollman Makris Class Action Park directed by Seth Porges and Chris Charles Scott

To View and Picture Herself Inside of an Infinitude of Apartments: True Confessions of a StreetEasy Scroller

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I try not to take it personally when StreetEasy.com asks me to verify my humanity. Apparently the way I use the website, compulsively opening tabs, scrolling through them, closing them and looking at another cluster of ads, alerts the website’s system that I am a bot. After the fourth or fifth time going through the CAPTCHA, checking pictures of crosswalks, I give up and shut the laptop. I mean, that’s pretty sad. When I’m in my street easy flow, the computer thinks I am a computer too.

But that’s kind of the point. Every ounce of life has been Air BnB’d. In my mind I have come to call what I am talking about “the real-estate-i-fication of everything.” This includes other people. People talk about other people like real estate. Good investment, bad investment. Safe, toxic. A diamond in the rough or a fixer-upper. Don’t date someone for their potential, they say. They don’t say that about housing though.

My passion for the ads started early, before the internet. It started with paper real estate magazines on the 35 minutes of ferry boat ride across the Puget Sound in Washington State. I was fascinated by houses. I liked seeing pictures of the insides of them, I liked the different styles. I was a Sims fanatic. The houses provided inspiration for my builds on the computer game. That was one reason.

The other was that I was acutely aware of what my parents had paid for their house in the 90s when they purchased it. I was obsessed about how we could get a better deal if we were willing to move. On the weekends I’d ask my mom to drive me, to please drive me, to open houses, advertised by signs in the ditches with arrows pointing down quiet lanes. I loved walking through the spaces of others in those weird little shoe coverlets.

From the perspective of a child, this obsession makes sense. A lot of space is just taken up by buildings I wasn’t allowed to go into. That’s sort of weird to a kid. So much of everything is private. I don’t think a kid understands private property. I wonder what a New York City kid understands. New York City is all of this privatization on steroids.

I’m going to tell you where I go for my goods. The real goods. Easiest way into it is with the StreetEasy ads. You gotta wait a week to get the Listings Project Newsletter (wholesome colonialism?), but boy is it juicy. I even plunder Craigslist, looking for wacky deals that aren’t scams. When I get real deep, I’ll go to the more obscure listings- like the New York City affordable housing lottery page; or the Zillow listings for the last inexpensive, income-capped, apartments in the city: the HDFC co-ops.

Why do I spend so much time doing this? It feels like important investigative work. But really, the practice is rife with longing for a life that is not my own, right now, today, breathing-in.

from author’s private Pinterest board “Fantasy NYC Apartment”

Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada notes that, in the 2000s, New York City was going through a major re-branding project that doubtless informs my experience of the city as a person who didn’t grow up here. She writes:

“The urban imaginary changed when Michael Bloomberg was elected mayor of New York. In his three terms from 2002 to 2013, Bloomberg effectively led a campaign to rebrand New York as a “magnet for people with dreams.”… Increasingly under Mayor Bloomberg, New York was represented as a “place of arrival,” “a place one comes to, rather than a place where one is born and raised.”” (204-5)

I feel most calm in my heart when I think that maybe, just maybe, the apartment where I live right now is my home. I rest assured knowing I am not planning on leaving. It feels like a sort of sacrilege to write that down. The resting state of an American is never you are where you’re meant to be, right now, and that’s enough. The assumption that makes the whole thing run is this: there is more out there, there is better out there, click here, discover it, keep scrolling.

When I indulge in the ads it is in a state of suspension from reality. Tension floods my body, particularly my jaw. When I decide to look at the ads, it’s with a pleasure similar to that of a child about to consume all her Halloween candy in one sitting. I know it’s going to hurt ultimately, but it will be so sweet going down.

The worst part about it is how if I did move into the dreamiest apartment I could find on the internet, I would still be left with the obsession to scroll. I doubt there is a reality where I won’t ever not be just looking. I have an imagined lives in my head. I hold a vision of myself in almost every neighborhood in this city. I’ve got my building picked out in Brighton Beach and Inwood. I know where I’d live in Sunnyside and the Financial District. Choosing between the West and East Villages would be a challenge, but it’s one I think I could overcome with a place I saw on that sunny strip of 8th Street north of Washington Square.

I know the buildings too well. It’s weird. And I like my actual apartment. I can’t imagine a better place for me actually to live. There are no answers in this piece of writing, just a true account of a person grappling with the strange phenomenon of being able to view and picture herself inside of an infinitude of apartments. Escapist at its core, I don’t think this compulsion will be going away any time soon. But, maybe it will. Everything is fleeting. Like the ads say, this won’t last long.


Works Cited

Maldonado-Estrada, Alyssa. Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. New York University Press, 2020.

Psychological Advantages of 1940s Beauty Tutorials on The Day-To-Day Life of A 31-Year-Old Female in 2023

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It has come to our attention, here at The Great Laboratory for The Freedom of Female Expression, that by implementing beauty and care rituals from the 1940s, the control group, Melanie Curran (F, 31), exhibits increased relaxation, self-esteem, and personal fulfillment. Why?

Our records show that on a freezing evening in Brooklyn, near the Winter Solstice of 2022, she encountered a vintage health and beauty tutorial. This was accessed via the ephemeral TV public expression sphere floating in time and space entitled YOUTUBE DOT COM.

Were she not already predisposed to vintage films, music, and literature, it is doubtful that her algorithm would have brought her to this video. But it did happened. As did something more remarkable. Her behaviors toward herself changed. In short, she picked up on what this video was throwing down.

She adopted the following behaviors:

  • Taking a relaxing bath each night before bed.

  • Washing her face with soap and cold water, avoiding expensive and frivolous creams and lotions.

  • Purchasing a big plastic jar of a cold cream type product which has been around since her great grandmother’s time, Jergens Face Cream, and using it as directed.

  • Gently brushing her hair at a vanity before bed and upon awakening.

  • Setting her hair in pin curls, or a wet set, at an average of once a week.

  • Maintaining the set throughout the following days with love, attention, and pomade.

  • Leaving her apartment fully done-up and delighting those around her.

  • Practicing good posture and verbal enunciation.

  • Pairing down her personal wardrobe to suit her fashion predilections, and maybe a Kibbe style for Soft Dramatic.

  • Sleeping 8-9 hours a night.

What occurred next was not surprising, but is not a typical response in the average youngish-millennial internet user with smart phone. Melanie Curran slunk to the fringes of social media, deleting them from her life, pleased to download a singular social media app, Instagram, in order to, say, write somebody she could not otherwise contact. She would then instantly, delete it.

It stands to reason, our scientists believe, that by devoting so much time to her own care and maintenance, it became at once impossible to tend to social media, to keep scrolling, and risk losing those precious hours she could be using to, say, brush out her locks or bask in the tub.

Cindy Sherman

The irony of course, is that social media’s usage is driven by the willing participation and almost religious devotion of women who hate themselves.

Would they not hate themselves if they were no longer using the social media applications? That’s quite possible. The Control, Miss Melanie, reported feelings of peace and serenity knowing she did not have to engage in that rigamarole digital mall cum popularity contest which demands everything and gives us very little.

“It makes people’s lives into speculative real estate,” she was quoted as muttering to herself whilst applying vintage face cream. “As the real land has already been conquered and viciously divided by a process of brutal colonial rule, the great tech bros have clearly decided that the next “Western Frontier” is the human being herself. Nay, her dreams. Her desires. Her insecurities. It’s terrifying.”

She slept well at night and was able to give love and camaraderie to her friends, family and neighbors. This included two instances of delivering homemade soup to loved ones. It included multiple more instances of just not being an asshole on the subway or at the grocery store.

“It is remarkable,” she muttered to herself again, this time in the tub, “how distance from social media, along with a strong 1940s beauty routine, makes me feel beautiful. From the inside out. It is a beauty feeling I get from within. If more people felt this way, it would spell disaster for the beauty industry. Because what if I can just love myself and give myself care and drink plenty of water and that’s really all I ever needed? Then the beauty industry and all those connected to it would suffer, crumble, and recede.”

What we here at the laboratory have come to understand is that the calm relief Curran felt once freed from the obligation of clicking and scrolling and liking and thinking and self-reflecting and self-disclosing on the internet, is actually a result of losing a job.

The job? Being on the internet. In Hyperemployment, or the Exhausting work of the Technology User, Ian Bogost outlines, in 2013 no less, how simply having to manage an email inbox and a social media presence is a pretty crazy amount of extra work. Even then, Bogost was exhausted and disgruntled. But how would you feel now sir? Now that every single click and eye movement and scroll and tap and word you type are commodities making other people money??????????? Our scientists would like to know.

Melanie Curran felt released from the pressure of having to be both consumer and product. She leaves us with this note:

It was this time last year. I took a job working as a background actor on the TV show The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. That was the first time I got insight in to just how much time and attention went into beauty in the past. See, it was this huge scene in the airport. They had to do hair and makeup and wardrobe for hundreds of extras. It was like a small army was forged from hairspray and girdles. So I was put through this process- of being made into a woman from 1963. I loved the way I looked. I noticed things the hair and makeup people did to me reminded me of my Grandma Pat. May she rest in Peace. Pat had a higher standard for herself. Her mom, Doris, an even higher standard. I thought- dang, if I had one to two to three extra hours a day to spend caring for my appearance, I might be able to recreate this kind of look myself. But where would I get those three extra hours? That’s when I realized- from my phone. I’d get them back from my phone. If I really wanted to look at glam and feel as calm as looking that glam makes me feel, I’d have to say goodbye to social media. I took me another year to really do it, but here I am. And I’m not doing it for anyone else. This is simply my preference. Instead of committing hours in adoration of what happens on screen, I adore myself. The self-confidence and peace is worth it. Here is the beauty tutorial which inspired me so:


Vintage 1940’s Beauty Routine for Women: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJFYytLKMug

Works Cited:

Bogost, Ian. “Hyperemployment, or the Exhausting Work of the Technology User.” The Atlantic. Nov. 8, 2013. www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/hyperemployment-or-the-exhausting-work-of-the-technology-user/281149/

Black Banjo Reclamation - Banjo Has Given Me Everything, What Can I Give Back? Spring Newsletter '22

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Hi, I’m Melanie, and I’m a banjo player.

A white banjo player.

Banjo has given me hope, happiness and human connection. In my darkest times, it’s given me a way back to life and into community. It’s put food on my table. It’s made me a guest at places I arrive a stranger. It’s allowed me to communicate without using words. Banjo has given me everything and asked nothing in return.

But I do hear it asking. Deep down in my gut I know something's not right. My quietest part knows that in the history of this instrument there are horrors and gravest wrongdoings.

Many are surprised to learn that enslaved Black people brought the banjo to America. Banjo music is Black music. Human beings were sold and purchased and their music was appropriated. Black-face minstrel shows, theft, and forgetting rendered the Banjo not a Black instrument in cultural consciousness, but the symbol of white, poor, rural authenticity. This details of this history are beyond my scope of knowledge. Some links are below to more resources.

Banjo music didn’t just wind up at my door. Banjo wasn’t placed on my table by a disembodied gloved hand. My musical life has been made possible by Black artists.

I have never had to pay one penny to Black artists or to descendants of the Black banjoists whose music, techniques and instrumentation I replicate. I want to be part of the end of a cycle of stealing, of taking without recognizing, and of receiving without giving back. For this reason, I am donating half of my performance fees, tips, and record sales to The Black Banjo Reclamation Project.

The Black Banjo Reclamation Project is led by an Oakland-based Black-Banjoist named Hannah Mayree. The focus of their project is “to return instruments of African origin to the descendants of their original makers.” They lead banjo builds and workshops for people of African descent to reclaim this ancestral instrument in the present day. Participants of workshops build and receive banjos. This reception of traditional instrument and knowledge is a form of reparations.

I am trying to raise $2,000 by May to help fund BBRP's 2022 builds:

  • Sacramento Weekend Banjo Build April 30 - May 1

  • Port Townsend Banjo Crafter Fellowship, Last week of June

  • Chicago Banjo Build, mid-July through mid-August
     

This work is transformational at the root. It heals the past while generating future possibilities. It moves beyond the bounds of time and space. Banjoists are cosmonauts, or banjoists are gardeners- pulling out rotted roots and nourishing the strong ones. Encouraging new life. It is restoration.

Will you please help me raise $2000 for The Black Banjo Reclamation Project? No donation is too small.


WAYS TO DONATE:

Donations to Black Banjo Reclamation Project are tax deductible. I can get you a tax receipt if you need.

I am one in the larger BBRP support team. We are mostly white banjo players and builders. We are working to raise these funds all over the country and change the way we interact with this instrument.

I have faith this fundraising is an action which conforms to will of my spiritual guides and ancestors. Supporting BBRP is a way to live like the world is already a better world for all. Here too is an opportunity for you to support healing, and to direct funds and power back to the Black traditional music community.

Thank you for taking the time to read my newsletters. Also thanks to Bochay Drum for pointing me to this project. I am healthy and living well in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. I have taken a break from performing. Being involved with this project helps me connect to the true purpose of my work as a musician and writer. More will be revealed. Thanks for coming along with me.

Springtime love,

-Melanie Beth Curran


Recommended:

If you want do one-on-one anti-racism work with a counselor, please check out this project:
Holistic Resistance. Facilitator Chelsea Meney is amazing. They help facilitate the BBRP support team meetings.

If you'd like to play the banjo, check out Sule Greg Wilson's banjo instructional books. He is another facilitator at Black Banjo Reclamation Project.

Further reading/listening about Black Banjo History
Black Musicians' Quest to Return Banjo to Its African Roots
How Rhiannon Giddens Reconstructs Black Pain With The Banjo
Black History of The Banjo

Books:
Hoedowns, Reels, and Frolics by Phil Jamison
White Tears by Hari Kunzru

Keepers of The Past - Winter Newsletter - 2022

Growing up, there was a kid's show on public TV called Zoom, not be confused with today's popular virtual meeting platform. One episode had a segment I remember to this day. Two children are challenged to look up the definition of a word. One must use a computer and the internet, while the other must use a little book called the dictionary. The race is on. The child using the computer is still dialing up the modem after booting up the machine by the time the child with the dictionary has found the definition. The message? That the old fashioned way is still more efficient. The “Old Fashioned Way” has only just been conceived of as being out-of-date. This is the dawn of the world-wide-web’s presence in homes.

"We're all plugged into one world now" - Zoom theme song
 

The segment makes clear a divergence. In the coming millennium, there will be two ways. The digital, and the analog. As a child, I understood this segment of Zoom as a rallying cry. Which side are you on? The year 2000 had scarcely hit, and I chose analog.

In late 2021, I’m watching a youtube video of a lecture by a catholic priest explaining the structure of ancient Celtic society in what is now called Ireland. I am curious about the metaphysical beliefs held by my ancient ancestors. Father Seán Ó’Laorie PhD explains the functions performed by three factions of the Celtic world in pre-Christian times. First, there are the Druids. These are the theologians, priests, healers, the keepers of The Now. Then there are the Ovates. These are the seers, the visionaries and prophets. Keepers of The Future. They were prophets whose job was not to foretell the future, but, Father Seán Ó’Laorie says in his soothing Irish lilt, to forestall it. To stop us from making stupid mistakes.

fabulous cape by MaidensPlayground, available on Etsy, should you want to become a druid or prophetess.

“The Prophet,” says he, “is a group that’s frightly needed on our planet right now.” Okay, he seems like a nice guy. His head is in the right place, and he’s received his doctorate in mystical Celtic stuff. I’m doing what I always do these late pandemic days. Lay in bed, soothing myself to sleep by watching sometimes educational youtube videos. I do this in a pretty removed state. But when the Father begins to speak of the third category of Celtic Society, of the Bards, I listen.

“The Bard,” he says, “was the person who made time travelers and mystics of the listeners.”

Excuse me?

“The bards are the keepers of The Past. That was their portfolio. They were historians, and they were genealogists, all in the oral tradition. There were no written records.”

Father Seán Ó’Laorie is an aging thin man with stubble and silvery hair down to his shoulders. It’s been a long time since I willingly listened to a catholic priest, but for him I’ll make this exception.

William Blake's painting he made of his cute little bard poem.

The bards, he continues, “...were also poets, minstrels, storytellers and performing artists. As far as the music was concerned, they had to be able to produce three kinds…”

I let these words seep in. It has been a hard couple of years for us. During a highly contagious pandemic wherein asymptomatic people spread the novel, and ever-mutating coronavirus during periods of breathing the same vapor - in and out, kissing and talking in close proximity - the concert halls, the country dances, the listening rooms, the warm taverns - these have all closed either forever or in awkward chunks of time. To add insult to injury, the category of individuals who could be considered today’s Bards are not recognized in our current society much, pandemic or not. We, The Bards, must scrape by, no matter what, at least in American Society. And in these long years of pestilence we have been backed into periods of forced silence. It doesn’t mean our music has died.

A friend of mine tells me that yes, she may be touring with an illustrious artist one month, but the next, she’s getting cake thrown at her playing a childhood birthday party in a backyard. She’s well into her career but her aging parents still hold out hope that she will no longer be a musician. She tells me, Melanie, someone’s got to do it. Someone’s got to sing the songs. And I feel part of a necessary but scorned populous.

Newspaper clipping from 2015 Topanga Banjo-Fiddle Contest, when I was "of Los Angeles"

But wait- how can I be so sure that I belong to The Bardic Class? Do I even qualify? To find out, I return to the video. The three categories of music a bard must be able make, in the words of Father Seán:

  1. Music that can sooth the savage breast. Also lullabies that can let a child go to sleep.

  2. Nostalgic music. That which would be able to make you weep for the past, or for people who are gone. To create tears for the past.

  3. Music that made you feel happy, and makes you laugh.

On this most random of nights, here in my bed in Brooklyn, New York, watching youtube, tears form in my eyes. It’s not so much that I am seeing how my own songwriting fits into these categories. It is that I can call to mind countless other musicians from my time on this earth who also meet these bardic qualifications.

And I know them. Over my near fifteen years playing old songs I have shared intimate musical spaces with so many of them. And I know how they suffer. Penniless, laughed at, addicted to substances, or famous by stroke of luck and talent, and traveling, lodged into the public eye, a public for whom an artist’s downfall is a source of entertainment -

“The Bard,” repeats Father Seán, “was the keeper of The Past.”

The Past, The Past, why do you seduce me so?

I am not the only one either. My generation, the millennials, were the butt of jokes from the first instance of our making personal lifestyle decisions.

From The Hard Times Article, Folk Punk Band Announces Break-Up...

The complaint from older generations was that the millennials were hopelessly nostalgic. We didn't have our own culture. We recycled that of the past and fetishised it. We did a great job at fueling a resurgence of old time music, folk music, and old American traditional music. The richness of this creative culture can be seen analog at old time fiddle festivals, and virtually on youtube channels such as Gems on VHS and Western AF.

In these bards I see us. A bunch of kids who grew up having to navigate that divide between the old and the new. We were well-suited for the ancient role of bard, those who carry the past into present, who move mountains with melody, who make time travelers of listeners. We were well-suited, having lost childhoods of hard-back books to adulthoods of digital information passing rapidly by in the endless scroll. Do not scorn us, for we can take you back and forth across the river, and set you down easy in your longing and laughter with the gentle pressure of a song.

an selfie, January 3rd, 2022


News From Life in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn:


San Benedito Beach is my second full-length album. It was released on October 23rd at an amazing sidewalk community concert meltdown called People's Beach Day. You can purchase and hear the album on Bandcamp.

I am offering Music Lessons, virtually and in-person. One of my students says this is the first time she's had fun playing music. That means a lot to me, and I'd love to work with you on banjo, guitar, fiddle and / or singing. 

I had one of the most wonderful concert experiences of my life on the Maine Island of North Haven. I was accompanied by fiddler and friend from the Pike Place Market busking days, Annie Ford. Check out the Crabtree Sessions Songwriter Series for an amazing living-history documentation of some of the greatest songwriters working today. I feel so honored to have been part of the roster. 
 

Recommendations:

vernon subutex
My tolerance for reading got zapped deep pandemic. It was reawakened by this insane delicious book series about an intertwined cadre of post-compact disc parisian rock and porn stars, degenerates, journalists, etc. The series by Virginie Despentes solidifies hunches I've had about French culture while living there. The books gives a lens on the rise of the alt-right in the country that is also cool-y antifascist radial. She writes, "They [banks/religions/multinationals] have managed to get a citizen with no heritage to give up all their rights in exchange for access to nostalgia for empire." among many other badass sentences.

winter yoga nidra
I love this pracitioner Ally Boothroyd's yoga nidra videos. If you haven't tried it, it's basically conscious sleep and relaxation. I know this time is really stressful, and a half-hour long guided spiritual nap is a gift for the nervous system. I love this particular winter solstice yoga nidra as it reminds me that right now is a time for deep rest. Outside, everybody is resting. Buds, animals, you name it. So should we.

joan didion
Joan Didion passed away. She was a hero to me. A guide. As a writer who writes about culture, about people in groups, her work has been the template for me for many years. I feel grateful to have lived in an overlap of her era. She is very special. I recommend starting with her essay collection The White Album. Rest in Peace Angel. bell hooks also passed. I haven't read enough of her work, so I am recommending her to myself.

maid
This is a TV series on Netflix about poverty and the domestic abuse cycle set in the Pacific Northwest. It is also a magical realism story of a young woman's realistic hope of embracing her dream as a writer. It hit close to home. Close to home. It's takes place in pretend Port Townsend and pretend Whidbey Island. They may be actually using the BC ferries, but I know all those characters from my actual life. The barefoot bandit episode is especially harrowing. But like in a good, beautiful redemptive way? I binged it.

how black women reclaimed country and americana music in 2021
Black Women are the queens of country music. No surprise. But Country Music the entity, the business model, the culture, is just starting to catch up. Check out these marvelous artists.

the mary wallopers
I love love love this band. Just watch n' listen.

ireland beyond colonialism podcast

I've only listened to the first episode of this, but it was pretty an engaging conversation. In episode one, a settler descended permaculture kid from Washington State attempts to return to the land of his indigenous ancestors in Scotland, so as to not cause more colonialism in Skagit Valley. His experiences are... complicated... It's an interesting glimpse into the life of someone who is attempting to belong in a world where people like me, like him, like most Americans, have to learn to live less brutally, and soon.

what's duskin doing?
My partner duskin has a great newsletter. He is an ecological philosopher, a writer, an artist, an activist, a great cook, lots of other things, and his thoughts and ideas are beautifully organized into these missives. They are a treat to receive.



Take care to all of you
may you be healthy and well-rested
sending love and light in these darkest days

-Melanie


PS
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