Irish American Zines - Subscription: 1 Year, 4 Zines + Bonus Calendar

For the sacred price of $120, you will get a year-long subscription to Melanie Beth Curran's zines. I release a new zine EVERY season, near the solstice or equinox. At the year's end, you will receive your limited edition Wall Calendar (theme will most likely be potatoes).

Zines are about unsung elements of Irish American life.

Each zine is meticulously hand-crafted and researched. They are art pieces, collectable items, worth their salt, extraordinarily rugged, delicious, etc.

The zines of 2024 include:

SPRING - "Do Me Justice: The Mary Wallopers, Arena and a History of Tin Pan Alley's Racist Sheet Music". Examines Irish American and Black American caricature in music and the lasting effects of this printed material.

SUMMER - "American Irish Songs" - Songbook collection culled from Melanie's life, from Library of Congress Field Recordings, and wherever else I can find songs that embody the American Irish music practice.

AUTUMN - "Bad Boys of Irish America: What They Wear, What They Do, And Why They Art Hot". This zine examines the mystique of Irish American rogue dudes, in media, film, tv, real life, etc. This will be somewhat of a manual of how to act like them (why or why not).

WINTER - "How Brigid Made The Fire: Unverified Personal Gnosis of How Brigid Came to Run My Life". Melanie writes the account of how Brigid, ancient goddess/force/catholic saint/mysterious being from Ireland came to run her life as an American in Brooklyn, New York.

Zine 2: Happy Within: An Irish American Songbook

"Happy Within - An Irish American Songbook"

Collection of Lyrics and Commentary on 38 Irish American Songs.

Each song is hand-plucked from the waves of time. You'll find serenades from sources like: Alan Lomax's 1938 field recordings, vaudeville stages, medieval manuscripts, Butte Montana miners and railroad workers, the West coast of Ireland, Thin Lizzy, Hell's Kitchen, and more! You'll even see a few soon-to-be-classics written by Melanie Beth Curran herself. A surefire party for the lads, lassies and laxxes all.

The title “Happy Within” comes from the lyrics which sparked this songbook’s creation. In 1938, Alan Lomax recorded a guy named John W. Green on Beaver Island in Michigan. Discovering the field recording of Mr. Green singing “Kathleen Mauvorneen” sent Curran on a quest.

“Happy Within” contains lyrics and commentary for 38 songs, plus pictures and ramblings.

104 pages, full color

6.69 X 9.61 inches, spiral bound

110lb cover

70lb text

Contains:

Highway Patrolman - Bruce Springsteen

The Patriot Game - Dominic Behan

Low Places - Garth Brooks

I Am Thinking Ever Thinking - Traditional / Singing of Delores Keane

Fannin Street - Kathleen Brennan and Tom Waits

Óró sé do bheatha abhaile - Traditional / Singing of Sinéad O’Connor

Barney McShane - Andrew B. Sterling / Singing of Kevin Shannon

New York Girls - Traditional Sea Shanty / Singing of Finbar Furey

Take it and Run - The Dropkick Murphys

Kathleen Mavourneen - John W. Green, Collected by Alan Lomax, Beaver Island, MI 1938

May Morning Dew - Traditional, learned in West Clare and from singing of Delores Keane

Hell’s Kitchen - The Westies, Michael McDermott

The Boys of Barr Na Stráide - Sigerson Clifford, Singing of Arcady

Caoineadh Na Tri Mhuire (The Lament of the Three Marys) - Traditional, Singing of John Heaney

The Irish Rover - Traditional Sea Shanty, Cork or Letrim origins

By The Hush, Me Boys - American Civil War Traditional Ballad, singing of OJ Abbott

My Bonny Irish Boy - Traditional, Singing of Birdie Rainey and Margo O’Donnell

The Galway Girl - Steve Earle

Fairytale of New York - The Pogues

Donegal Danny - by Phil Coulter, Singing of Margo O’Donnell

Don’t Judge a Man by The Clothes That He Wears - Andrew Gallagher, Collected by Alan Lomax, Beaver Island, MI 1938

One Starry Night - Traveller song, heard in County Clare

Paradise by The Dashboard Light - Meatloaf

Yankee Brown - Daniel Bonner, Collected by Alan Lomax, Beaver Island, MI 1938

She Moves Through The Fair - Traditional, Singing of Sinéad O’Connor

Rop tú mo Baile / Sale / Be Thou My Vision - Dallān Forgail

Shenandoah - Traditional, from singing of Paul Clayton

The Wearing of The Green - Dion Boucicault and Others

The Dark Eyed Gypsy - Traditional, singing of Joe Holmes, from Fire Draw Near Anthology

School Days Over - by Ewan MacColl, singing of Luke Kelly

The Boys Are Back in Town - Thin Lizzy

Dublin Blues - Guy Clark

Glenswilly - Melanie Beth Curran

Landed Gentry / Rivers Just Babble - Melanie Beth Curran

I Don’t Regret a Thing - (Laoghaire Ní Sidhe) - Melanie Beth Curran

From the epilogue:

"In these songs were people burning with passion and anger. Even if they weren’t saying it outright, the anger was implied and undergirding even the most beautiful songs.

For three days I woke with the lyrics to “Hell’s Kitchen” by The Westies playing in my brain. The song was a good omen. Here was another songwriter languishing in New York City making the mistake of caring about the past and the making vulnerable choice to craft a song for it. Not sure if the writer even lived it. Was his father really some kind of Hell's Kitchen Irish Mobster? Did the places between ninth and tenth really reek of sex and sin or was he making that up? “You weren’t born a kitchen girl”, he sings. Does he know Kitchen Girl is a beloved American Appalachian Fiddle Tune? He’s just talking about a woman who wasn’t born in those streets above 42nd. He’s talking about me.

I go there one day and after a multi hour cultural assessment I discover that Hell’s Kitchen does still have a lot of Patricks and a thousand other types too. I keep seeing myself there in my precious apartment, in a silk robe, drinking iced cola, refrigerator filled to the gills with explosives. I’m good at making bombs in this fantasy. I’m a natural. I hit all my targets. I’m fearless. I’m brave. Zine is the back half of magazine. It’s pronounced “Zeen”. A Magazine gets its name from actually military magazines, places where the armaments were stored in an organized fashion. The original printed magazines did this too, but with words. Each section of the magazine was its own thing that could do harm and rip things up and explode.

This zine is a collection of Irish American Songs. These songs contain all the rage and passion I didn’t set loose on the elites this year.

I gnaw on the window sill and dig my nails into the carpet. The songs make a break for the exit but I ask them please to sit down and appear in these pages for you. I’ve done all I can to describe their fury but know that there are many yet unsung."

Zine 1: Do Me Justice: The Mary Wallopers, Arena, and Vaudeville Clairsentience

Welcome to New York City, where the Ghost of Tin Pan Alley still lurks.

This is an NYC tale about an EVIL force that threatens performers along the Mohican Road (The Bowery / Broadway). As the demon makes the author ill, she finds a balm- A SALVATION - in the performances of Fall 2023. One by The Mary Wallopers, one by a dance group doing a musical dance show called Arena. Both groups BATTLE the old cold thing.

The author illuminates histories of Black and Irish stereotypes in American Sheet Music.

8.5in x 11in, staple bound, printed on 80lb un-coated paper with a 100lb glossy cover.

Zine is full color baby, 44 pages

Excerpt:

"Do me justice, treat me fair
And I won’t be discontented
And I won’t be laughed at anywhere
But fairly represented

Andrew sings the refrain. It’s just so strange. I’ve been creeped out since I got off the subway. That cold and icy feeling crawls up my calves now. Irving Plaza is located right around the corner, literally a stone’s throw, from the former location of Tony Pastor’s Vaudeville Theater on 14th street. The cold climbs up my thighs and to my stomach. It envelopes me like a crooked hand. In the Tin Pan Alley songs, Paddy will do anything for whisky. Barney McShane will not speak to a suitor when she offers him tea, but liquor? Absolutely. It’s all comic until you’re wailing on your children and suffering liver failure. In Vaudeville skits, Irish males were often depicted as relatively harmless drunks and fighters. Vaudeville Irish females though, well, that’s a whole other story for another day. It was not pretty. Not at all.

The Minstrel Machine wound its fingers around the vaudeville stages of Union Square and scratched up Broadway’s back. Tin Pan Alley on 28th street published sheet music versions of Vaudeville’s famous songs. Tin Pan Alley then wrote songs for vaudeville stars to perform in places like Tony Pastor’s. The songs were on a feedback loop. Film began.

Early film reels played during continuous vaudeville shows, in place of actual, physical acts. These reels were simply the physical vaudeville acts made into film. They were about two minutes long. Many reels were filmed at a rooftop studio around the corner from Tony Pastor’s on Union Square. So Stage Irishness, this thing about which Andrew sings right now, this thing which he himself spars with as an Irishman on stage, especially in America, was cemented into song, into sheet, into celluloid, right here. 14th Street, Union Square, 133 years ago.

Now the cold thing is on my shoulders. It nuzzles my neck like a cat. My body sizzles and zaps with a ricocheting prickliness.

Dear wee little Francis, this is the one he called the train robber. This is the tarantula of music, crushing spirits with its dark and heaving limbs, making monsters of men, gripping pens and twisting tongues to make cash, milking people for their quirks and habits, slurping the gum water out of spittoons and pissing lemon juice over fields of green, just waiting in the wings to take its final snarling bite. It creeps up my skull, my eyes clamp against the tears, so many bodies around me blurry now, I am certain I will fall ill in the coming days. Grey milk and castor oil baron gatorade. I will stave off that thing which burnt down Japan Lithium Auto, I will repel the destructive force of this creature, which whooshing made its way across Arena’s facade, for I have shaken this man’s hand.

It happened at Bartley Dunnes. I approached Andrew at his laptop. I approached with the gingerness of journalists. I approached with calm confidence, moving into position, right on cue, and shook his hand.

“Hi. I’m Melanie and I’m here writing about Mary Wallopersism. Please, can you tell me, what is your goal?”

“To save Irish culture without becoming a false prophet.”

That was his only utterance. I could tell by the way he gripped my hand that something else manned his spirit. His body was lost under the influence of pints, but his words exacted crisping clarity.

For this is the way truth turns to language. This is the way the honest feeling forms in sound. First, it hears the call of the other, the one who presents the void. Then it parts the lips and pushes forth into waves of dependable substance."

My Irish Bridget Stereotype Article is up on JSTOR Daily

From Saint to Stereotype: A Story of Brigid

Caricatures of Irish immigrants–especially Irish women–have softened, but persist in characters whose Irishness is expressed in subtle cues.

Check it out!

A cartoon illustration of Bridget in Puck, 1883

Zine 1: "Do Me Justice"

Welcome to New York City, where the Ghost of Tin Pan Alley still lurks.

This is an NYC tale about an EVIL force that threatens performers along the Mohican Road (The Bowery / Broadway). As the demon makes the author ill, she finds a balm- A SALVATION - in the performances of Fall 2023. One by The Mary Wallopers, one by a dance group doing a musical dance show called Arena. Both groups BATTLE the old cold thing.

The author illuminates histories of Black and Irish stereotypes in American Sheet Music.

8.5in x 11in, staple bound, printed on 80lb un-coated paper with a 100lb glossy cover.

Zine is full color baby, 44 pages

Trust me, you will love it.

This in an elite zine.

Limited Edition First Run of 51 Prints.

Original Working Title: The Mary Wallopers & Arena & Vaudeville Clairsentience in NYC

Preview of Zine 1: The Mary Wallopers and Arena and Vaudeville Clairsentience

HYPOTHESIS:

The mind which understands basic things about American Vaudeville geography in New York City will have a haunting, meaning-filled, and evocative experience watching performances, in the present, there. Vaudeville awareness leads to nuanced takes.

PRE-ORDER ZINE 1: The Mary Wallopers and Arena and Vaudeville Clairsentience

Pre-Order My Zine!

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!

San Benedito Beach is Released! Melanie Beth Curran's Second Album is born.

San Benedito is here. Listen to my second album in full here and wherever albums are streamed.

Support my work and purchase an album through Bandcamp:

melaniecurran.bandcamp.com/album/san-benedito-beach

I am selling CD-Shaped original paintings there!

“…You'll get your own unique incarnation of the San Benedito album cover which can be framed and hung in your realm. Comes with a download code, liner notes and a whole lot of CUTENESS! Ink and watercolor on paper by Melanie Beth Curran herself…”

Have a pleasant time at the beach.

Glenswilly - a new old song

Glenswilly by Melanie Curran

fare thee well my honey where ever you may travel

may you never want for money far across the sea

remember to tread gentle don't take more than is owed you

nothin’ comes for nothin in the land of the free

chorus!

when you see the house of the rising sun

or lie your head in the fields of green

remember me as the one who loved you best

back in old glenswilly

take good care of this fine hewn leather satchel

remember say a prayer for your arrival at the shore

lend your hand to the ones who come behind you

never turn your back on the ones who’ve come before

chorus

when you breathe that air well you’re not the first to breathe it

when you take that train well you’re not the first to ride

take your time with the pangs of bereavement

glenswilly’s not a place so easily let behind

chorus

when you’re old and grey and your poor bones grow brittle

and they lay you in the clay and mark you with a stone

I’ll be there to meet you in the middle

and guide you on your way as you take the long way home

chorus

— I wrote this song for my great grandpa Frank Curran, coming from the perspective of his caregiver back in Glenswilly, County Donegal, Ireland. Maybe these words are the words of parting that were never shared but always felt. He left for America when he was about 13.

Lost Love Tapes, Left-Behinds, Quaran-tunes, French Pandemic Protocols, Plage vs. Plague, Paranoid Forms, 8 PM, Corona Speaks, Namasté in My House

SHE WHO PREFERS FRANCE DURING ONSET OF PLAGUE

I am an American, in exile, in Bretagne, willingly. It would be untrue to state that there is not a lust for adventure in my choice to remain abroad during the Corona Virus outbreak. The Fulbright Program, a classic American cultural exchange institution, which since 1948 has propelled mathematicians and artists and aspiring diplomats and scholars and scientists into the Great American Honor of having travelled, shared, and thought in foreign lands, is herby suspended. I, like some of my fellow fellows, “The Left-Behinds”, have decided to stay in France, despite the level 4 travel warning. The State Departments’ official letters demanding that all nationals prestently abroad return to the United States, have not swayed me. Being told to return feels akin to receiving Titanic tickets. By remaining in Brest, I have avoided passage onto what I fear is ship even spookier than the Diamond Princess. It’s my America! Right now! Facing the pitfalls of its for-profit healthcare system, its lack of social safety net, its history of bad reactions to perceived menaces, which, stalking the edges of frontier consciousness, are often overreacted to, and often with guns.

Perhaps! You are receiving this email newsletter for the first time. If so far it reminds you of that ill-fated voyage of the unsinkable ship, you can unsubscribe by scrolling to the bottom and clicking. A lifeboat in the form of an unsubscribe button lives there. For others reading this for the first time who are thus far enjoying it, I am pleased to tell you it only comes once a season. I try to be a faithful mailer on the equinox and solstices, in keeping with the grand Neo-pagan witchcraft traditions of the Pacific Northwest of the United States of America.

Now, please let me introduce to you my newest art baby. Perhaps the pleasure of Corona Virus is that we all have more time to listen to music. This circumstance is a blip of good fortune to those like me, who record songs and share them. Without further ado, I give you Melanie Beth Curran’s Lost Love Tapes. I hope they are a retreat into an alternate reality via sound. Ahem, via "quaran-tunes". 
 

Thanks duskin drum for the album artwork.

Please consider buying this miniature album for five bucks or more. And consider buying albums from all the independent artists in America and The World whose gigs have now been cancelled. My gig, the Fulbright Fellowship, has been cancelled. No longer will I be able to solicit funds from them for the continuation of my project in summer. No, this is the time of a buckledown. Of new hustles. One of mine is always bandcamp.

 www.melaniebethcurran.bandcamp.com 
 

WHAT ARE THE LOST LOVE TAPES?

Watch the video about it here. 

From an outcropping of moist grass on the Montmartre hillside, these songs stumble inebriated. It's basement champagne again in the open, while howls clamor out the speakers of a tinny radio. These songs are both Great Worldly Standards and Made Up Songs By Yours' Truly (Numbers 2, and 5). They are sung from the silken strands of Spring, or roped and wrangled from the armpit of a Transatlantic accent, or put through the filter of an un-plugged microphone abandoned on the outskirts of Versailles. 

The songs were constructed, which is to say recorded, out of a thrilling combo of patience on a September Afternoon in Queens and the luscious hardwood of custom guitar. Of a brilliant guitarist a-company, Jacob Sanders (more on him later). Also of my voice, which was aching for a new approach to the show tune during the period in question. The recording session was a living room situation, to be sure. Early September in the waning last year of the 2000-teens.

Remember! These songs are no more than a longing released, maybe over Italian Seas, or odes to sightless saints, and/or they were sneezes put through the process of composition. The Lost Love Tapes are the forgotten philosophies of Judy Garland and Liza. Or they are the bubbling misfortune of Europes gone by. Probably they are Trench Soldiers aching for Bosoms, from out of an America patriotic, doomed, and imagined by those who never got the chance to live over there. These songs are Sinatra Stardust and Backstage Honey, dripped over a heartbreak on the last dirt roads of paradise. If you desire a cheap diner egg over easy, yolk trickling to the edge of a late-model clay dish procured from a thrift shop, awaiting its fate, to be broken in a domestic dispute, this is the miniature album for you. It is the album of Plane tickets cancelled. Of glass shattered in the gloaming atrocity of having loved and having failed, gracefully, at holding the other party near.

May you slurp these songs down as brandy wine. Love Tapes are Best listened to while drunk with a radio you taped together yourself in the basement last Christmas during the power outage. Love Tapes are Best listened to through the wall of a DMV in a country where you are no longer a foreigner. Love Tapes are Best listened to underwater, drowning on a cruise ship where I was once your lounge singer- your Diamond Princess. As your songstress I promise to be the ever-loving tour-guide taking leave of her Sacred Heart outcropping, in order to show you the part of the hill where the seedy still gather and yell at children passing by..

The moist grass of Montmartre. The lawns for those with nowhere else to go. The tourists and the monuments, the carousel which in winter goes silent. These are the locales from where to you I sing. These songs are each a mournful busk from a Brooklyn graveyard, or a triumph echoing down the aisles of Valentino -- the grocery store on Fresh Pond Road by the elevated M stop which, below the feet of moving musicians in Queens, supported an entire movement of era-less folkies in the present day. When I pressed play. These songs are each a Fresh Pond overflowing and trickling back down the forgotten wooden crates of imported apples and velvet bed sheets, to the New York Harbor, that beloved oyster bed of yore.

...Singing with Jake at the Disco Bay Detour...

My name is Melanie Beth Curran and these are my lost love tapes but they are your  lost love tapes too. My accompanist is Virtuoso found in the Far Fledged Banlieue, in the Oaxacan night, in The Last of the East Village Jazz Standard Hold Outs, Mr. Jacob Sanders, whom I met on the occasion of his having survived a Chicago House Fire and a busted Prius explosion somewhere in the midwest.

We met up for an afternoon in 2019 September and recorded into my iphone four or five or six- I've lost count of the editions. Accept these dodgey masters - for they seek not to impress but to open you, as Fall did me, at the time of their having been sung.

Hymnals laid.

Marches laid.

Just an ode to Old Man River

who just keeps rolling along.

And long have I wanted, to bend at the banks,

and sing my victory songs.

The Lost Love Tapes are yours Now.

...My 27th Birthday in me and Talia's apartment in Ridgewood, site of the Lost Love Tapes recording session...

FOUR COURSES OF PANDEMIC PROTOCOLS

“I am not logical. I am not cynical! I am beyond what this language can express! 

I am your thoughts unexpressed! I am your fears transposed! You need not think about money about rent about work about school about debt about vacation about your anxiety attacks about your depressions and mood swings about your worries of getting older of not being attractive of not having erection of your isolation of your jealousy of your hatred of your impoverished all too impoverished existence.” 

- The Corona Virus, as translated by The Society of the Friends of the Virus

...Just use that tissue one time please...

 Maybe the days I’m living now are saturated to their core with the presence of Macron’s Corona-time Visions. It’s not all total acquiescence here in Brest. Day one of the mandated confinement, I watched a group of drunk guys on the sidewalk below my house describing how unafraid they were of the virus, and hugging one another to prove it. You know this is serious, because the French barely hug each other without the plague.

The implementation of protocols happened in a slow, four course meal way, over a long week-end. On Friday, school was cancelled. On Saturday, clubs, theaters, and bars closed. On Sunday, we went to the last big public market, and bought a bunch of beautiful quarantine delights.

...Public Marché Alimentation Haul pre-confinement. How many cheeses are too many cheeses?... 

On Monday, France was told not to go to work, and to think about confining themselves. On that day, I went on a beautiful long walk through the botanical garden, and then to the beach, where you would have thought it was the first day of Spring Break. Everyone was out there, kids, teens, grandmas, dogs, and me, sunbathing. The next day, authorities remind everyone that this is an epidemic, not a vacation. The rules are going to get more strict and specific. They’re going to deploy cops to the beaches to prevent relaxation.

...Slight confusion about whether or not this is a Plage / Beach vacation or deadly plague... 

I get a text from the government (translated): 

COVID-19 Alert! 

The president of the republic has announced strict regulations that you will imperatively respect to work against the propagation of the virus, and to save lives. Exits of the house will be authorized with a form, and only for your work, if you cannot telecommute, for your health, or for your essential errands.

Now the rules have shifted. No one can leave their house for more than an hour, more than once a day. We must stay within a 1 km radius of our homes if we do, and we must walk alone, or only with someone from our "Quaranteam". The attestation form has also changed, and can be found on the internet. Did I mention that living in France is basically impossible without a printer, scanner, and fax machine by your bedside? I love analog paperwork, but maybe not this much.

..DAD! TELL US WHAT TO DO! ALSO, HOW ARE YOU SO SYMMETRICAL AND SMOOTH LOOKING?... 

To Americans, I can understand how these measures might seem totalitarian. Counter to the very idea of individual liberty that the French invented in the first place. A concept which took root notably in the old USA. But French independence works differently, or is conceived of differently. In this place, the government may be flawed, but the people are more comfortable with government as the protector of rights, of decorum, and of social systems.

Here, it’s less conceivable to be a part-time musician sometimes fisherman partial homesteader armchair scholar freelance writer who drives Lyft and sells vintage clothes online. Freedom in France comes at the price of losing the hyphenated job titles. Freedom in America comes at the price of losing a social safety net because we can always be whatever we imagine. A social safety net would only entangle us. Or so the story goes. I’m skeptical of both systems. But I’m choosing France for my plague time.

The freedom France has, is the freedom to critique and make fun of Dad - of the government and its shortcomings - while knowing that, in the end, Dad has got you. You’ll be able to get shelter, healthcare and medical treatment, and in the time of plague, the assurance that others will stay in their quarantines, pretty much.

...Back in February, at the Fulbright Mid-Year Meeting in Paris... 

8PM

“To practice other than paranoid forms of knowing does not, in itself, entail a denial of the reality or gravity of enmity or oppression.” 

-Eve Sedgwick , from Paranoid and Reparative Reading…
 

The other night I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Today it feels like I’m living it. My street is a strip of glass portals into other people’s lives. Every night at 8 pm, everyone on the rue Victor Hugo leans out of their windows and applauds together. We get to hooting and hollering, screaming a bit, and banging on pots. It is a collective call of gratitude to the health care workers, allegedly, being carried out all over France at various 8 pms. But I think the cries stem from a collective desire to feel less alone right now. The 8 pm applause is like the traditional music of enclosure, serving the sonic needs of the commune. 

is Rear Window my new reality? Sans murder, I hope.

 It pains me to know that some of you are alone right now. I hope this letter can feel like a hug from me, a cheek kiss, or a handshake, depending on our country's style of greeting, and upon our personal relationship. I am lucky because I am not alone right now in my home in Bretagne.

I have been given an unanticipated gift during this plague. Plague perceived, plague in abstract, plague happening very much in the lives of health-care workers and the ill. I am quarantined with my lover, who got stuck in France too. He is another original Pacific Northwesterner in Corona Exile. He and I make complex meals, and I can speak to him of the sweep of the decades, of culture’s crawl through the neo-liberal amber waves of grain, of the death march into de-regulation, of the inherent roundness of cute things as objective category, and how all of these concepts have influenced the makes and models of 20th century automobiles. Fortunately, I am paired with someone who shares my aesthetic taste in vintage vehicles. Not my love for the Grateful Dead though, but what can you do. He is kind and articulate and weird in the very best way of all. Also he is a person that sends out this newsletter. He is fortunately for me, better about taking work breaks, and very committed to an exercise routine, focusing specifically on the glutes. When I get out of quarantine, the Kardashians are going to have someone to contend with.

Should there be Kardashians after this. Here! Here! Let us ring in a New Era, where the real influencers are only mothers and tulips! To be sure.

… She is the true influencer in my life. I often saw this incredible Brestois woman with beautiful hair while walking around. I will miss you, 1800s hair lady…

From Bainbridge Island Wise Woman Katherine Lafond’s Channeling of The Entity of the Corona Virus Through Automatic Writing: 

“Be still and know that I am, too! There is nothing in creation that is not Holy. Treat me with respect. I am potent and I have work to do. The world changes by my actions and presence. Who else do you know who is as powerful as I? I can last as long as I am needed. My message of - Stop and return to what life is truly about - is life supporting at a root level.

Humans had forgotten how precious life can be. Unlike a tornado, I have lasting power; sustaining enforcement; I am like the world-police force. You like to say - Let love Lead - Yes, now you have the opportunity to see what that might look like. This is not the time to be killing off that which sustains you; but to relearn right relationship.” 

Her final words were:

“To obey equals freedom.”

Picture of some of my best friends in Katherine Lafond's Garden, Bainbridge Island, maybe 2009

MUSICIANS BUDS WHO ARE AWESOME WHO YOU CAN SUPPORT RIGHT NOW!

Many special musicians have released music in the last years that is really good. Some that come to mind are:

Annie Ford, Miriam Elhaji, Sierra Ferrell, Heather Littlefield, The Lovestruck Balladeers, Chris Acker, Okay, Crawdad, Mashed Potato Records Compilations, Cinderwell, Taylor Plas, Sabine McCalla, The Four O'Clock Flowers, Jerron Paxton, Meredith Axelrod, Jackson Lynch, Feral Foster, Ali Dineen, Joanna Sternberg, The Blue Dirt of Paradise Album, Allyson Yarrow Pierce, Marina Allen, Ben Varian, Cameron Boyce, Wolfgang Strutz, Frankie Sunswept, The Daiquiri Queens, Gus Clark, and SO MANY MORE!!!

THOUGHTS ABOUT CORONA-TIME LANGUAGE, PLACELESS-NESS, AND SOME THINGS TO READ

Eve Sedgwick's essay about paranoid reading, which I have quoted in this newsletter, is a very interesting read during this time. Can there be another mode of knowing, besides the paranoid form? She writes:

“The unidirectionally future-oriented vigilance of paranoia generates, paradoxically, a complex relation to temporality that burrows backward and forward: because there must be no bad surprises, and because learning of the possibility of a bad surprise would itself constitute a bad surprise, paranoia requires that bad news be always already known.”

WELCOME TO THE NEWS CYCLE RIGHT NOW.

Basically coronavirus news rewards our paranoia - we can’t know enough, be prepared enough, be vigilante enough, because the enemy is everywhere and nowhere. Our enforced isolation is the ideal environment for cultivating preparations against bad surprises. We are hoarders not only of toilet paper, but of ideas about futures that might come. And should they come, we won’t be surprised. And weirdly, never be rewarded for our hard work of being paranoid. 

This article in French articulates how the unknown vector points of Corona Virus makes this epidemic experience unique, in terms of plague history. Or, weclome to, “Even Boris Johnson can be Infected: the Plague.” 

I am enjoying, forevermore, the writing of a young architecture critic named Kate Wagner. She runs a blog called McMansion Hell, which, aside from making hilarious dissecting memes about the architectural form of the McMansion, also offers really informative and accessible writing about architectural forms. Living in the grey concrete slab city of Brest brought me to her essays about Brutalism. Her writing expands the history of how humans have constructed and conceived of place into broad, yet pointed, explorations of economic, social, and queer histories. She wrote my favorite piece ever, about how the language of capitalism, or “HR Speak”, has entered into relationships. Have you ever been charged by a friend for “emotional labor”? Has your grandma ever “reached out” to you? Welcome to relating to others at the time of friendship being a commodity. Which is also why “practicing social distancing” as a phrase, terrifies me. That sounds like something a new-age spiritual tech-CEO would say to employees to get them to work more. Plus, aren’t we already “practicing social distancing” in the isolation experienced under late capitalism? Furthermore, what the hell are we “practicing” for? For when this level of confinement and isolation is totally normal?

If anyone wants to have a rant about the creepy, weird, self-help-y language of quarantine - “Shelter in Place?” - seriously? They might as well just change it to “Namasté in my house” - Please, feel free to “Reach Out”. (pukes).

If you want to get down with how placeless places were already propagating, pre-Shelter in Place, please read Kyle Chayka’s piece on “Air-Space”. It’s that minimalist Air-BNB aesthetic found worldwide - anonymous white rooms with a crisp white duvet cover and a strong wifi connection. What happens we being somewhere doesn’t require actually having an experience of anywhere? Thankfully, Kyle and Kate were on a panel together called The Architecture of Consumption. I love this discussion. I adore these people. I feel like they are my family members. 10 out of 10 would quarantine with. 

Jeremiah Moss’ shamelessly nostalgic Vanishing New York blog is an interesting, if depressing, place to go watch the city shift from online. The author writes under a pseudonym, presumably because it frees up his ability to be obsessive and maybe grossly romantic about a neighborhood he moved to in college. On this blog, I see a resistance to the gentrification of the East Village, by someone longing for more bohemian bygone days. I am pretty strongly in that camp, about all places, even those I never experienced the cool time in, firsthand. The East Village neighborhood is an important part of my writing project in New York City, about a relative who lived there from 1976-83. I’m interested in what drives people right now to want to preserve spaces where things happened. My hope is that coronavirus slows us down to the point where we can really come to appreciate being and participating in the psychical world. I believe humans are lacking communion with locality. If we consider our homes like wonderful multilayered universes, why would we ever want to cut them up, sell them, and extract their minerals for profit?

A friend mailed me the book Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer. This book has helped me re-consider the way I interact with place - whether I am outside or inside. 

Lately I have been developing this really personal relationship with my favorite bowl in this apartment. She’s a big brown bowl with a pyrex lid. We’ve named her Brownie. I sung a song about Brownie to myself as I was cleaning the dishes today. I think I love her. I want to protect my cabinets. My house. My apartment building. My block. The sun, the sky, the seagulls. Loving one bowl can change your life. I hope more real estate developers come to love bowls. And thus, the buildings where things happened can stay, and more things can happen in them.

An interesting and really out there essay is Within the Context of no Context. Written in the 80s, when The New Yorker let its writers fill an entire issue with one essay, the words seem to signal the period we are now living in. The essay speaks of a coming world were visions and connections are experienced in shimmers, signals, on screens. Media, weirdness, isolation. It’s a beautiful and odd and haunting piece of writing. I couldn’t help but read “Within The Context of No Context”, by looking at its context. Literally in the pages of a magazine advertising the burgeoning Yuppie lifestyle. Luxury apartments for sale in the East Village, diamond bracelets by mail order, vacations in European locales at so-and-so phone number - these temptations call out around the demented text. The ads win, convincing readers to abandon any discomfort they feel reading the essay, to enter the shiny world of Reagan-era plenty coming into being in New York.

Fast forward to the present day, when this particular Target Store arrives. I won’t explain it, I think the blog post will speak for itself. 

But the blog to end all blogs is certainly Jack Brummet’s blog, All This is That. My uncle passed away one year today, and left the world with this amazing, dense blog, which he maintained religiously from 2004 - 2018. It’s actually a universe of his life and interests, along with anecdotes and tales he cataloged and collected from family and friends. He was committed to documenting his personal social sphere. He was the first person to ever write an album review for me. I felt like he really considered me to be a great and important artist, and I felt the same about him, and still do. 

On his blog you will find the world of his beautiful mind. His archives of pictures from hanging around Bellingham, his stories of growing up hillbilly in Kent, his art and poetry, explorations of topics ranging from Aliens, to Sasquatch, to Rock n’ Roll, to the origin of the smiley face, to mugshots of 30s prostitutes in Montreal, to his Political opinion pieces, to Conspiracies, to Thrift Store Finds, to articles written by his Pseudonyms, to many a memory about living in New York with the Currans and their friends, in those late 70s, early 80s years. The Jack-i-verse is a very special place. Rest in Peace, my beloved weirdo inspiration godfather. 

There are so many medias to consume. I’m sure we’re all hanging out too much on the internet anyway. You probably don’t need any more reason to do so. That being said, you can also watch the music video I made in Brest called Rough to Ride. Otherwise, I don’t know, paint a mural in your house, make up a play, stare into space, get a therapist online, GO ON RENT STRIKE AND WORK STRIKE AND GENERAL STRIKE, and email me if you're bored. 

As always, please feel free to share this newsletter with anyone you think would enjoy it, and hey! Start your own why don’t ya. We little humans are individually so much more interesting than the New York Times. Together, we can make slow, imaginative, alternative public medias and modes of thought. Until that day, there is always The Onion, whose Corona coverage has just been incredible. 

I love you! Take care of yourselves and your people!

Your friend,

Melanie Beth Curran
 

…annnnd an alternate album cover. Yes that is a picture of me at angsty age fourteen, with my brother Kevin, in the Curran family computer room.

PS, OH YES. My living room is officially renamed "Brest Beach", for the way the sun comes through the windows in the afternoon, creating spaces on the floor perfectly suited for laying out a towel, getting in swimsuits, and sunbathing. By the time quarantine is done, I will probably have a tan, and an entire album worth of beach songs. Watch out Jimmy Buffet!

Lost Love Tapes Available Now, On Bandcamp and Spotify

Melanie Curran’s six song EP features beloved classics and two original songs. Accompanied by guitarist Jake Sanders, the Lost Love Tapes ring out in melodic lo-fi.

The Art of Elegant Confusion

My intent as an artist is to venerate common spaces. To map the tension between the now and the has been, and to observe how memory looks against the backdrop of present day. My project in New York has been to write a book about my deceased Uncle Colin’s life in this city. He lived here from 1976 to 1983, before taking his own life at 25. My days are spent finding out as much about him as possible, including the historic backdrop of his time period in the East Village.

I stress that I can only tell his story by mapping my own interest in it. By highlighting the contours of my curiosity, I thus make my life into text and art, and render a composite of him. The particular way I bumble over his artifacts and stare at the façades of buildings where he used to go, shows more than anything how grief, a suicide, an absence is passed through a family. I find so much comfort in knowing that not knowing is a valid position to take as a writer. That there is no need to improve a narrative or impose a storyline, when I can write my own confusion elegantly.  Mine is a purposeful mistranslation of history or of his story. I write a book at ease with not having the answers.

            I built my proposal for a Fulbright grant with the same intention, that as an ethnographic writer coming into the traditional music community in Finistère, Bretagne, I would have little if nothing to say about ‘what is going on’. Instead, I proposed to write about what I did not know, based on an accumulation of interviews, musical knowledge, and archival materials. And guess what? The governments of America and France have approved my project. I will be moving to France in Fall to simply be with musicians, learn new musical techniques, and write about my own sense of dislodgement during my nine month research period. Time enough for a baby! A baby of non-knowledge. Please, please come and visit me here.

            When I left my love in January, I spent the first days alone, crying in an apartment in Catania, Sicily. Resting on the bed, as though fated, was a book chronicling the influence of artist Sophie Calle. The book was written in dense art-critic French, but I could understand enough. Sophie Calle is the queen of the First Person, Moi:Je. In all her work, she is always there (video, text). There is no art without her body and her curiosity. She does no hiding, except if it is from those she stalks publicly. I figured her as my patron saint as I delved deeper into the Italian language, into feeling my foreignness, and into the pain of losing someone I had loved so much. She was with me as I took a photograph of my tear-soaked face in the mirror, mascara blackening my cheeks. That misery can be a state of grace. She was with me as I came back to New York to document my inability to tell, coupled with my devotion to the cause of telling.  

            The events have occurred rapid-fire since I returned to New York. My book stared to take on a velocity of its own. So many rejection letters came from so many publications at once. An acceptance came from Fulbright. Heartbreak, more of it, all of it. Therapy- yes. A musical performance. I was sexually assaulted. The person who did this to me a couple weeks ago is a part of a group of people who I met last year. When I met this group last year, another member of that group threatened to rape me. I can remember running away from him through the streets of Chelsea, terrified for my life. Today I have a renewed sense of when certain environments are not hospitable to my radiance. I continue to mine for the truth in spaces I feel safe and loved.

             These two months have been some of the most intense months of my time on earth. Through my research, I learned something terrifying and illuminating about my deceased uncle (You'll have to read my book!) There has been sobbing, and more sobbing. What didn’t redeem me kept me moving. I have learned to recognize that as I grow stronger, certain people will try to bring me down. I purchased an electric blue power suit. I conducted a disco photo shoot in the front bedroom. I have spent hours banging on the fucking piano.

            I have my body. The way people will decide what kind of life I should be living, based on the way my body looks, are deeply mired in their own pain. Thank you to those who have supported me in this intense time, who have celebrated with me, who have been there for me as I cry. Because as a woman (a Western Female?) grows, it will become clear to her the people in her midst who are incapable of letting her be powerful. And I have seen those souls and I touch them.


Performances:
 
Tonight! March 20th, 9pm, Jalopy Theater Roots and Ruckus, Red Hook Brooklyn
 
Western Female Pacific Northwest Tour!
May 24th, Folklife Festival, Seattle, WA American Standard Time Stage
May 25th, The Roost, Bellingham, WA
More dates TBA!
 
Publications:
 
I wrote this book review in The Brooklyn Rail:
https://brooklynrail.org/2019/02/books/Girl-Zooby-Aimee-Parkison-and-Carol-Guess

And interviewed Francisco Cantú, author of The Line Becomes a River:
https://newschoolwriting.org/interview-with-2019-nonfiction-finalist-francisco-cantu/

 
RECOMMENDATIONS!

 
Late Night YouTube Hits from Feral Foster’s Kitchen:
 
Busta Rhymes, Gimme Some More

Whitney Houston Singing the National Anthem at 1991 Superbowl

Really long and emotional Thai commercials ... or this one


Movies where women are filming themselves and their buddies:
 
Double Blind (No Sex Last Night) by Sophie Calle

She Had Her Gun All Ready by Vivienne Dick (I get to meet her in April!!!!!!)

Paris is Burning by Jennie Livingston (Maybe her subjects are not really her buddies, that is up for debate online, but WATCH THIS MOVIE Jesus. So incredible.)

 
Best of My Netflix Breakup Binge:
 
Russian Doll with Natasha Lyonne: My favorite piece of new TV. Particularly with regard to ghosts and the East Village
 
Dear White People by Justin Simien: A great show depicting a group of black students on a majority white campus, and what that means.

GLOW: Female wrestlers in the early 80s. So much good.

And the Crown Jewel of My Life:

Five Foot Two, The Lady Gaga Documentary. Also this interview with Lady Gaga.


The Extended Diamond Brand Universe:

Sophia Tschida of Wolf Moon Doula is a star birth practitioner in Kitsap County. She is organizing the Peninsula Birth and Baby Expo in Bremerton, Washington on March 30th.

Hannah and Marc Doucette, also of Kitsap, are the dream team behind Wassail Ecological Landcare and can help make your permaculture design and implementation dreams come true.

Jon Glovin sells a very exciting collection of books online at Fenrick Books.

Beto Bonus:

The American Poetess in me loves Beto O'Rourke's musings about America.


Long live hope and pleasure.

Peace be with you for Spring! See you soon!

Love Melanie