Melanie Beth Curran 10/3/23 Melanie Beth Curran 10/3/23

Working Melanie Magic Into The Architectural World - Fall Newsletter, 2023

Telling you is like confession or something. The architecture dream is so deep-seated and quiet in me. I've hinted to it some over the years I've known you. I care about buildings and history. Maybe that's why I always snuck into abandoned ones as a kid. Who am I kidding. I still sneak into them. I care about what went on here before. I care about the conversations that were had and the songs that were sung and how those words may still be echoing about in the present.

Just the other day I got in trouble for trespassing at Chatham Towers, trying to get a good glimpse of the piece of earth that used to be "The Old Brewery". They just put Gangs of New York on HBO, so this nerd has been lurking around the old Five Points looking for ghosts in the walls and sidewalks. ANYWAY.

My purpose came clear during my last sixth months of meditation. Sometimes the directions roared through my deep breathing like a freight train. (If you like freight trains, I recommend this awesome train hopping memoir, Sunset Route by Carrot Quinn.) The messages I received out in the world only served to solidify my new path. I've tried to ignore them.

"That doesn't make sense, I'm but a folk singer!"

But the voice comes from a deep well within me. It's too loud. It doesn't care that I've just become the other half of a new band called The Jersey Sures (available for all gigs!). When I get so quiet I can hear only silence, the message I get is to work my unique brand of Melanie magic into the architectural world.

It's more than preservation I'm interested in. It's creating an entire framework for architecture, building, and construction - one that takes into account cultural context and the specific character of place. One that bites back at white supremacy and capitalism and throw away culture (other great books on these subjects are Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong and Abolish Silicon Valley by Wendy Liu). I'm so into this.

Over summer I went through entrepreneurial training as part of New York State's Self Employment Assistance Program. I got a letter in the mail one day telling me I'd qualified for this program. Sometimes I don't know what to do next. The letter made it clear. I enrolled. By following the SEAP's guidelines all summer and working with mentors and coaches at SCORE and The Women's Business Outreach center, I've started a business called Wall Nectar.

At Wall Nectar, I get to combine the things I love to do and am good at doing into one service. I get to work toward my dream of experimenting and creating a culturally sustainable architecture model. My first experiments with this were, like so many of us, on The Sims. Thank you, The Sims.

So here's what Wall Nectar does:

We create interior murals by conducting living history research and putting on a public musical performance on site. Clients may be restaurants, historical buildings, entire neighborhoods, theatre companies, organizations, shops, public or civic buildings- I am not sure. I am currently searching for my first clients. This entire process- from research to performance to painting- is called a Wall Channeling. Wall Channeling is the signature service of Wall Nectar.

The closest thing I've ever done to a Wall Channeling before is People's Beach Day. So if you liked People's Beach Day, you're going to LOVE Wall Channelings. It's taken me some time to feel confident spelling the word Channeling. And yes, I still have my job at Montclair State teaching College Writing. You can tell, because my writing is PERFECT. It is NOT full of RANDOMLY capitalized WORDS, for example.

So here I am world. I am Melanie Beth Curran, surrealistic Founder and CEO of Wall Nectar in Brooklyn, New York. Wall Nectar was baked here in the apartment where I live, and at the BOC in the Bronx, and in the offices and zoom rooms of architects and experts who guide me.

So please, if you or someone you know has a building, has a special place, has a budget to cover art and performance that celebrates regional identity and history, get in touch with me. Also just here if you want to talk about your feelings.

Thank you for supporting me and my work throughout the years,

-Melanie

*Riding the subway with pincurls, because I still* *religiously adhere to 1940s beauty routines. Thank you to Katie Lomax for the Cloisters photo up top. Please go the* *The Met Cloisters* *one day if you haven't (not a real convent).*

Melanie Beth Curran 7/10/23 Melanie Beth Curran 7/10/23

I am an Irish-American Dead Head Closeted Red Sox Fan with a Buried Boston Accent

I have a spiritual teacher named Nikki Walton. She releases a meditation each morning.

"Say the word I," she asked listeners. "Now say "I" without actually saying "I". Stay feeling the "I" that doesn't pronounce itself."

She says that this is the feeling of god, or the universe, or the goddess, or the creator, inside of a person. It is the radiant feeling of saying "I" when we don't.

I chanced upon the core of my being in Boston earlier in June. My material surroundings so resembled my essence that I thought to write upon the subject here. A series of miracles ensued and I was hard-pressed not to believe that a creative intelligence was masterminding the spectacle of life on earth.

The last memory I have of being part of Boston was not wanting to leave it. I loved being young Melanie there. I lived in Peabody, Massachusetts, with my mother, father, brother, and something else. The something else doesn't have a name, but I associated with a few things: The Boston Common, a certain quality of adult personalities, swan boats on a pond, Make Way For Ducklings, Dunkin Donuts, and the way I pronounced words.

It was the dawn of kindergarten when we moved to Bainbridge Island. I was nearly put into speech class when the teachers figured out that it wasn't a speech impediment I had, but a Boston area accent. The Pacific Northwest of the United States, where we'd moved, is where newscasters with regional inflections turn to seek out an accent-less way of annunciating words for public broadcast.

My way of pronouncing language went away, but something remained. I remember driving away from the house on Jennifer Lane, Peabody, Mass, watching the neighborhood recede from out the back windshield of a Ford Explorer. I saw the neighbors waving us goodbye. I felt an aching in my soul. I loved this place. The love is still with me.

Would I have transformed into such a fantastic hippie had I grown up in Massachusetts? By high school on Bainbridge Island, I favored being stoned and listening to the Grateful Dead over going to class. I would skip to hide and listen to their music alone in dark recesses. Their back catalog is imprinted in my consciousness. Maybe I was trying to manufacture something big enough to replace that old childhood longing, something to soothe the ache of early experiences of impermanence.

It was 2004 or 2007. Could have been both or either. I took the portable radio into the street at night. I set up a chair and looked at the stars, listening to the Red Sox baseball team win The World Series. I loved the Red Sox. I had fond feelings for Fenway Park. I told no one. I loved the Green Monster the way northwestern children love Sasquatch. My love for all of this was secret. It is weird to tell about it now. I held my love cards close to the chest then because I didn't want anything to come between me and these waves of sound expressing Bostonian victory.

Being an American is being suspended between a longing for what one doesn't have yet, and a longing for what one is leaving behind. That's my experience.

My family in Seattle, especially my paternal grandfather and his siblings, stressed a great sense of "being from" in tandem with our family name. Curran. We're Irish. We are from County Donegal, from a small place outside Letterkenny called Glenswilly. And that is that.

Any other ancestries in my life were obscured by this story. It was a tale told and re-told. There was a highway of green leading us back to Ireland. When I asked my father why we went to Mass each Sunday, why I was enrolled in CCD, why - I was told it was for tradition. He wanted us to grow up with that unbroken thread back to Ireland, with a structure for worshiping god.

An identity was formed. I am an Irish-American Dead Head Closeted Red Sox Fan with a Buried Boston Accent.

About a fortnight ago, I traveled to Boston from my home in New York City. Through a series of encounters and intuitive actions, I'd fallen in with a cohort of Irish Studies scholars and was invited to give a presentation at a symposium put on by Boston University and University College Dublin. The symposium was called "New Modalities of Irishness: Race, Identity and Inequality."

I settled into my lodgings and wandered about Back Bay. I met a stream of strangers who offered me questions and commentary.

"Is that a gun?" (It was a fiddle.)

"How much you pay?" (For rent in New York City)

"Are you Catholic?" (By default, I said, by design.)

and,

"God Bless You, You're a Peabody Girl" (pronounced like I used to, guhl.)

When a woman uttered these last words to me, a comfort from my earliest memories engulfed me like honey. My lodgings were, in fact, abutting Fenway Park. An elevator was Red Sox themed. The symposium was a decadence of ideas. We explored notions of an Irishness which can be switched on and off, can be signaled, can be invoked, can be deployed to achieve certain social aims.

I returned from that event with a sweet sense of belonging. It was as though my ancestors were right there with me, partying, especially my Grandpa Pete. It was as though they had gotten together on the other side and woven this sequence of events into being. For once, I'd been open enough to follow their signs and let go of my own will. Things got weirder as the night progressed.

I considered an early retirement to my chambers, but opted for a final spin around the block instead. 'Twas then I met with strange company (see, there, I just deployed a written Irishness). So many dreads on white people. So many drug rugs. It was like a - wait a minute -

A quick google confirmed my suspicions. The Grateful Dead were playing Fenway Park this night.

I stole away, down to the outskirts of the stadium. I, ticketless, perched on a picnic table within earshot of the music as it spilled over what I like to imagine was the Green Monster itself. I felt the presence of my monstah, and I relaxed. There were two young deadhead ladies before me. One was stretching herself like a cat, perched on safety orange plastic road barricade, while the other sister spun. The spinner dancers are a long running Grateful Deadian subgroup. As I watched them, I swore they carried the spirit, the very spirit I had sought while hiding in my family's house, tripping out, listening to this very song.

One More Saturday Night poured out of Fenway Park and into this little side strip of Shakedown Street. The dancing lady sung along in flying harmony to the music, quite like Donna used to do in the old concert recordings.

I've never been to a Grateful Dead show, (I know they are called The Dead and Company now, but like an old neighborhood kid calls the East Village the Lower East Side, I will die on this hill) and I likely never will. This is the band's last and final tour. I have no real means of getting to any of the remaining shows.

But. But I swear that the thing I was seeking in all those stoned high school moments listening to the recordings actually incorporated into me that Saturday Night as I watched the young ladies sing and dance and stretch. As I listened to a song that has been played over and over and over again to audiences who were hungry too, I felt a formless things land, as I sat on that picnic table, stone cold sober.

To soak up sound in the city where I became verbal. To bask in the afterglow of deadhead decades at my favorite baseball stadium - my regrets to the Seattle Kingdom. To have a day spent meditating on what remains of an ancestral Irish homeland in me while eating lobster rolls. I have been an unruly lady and I have been a calm lady. On that night I was not myself, but rather, I was myself experiencing the "I" - unspoken aloud but uttered with all fibers of my flesh.

The gods conspired to show me the core of me, all around me, unfolding like a play dedicated in memory of my deepest childhood and American longings, to be part of something, and to know that something as the water in which I swim.

Melanie Beth Curran 2/8/23 Melanie Beth Curran 2/8/23

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

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.

Melanie Beth Curran 1/7/23 Melanie Beth Curran 1/7/23

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

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.

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/

Melanie Beth Curran 10/9/22 Melanie Beth Curran 10/9/22

Verbs!

I didn’t give verbs much consideration before. They were a part of speech, like any other. This all changed on a sunny autumnal day in the New York New Jersey area. I felt inspired to bring my writing students on an adventure around campus. I entreated them to “find words in the wild”. With pen and paper we traipsed around Montclair State University collecting language.

The most fascinating part of this exercise was what happened when I asked them to collect verbs. Have you ever looked at the world in this way? Observed the processes about you? The things doing things on their way from birth to decay? Or is there a constant flow of energy, that takes the shape of nouns from time to time? What are verbs? What is verbing?

I loved the experience of gathering verbs from the ground, from people, from buildings humming with life. So much is in motion, even in a quiet place. I am fascinated by the way we chop up the material world into smaller parts. The English language is a shoddy representative of what is really going on. That is especially true in The United States of America, where indigenous languages exist to better fit the place they are from. They have been silenced. They are in resurgence.

Indigenous People’s Day is tomorrow. I am grateful for that. In my verbal quest the other day, I remembered my beginning study of Twulshootseed language. I remembered how that language centers around verbs, processes. It’s so much more fun! English declares things dead. Which is so weird. Because everything is verbing.

I was researching Birkin Bags. They are these exclusive handbags that you can’t even buy if you walk into the Hermès Store, the luxury brand which sells them. No. You must get on some kind of waitlist, then fork over $20,000 to $200,000 dollars. What makes these bags special are rare leathers used in their manufacturing. But Birkins are on their way to the grave. They can’t even last that long. Not really. Everything’s decaying. That’s the lesson of fall.

I’ll never forget living in Bulgaria. The cars under communism were called LADAs. When I lived in that country in 2009-2010, these little old cars were ubiquitous. I remember seeing one in a field. My host told me that the LADAs were made of an organic material that sheep love to munch. The sheep were eating the cars. I watched them.

I loved that. There is no permanence. Permanence is a lie. It is a state we like to believe in. It is an essential fantasy that aids in the selling of products. Hermès declares that, unlike other bags, the Birkin will never lose its value. It’s one of those most rare of objects: it gains value as it ages.

Says who? Who decides that the ten-year-old painter is a prodigy? That the apartment worth $1500 a month in May is worth $3500 in September? We do our damndest to put prices and time constraints on process. An apartment is just air doing apartment things. Is just earth doing apartment things. God bless affordable housing. God bless cheap rent. This world of prices is out of control, and we all know it.

I walked down the street the evening after my verb class. There is nothing prettier than my neighborhood at dusk in early October. I saw the lights coming through the windows of an ornate historic apartment building, and I saw the blueing sky, and the mid-century government housing with its windows aglow, and the tree tops shimmering their final green leaves, and I saw this whole scene with new eyes. For I saw verbs before I saw things.

The world vibrated, hummed, shifted, expressed itself in activity. What a pleasant surprise. To catch a glimpse of subtle changes. To focus not so much on the what but the how. I spend more time doing nothing these days. Staring into space. It is work to retain autonomy over my attention. Attention itself has been chopped up and commodified. That most precious of processes, that most sacred of verbs, to be, how can I reclaim you? How can I hold you close?

If you are reading this, please take some time today to stare at the world, just as it is. Nothing to claim, nothing to do, just watch time going on. I’ve feel I’ve stumbled on a pot of gold. To be able to bear witness to the secret flows of time and space, but for an instant, that is a pleasure being extracted from us people every single day.

Pay attention to the verbs. What is happening around you right now? Put attention there. It’s a luscious experience. Happy fall.

Melanie Beth Curran 1/3/22 Melanie Beth Curran 1/3/22

Songs Don't Die - Fall Newsletter 2021

It's possible that from a playground song I learned which words to leave out. Here's the song in question:

Miss Susie had a steamboat the steamboat had a bell, Miss Susie went to heaven, the steamboat wen to Hell-O operator, please give me number nine, and if you disconnect me, I’ll chop off your behind the ‘fridgerator there sat a piece of glass, Miss Susie sat upon it and broke her little ask me no more questions, I’ll tell you no more lies, the boys are in the bathroom zipping up their flies are in the meadow, the bees are in the park, Miss Susie and her boyfriend are kissing in the D-A-R-K D-A-R-K Dark, Dark, Dark. The Dark is like a movie the movie’s like a show the show is just like Nick-at-Nite and that is all I know I know my ma, I know I know my pa, I know I know my sister with a 40-acre bra.

Then the memory deteriorates.

Please give me a nickel?

Please give me a dime?

Something about a motorcycle, or a car, or a boyfriend?

Or are these different lyrics, the folksongs of America regurgitating endlessly in my memory? How do I know I know the words? I understand this song is how I learned what not to say. Instead of being spoken the bad words bleed into new sentences. If you pause too long you’ve said Ass, you’ve said Hell, you’ve said flies as in zippers. But there was one on the playground of Ordway Elementary who was not afraid to say swears and that was Aubrey Shepherd Smith and she said fuck.

This was the worst word. I was terrified of the sound. Madison said it too after Aubrey. I couldn’t. I couldn’t form that morsel of language. It didn’t seem right. It was a curse. God would remember. But Aubrey’s family were Gods. Her uncle was in a band called Soundgarden, which, in that year, 1996 or 1997, would have been at an all time career fuck you high.

This was the pacific northwest. There were badasses in the shadows. Cool kids on the back of the bus. Rollin’ down the street smoking Indo, sippin’ on gin and juice, laid back, got my mind on my money and my money on my mind. A boy sang this and others listened and learned, and learned, that this was cool. What was Indo? I knew what juice was. I thought I did. Came in a cardboard box with a straw.

Sometimes I think about all that trash. What if everything I ever threw away showed up in the same house on the same day? What would I recognize? What would agonize me to see again? I think it’d be the simple fact of gross accumulation. This is what disturbed me most as an 18-year-old living in Bulgaria. There were piles of single-use plastic and garbage lining the highways and clogging the intersections going into villages. Ditches were dammed along the fields of shepherds. It was a country so unused to waste that it knew not how to hide it.

Waste. Silences. I’m looking at you. When there is too much there is either an excess or you be quiet. What to do with the overflow. God what an annoying and impossible thing to even talk about.

And that’s the very disturbance that brought me to my mom’s yearbook. The sense that her past on Bainbridge Island was hidden too well, and how could that be? How could she had undergone an existence here and leave so few traces of it? There was the yearbook, and there was the 1984 Bainbridge Island High School Senior Cruise VHS tape.

My grandfather had a home video camera long before this was a normal practice. He was and documentary film-maker disguised as a general contractor and auto-mechanic. In the video, he’s on the senior cruise, interviewing the fresh graduates. I see my mom at 18. I see her friends and their hair, and how they used to move. I compare this with how they move now. I know them as adults. My mom and I grew up in the same down. I know the slanted road leading down to the public dock that’s in the video. I’ve been here many times. Or is it there? The ship pulls away and out into Eagle Harbor, and the graduates burst into a chorus of Help Me Rhonda. Did my grandfather egg them on? Or was this spontaneous?

This song sticks with me as a child. Help Me, Rhonda. Who is Rhonda? How do the graduates know her? Why do they in 1984 all know this piece of music? I have no context. I’ve never heard the original version by The Beach Boys-

but when I’m on the ferry with my girl scout troop, troop 133 in the back of an SUV, we listen to Oldies 97.3 fm and some how, we are all singing the words to songs from the 1950s and 60s which I have no recollection of hitherto hearing. I just know them. American music.

My grandfather sticks me and my 2nd cousin in the backseat of a refurbished Model-T Ford. He is one of the premiere restorers of automobiles alive, in the world, today. Same one who made the home videos.

Is part of my familial lineage an obsession with the refurbishment of the past? Or is that a general American Way? Anyway. I’m in the Ford.

And we are going to a secret place in the farmlands around Kingston, Kitsap County, Washington. On the drive my 2nd cousin asks me, who is your favorite musical artist? I respond, J-Lo. I know I am being slightly disingenuous. I do like J-lo. Especially on the track popular at that time, featuring Ja Rule, I’m Real. But I am also saying J-Lo because I know it will make me sound cooler.

I find great relief when we turn down the private lane, almost hidden in the tall grasses. The road winds until we reach an oasis. It’s a secret drive-in. A metallic diner lodged deep in this field. Brought here but someone else obsessed with maintaining this portion of history as a social club. Yes, my grandparents did literally meet at a drive-in like this in high school. We park in a slot flanked by vintage automobiles, which were so ubiquitous in my early life on account of my grandfather’s profession, that I really just believed they were everywhere.

And we went into the diner, the My Girl Drive-In, and we bought milkshakes and sat in vinyl booths and watched an Elvis impersonator go through the motions. Rock n’ Roll played from the jukebox. I enjoyed the sounds I was hearing. This was different from my relationship to pop radio. There was no forcing the interest. A Marilyn Monroe impersonator also appeared. It was 2002, but part of us was stalled mid-century.

It was even that way, it seemed, for the high school seniors, screaming ’84! and Help Me Rhonda! on the VHS tape I worshipped, watching over and over over childhood, trying to make tangible the stuff of my mother’s past.

There was also her yearbook. These were hallowed pages full of clues. I came to know the high school seniors of 1984 almost like friends or deities. Their pictures, their senior quotes, their hairstyles are etched in my memory. For the most part, the images were glamour shots, stylized in the fashion of the time.

But there was one at the end of the alphabet, who did not conform. He was called Andrew Wood. And the name of his first band, MLFNKSHN, was written in the space where his senior quote should go. His face was painted stark white. His eyes were rounded by dark paint and his mouth with black lipstick. His long blonde hair cascaded to his shoulders and led to a body just out of the frame.

I asked my mother about Andy. Sometimes multiple times a day. She told me he was dead. He had become a rock star. She told me he didn’t say much in class, but every once in while, he’d raise his hand and say the most profound thing.

The music of Mother Love Bone, is not my favorite, exactly, but the personage of Andy Wood, frontman, is. He died of a heroin overdose just before his band got big. But not before the release of a record which is considered the origin place of all Seattle grunge which followed it. Andy Wood is not well known, but his influence is extremely far-reaching.

His blend of of glam and stadium rock - a football fan in lady’s clothing - howling long ballads into the furthest reaches of wet basements - is the stylistic foundation of the grunge genre which bloomed in his wake. And Andy dreamed it up on Bainbridge Island. He dreamed it up while in school with my mom. He’s not on the VHS tape of the senior cruise. He’s not on the boat. But he is somewhere, ephemeral, he lives on in the recordings- a song called called Chelsea Dancer, in the bleach blonde hair of Kurt Cobain, in the bandmates who dispersed after his death becoming Pearl Jam, becoming Temple of the Dog, brushing against Soundgarden whose code of coolness seeped to Aubrey and then into my ears the day she said fuck on the playground.

Transmissions. An unbounded oral history that no one talks about. There is a connecting thread between times. This is what I believe. This why I am so disturbed by the idea that things can just be thrown away. Because it’s not true. Garbage is just buried. There are rusted out cars in the 2nd growth forests. Andy Wood lived here and we sing songs as we jump rope, clap hands. The radio transmits oldies and newbies alike. Shift the dial, mind on my money and money on my mind Rhonda you look so fine.

I am so sure of the constant drone between generations. I am so sure that the chants of the graduates, ’84, ’84, ’84 were echoing still when in 2009 Lady Gaga howled Pokerface on the school bus as we waited to board to boat. This time I was graduating high school. It was my senior cruise. I coaxed the others around me into incantation, ’09 Box of Wine, ’09 Box of Wine.

I chanted as through my grandfather was making a home video of the moment. One that my theoretical daughter would watch to learn how to be, how to speak, what to say, what to omit. I was chanting the way my mom’s generation taught me how. I was chanting as though I was part of something sonic and singular, and the waves crashed underneath the piers of so-called Elliot Bay, where for some generations, some of the population has pretended that when people die their songs die with them.

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Photo of Annie Ford and Melanie Curran by duskin drum

Melanie Beth Curran 8/3/20 Melanie Beth Curran 8/3/20

Black Lives Matter, End of Tourism, Σούγια, Crete Magic, Imperialist Nostalgia, Carey Get Out Your Cane, Peasant Authenticity, Praise for Marthe Vassallo, Vacation Music, Cabbage

"Now I'm nostalgic for the future, which was my native land."
-Hari Kunzru, White Tears

Melanie at City of The Sun, Occupied Cohokia Territory , 2014 - photo by Mackenzie Stewart

Here is my summer newsletter. The voices of Black, Brown, Indigenous, & People of Color must be celebrated, uplifted, listened to, and passed on. Not 'now more than ever', but always, and consistently. The first part of the letter will focus on voices I have heard and want to pass on to you. I don't know if I'm doing anti-racist work right, or well, especially in the context of this newsletter. But to be silent for fear of making mistakes doesn't make any sense. If you're seeing a way I can do better, you can let me know. I hope we can all be in a continual state of learning, communicating, and acting for racial and social justice. Thanks :)

The second part of this letter was going to be an address of the most pressing questions of our time. If you are me. Such as: Am I, the young writer taking refuge in a remote village in Crete, witnessing the end of tourism? What does it mean when tradition, in this case Breton Fest Noz Dance/Musical culture and Salish txwəlšucid Language, get passed on in digital space? How do languages of English and French have colonial/capitalist concepts written into them, and how can this violence be rectified? When will America be worthy of its founding ideals? Can white people admit failure, and actualize healing by articulating our white supremacy?

But I only got to the Crete/Tourism inquiry. Otherwise this letter would have been way too long. But… Melanie… this newsletter IS way too long. Like, the entirety of it won't even fit in the email and I have to click a link at the bottom to see the whole thing! Touché.

The third part of this letter is some writing about Bretagne. It’s a story about a cabbage and a Queen with whom I intermingled in winter.

Disclaimer: There are going to be typos in this newsletter.

Without further ago, let’s get this party commenced. (that’s a direct quote from TV show Dickinson)

PART ONE

Je ne peux plus respirer / I can’t breathe

George Floyd wheatpaste in Brest, France

Here is a potential map of an anti-racism practice based on my own.

Begin by considering the symbolic action of breath in the movement for Black Lives with this podcast featuring Jungian analyst Fannie Brewster. Accompany this with M. NourbeSe Philip’s book Zong. It’s a literary object expressing wordlessness, loss of language, lack of breathe, drowning, and the voices of slaves murdered during the Middle Passage, stilling echo from the Atlantic Ocean in fragments of legalese.

Continue by imagining America begins the moment enslaved people arrive on its shores, in the podcast by Nikole Hannah Jones called 1619. Interrogate the trajectory of Black Life in America. The film Daughters of the Dust, the first person accounts of the Slave Narratives , Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad, this documentary from 1968 about the heritage of slavery following Emancipation, the film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, this documentary about the life of a young woman in the Watts Section of Los Angeles in the 60s, this industrial film from Budweiser in the 70s which outlines a strategy for marketing malt liquor to Black communities, the Black Panthers documentary by Varda, Martin Luther King’s Beyond Vietnam speech: A Time to Break Silence, Audre Lorde’s 1978 essay Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. Fill in the past centuries of American history with what you never learned in school. Learn that the past stays with us re: Jesamyn Ward’s novel Sing Unburied Sing. Know that the above is a non-exhaustive list, but a representation of one white person’s incomplete learning.

Dialogues Bookstore in Brest June 2020 - this major display of books about American racism

vs. selection about French colonialism same store same day.

Turn to music. Listen to this podcast by Wesley Morris about how white appropriation of Black expression is the basis of American popular music. Learn this again and again. Listen when banjoist Rhiannon Giddens says anything (What Folk Music Means...) I have a big vacancy in my mind regarding Black culture and experience throughout the 80s, 90s, 2000s and now. I try to bring nuance to my understanding of this time. I’ve started with a book of poetry called I’m so Fine: A List of Famous Men and What I Had On by Kadijah Queen. Or American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes. With Cheryl Dunte’s film The Watermelon Woman. With Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's story collection Friday Black. With Barry Jenkin’s Moonlight. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. Childish Gambino/Donald Glover’s This is America music video. Donald Glover’s TV show Atlanta. The film Get Out. This Vince Staples music video for Señorita wherein white people are entertained by the pain of People of Color from the protection of their/our own white privilege. I start to decompose my own. To do so, I must stay centered, pull together the energy for the long-haul, and create an anti-racist practice at a pace which is sustainable.

For this, I heed the following words of composer/producer King James Britt (twitter @kingbritt):

To all my black & brown family & our true allies, I wanted to express a few ways of centering yourself in this revolution that we are in.

One - Find a spiritual center. Whatever that may be for you, an altar, church, ritual, but something where you can tune into divine spirit. If we aren’t spiritually centered, we can’t find balance in the fight. It’s also a powerful revolutionary act. You are in full control of.

Two - detach from all of the noise. Social media has been a great tool for exposing the atrocities that are happening to our humanity and culture. But there is so much noise in these feeds which become distractions. Find your 3 favorite information sources and focus on that. Also a few friends you trust as information curators.

Three - do things you love. We can get swept up in the constant fight and forget our joy. Joy is one of the most powerful weapons because it creates contagious vibrations of loving feelings. It also helps keep your spiritual equilibrium.

Four - do what you feel you can do to help in the revolution. Don’t get guilt tripped into feeling you aren’t contributing. Find whatever resonates and feels good to you, to contribute. It could be just calling your friends for support. All forms of contribution count. Only you know your capacity to contribute in a healthy manner.

Five - continue to be your true authentic self. This is why we are here in physical form and is a powerful statement. To continue to be authentic in the eye of the storm. We need to continue to envision positive realness in the midst of the violence.

Six - gain the knowledge, laws, statistical breakdowns of wherever you live, your rights, all of it. The more you know, the less it can used ‘against’ you.

Seven - use your intuition. This is probably the most important of all. This applies to every single action in your life. If you are centered, your intuition is your antenna for what moves you will make at what times. It could be as simple as not walking down a certain street because you sense danger. Trust your gut and don’t always listen to all the advice that is given.

Eight - music. The universal language and vibrational healing. If you create your daily soundtrack to steer your emotions, that is a radical act of self care. Be intentional about your sonic diet. You can shift not only your mood but others as well thru the vibrations you push into the world.

Nine - self defense. With all revolution, there will be violence. You may not be subjected to it but if you are, be prepared. Whatever that looks like for you

Ten - Thank you.

Okay, this is Melanie again. I’m going to keep giving my suggestions for things to read and think about. With this newsletter and any other information you’re coming into contact with, don’t forget to breathe. Take in as much as you can at a time. Ignore what I write completely if needed. What I glean from King James Britt’s words above are to take care of my mental health, my spiritual state, so as to stay strongest in times of struggle.

Recommencing.

Listen to Code Switch podcast episode Why Now, White People? Do not let this revolutionary moment be a trend. It has all the hallmarks of a trend. Find others to hold you accountable in the process of dismantling white supremacy. Hold them accountable too. (Code Switch also just released an episode on Karens)

Read Peggy Mcintosh's list of 50 examples of white privilege. Read them aloud and with family and friends. Purchase Layla F. Saad’s Me and White Supremacy workbook. Do it. Take a break from it. Start again. Encounter the extensive world of google documents available to all: Scaffolded anti-racism resource guide, resources for anti-racist parenting, policing alternative resources, and this Black Lives Matter master document. If the phrase Black Lives Matter makes you uncomfortable- ask why that could ever possibly be true. Why would that statement ever need to be qualified. Read this piece, written by fellow Fulbrighter Sterling de Sutter Summerville on what allies can do to help the Black community. Check out episodes of Wyatt Cenac's TV show Problem Areas.

Treat Racism Like Covid-19 Protest Sign Guy

Acknowledge the systemic nature of racism/colonialism, embedded in the foundations of America, and especially the American economy. Of France’s too. In the institution of law enforcement. Note the difference in the words systemic and systematic. Educate with the de-colonial philosopher Frantz Fanon. Or the episode of 1619 podcast The Economy That Slavery Built. And Ta-Nehesi Coates The Case for Reparations. Figure out how to invest your money and/or time in Black businesses and institutions. Here is an incredible directory of that information by city. Put your money in Black owned banks, eat at Black owned restaurants, buy from Black owned clothing businesses. If you're like me, you dream in beautiful, flowing, colorful clothing. Here is a Black owned resort wear company, and another, and another.

Donate to the organizations propelling the Black Lives Matter Movement. A couple are Black Lives Matter and The Black Visions Collective. Find many more here under the donate tab.

With this video from The Root, come to question the white capacity to digest (Rankine) Black pain, and death, and suffering. Especially in videos of police brutality and killing.

Let's Talk About Race - image by Chris Buck

Know that Blackness is not a monolith. Focus and uplift the beauty, creativity, joy, pleasure and multifaceted richness of Black life. Highlight Black virtuosity, excellence, brilliance, creativity as much if not much more than the narratives which cast Black people as only victims. Introduce Black power, art, and expression into your everyday consumption of media. Know that doing so is an act which subverts history in the most generative of ways. Imagine what it would have been to grow up in a world where few of the characters on TV, in books, in films, in toys looked like me.

Support Black artists, collectives, and projects. A few which come to mind are the Black Power Naps project. Is the artist Rachelle Brown (@reshell-brown) who creates the NUDE events in LA. Is the Cave Canem Poetry Project. Listen, listen, and dance to Zakia Sewell's weekly show Questing W/ Zakia on NTS radio which freaking rules. Appreciate the stand-up comedy of Duclé Sloan.

I remind myself that there is no arrival. The goal is not to be a perfect white person who knows all. That’s not even possible. So I embrace two practices. The capacity for apology, and my own perpetual student-dom. Alishia McCullough lays out this idea:

from Alishia McCullough's '7 Circles of Whiteness' post

This concludes what I have currently culled in a beginning, ever-evolving, anti-racist practice. I’ll now transition into the second part of the newsletter. My life as an artist, writer, musician, stranger, tourist, friend to many, are enabled by the infrastructure of whiteness, affording me things I have not earned.

Readers, please feel free to disregard the next parts of this letter. To give all of your attention to the work of the artists, thinkers, leaders, activists, and causes that are not emanating from me, a white writer musician vacationing in Crete.

PART TWO

The End of Tourism?

"Who knows the tradition? We do. We own that shit."
-Hari Kunzru, White Tears

I’m in the small village of Sougia (Σούγια) on the south coast in western Crete. At this point, I’ve moved out of where I was living in Brest, vacating to a small room here at the Lotos Seaside Hotel. Though a month-long vacation may seem extravagant, I assure you I am here on business. Someone has to write the ethnography of umbrella shading practices, tanning strategies, moisturization customs, wifi-finding traditions, and various techniques of consuming Cretan olive oil. In addition to these anthropological investigations, I am also researching my own relaxation threshold as I develop a habitus of swimming, piano playing in bar, and consistent vitamin D exposure.

Crete tourism is pretty new. Joni Mitchell is the prototype of Crete tourist. In 1971, she lived in a cave in Matala, not far from this town. During her dulcimer accompanied sojourn, Joni wrote songs that would become the album Blue. On this album, one finds the song Carey, which describes in detail her lifestyle in Matala. The song is a gem of musical ethnography. Joni is my spirit guide right meow. I’m writing songs on the banjo and at the piano in the lotos bar (I guess it’s not capitalized). Originally I wrote it off as a place where retired men go to day drink. But now I’m observing a diverse clientele. It’s like the town’s rec room, and the town is made-up of all the people you might find at a neighborhood block party. The customers cannot be typecast.

I was told by the waiter, who is also an energy healer (He says spraining my left ankle means I have female problems and a lack of self confidence. Great.) that earlier this summer a group of 10 or 20 friends lived at this table for a week. Yes, this table where I write you from. They slept on the bench seats, charged their phones with that lime green power strip, and lived beside this pile of backgammon boards. Other people in Sougia stay in tents and semi-permanent campsites by the cliffs. It’s not unlike Matala in 1971. Except there’s a lot more electronic music coming from bluetooth speakers.

I watched this Crete British travel video from the 60s. We can see here the creation of Crete’s ‘peasant authenticity’ as a consumable tourist thing. I’ve been having a weird nostalgia about a tourism era I never experienced. I guess others are too. Evidenced by this playlist, and this one too. I’ve noticed cool honky tonk buddies displaying appreciation, in a totally non-ironic way, for the early work of Jimmy Buffet. Vacation music. What’s up with it? It articulates a fantasy of place and much as it does a remove from being anywhere real.

The tourist comes as consumer of 1. The vacation experience which supersedes any complications the place may put up against a smooth experience of pleasure and relaxation. And 2. The authenticity experience wherein the tourist encounters the messy stuff that makes the place special. Even if that stuff is performed as spectacle or simulacra.

Reassuring message from a knife store in Chanià. Crete is known for its tradition of knife crafting.

We went on a little jaunt in Bretagne to beautiful tourist trap Post Aven. This year the music and dance events that make Bretagne famous in France for being a place with an authentic culture, are cancelled. The Cercle Celtique groups who dress in traditional Breton costume and perform the dances and songs are on 2020 hiatus. The Festoú Noz and Deiz I was attending in Bretagne went on live stream. This deserves a post/chapter/exposé of its own.

Fest Noz de Confinement on Facebook Live.

Cute Tourist Trap Pont Aven... How do you wear a mask at a restaurant?

Authentic Breton-ness in Pont Aven is limited to what can be purchased in the shops. This includes striped shirts, Breton cookies, crepes crepes and more crepes, cider, raincoats, and butter. I spent a lot of time looking at a rack of greeting cards which cast the Breton people as backwards, old-fashioned, janky people. In the cards, rotund women in full traditional Breton wear including decorative coifs navigate a cartoon world of tractors, crass sexual innuendo, barn animals, and remove from modern technology. It’s like Bretons are to France what Hillbillies are to America. Also maybe what indigenous people are to America. What does the tourist to Bretagne want to experience? What do they get instead? We got an experience of an abandoned go-kart rink.

Abandoned Go-Kart Rink near Pont Aven Bretagne

Photographing the Breton Flag in Go-Kart Rink - image by duskin drum

In any case, the regional expressions of a place are smoothed over and made less powerful because of mass tourism to the region. The tourists, in seeking to experience “the real thing” are complicit in its erasure. A tourist returns a decade later to find the quaint eccentricities they loved there are no longer there. This leads to a bad case of what anthropologist Renato Rosaldo calls ‘Imperialist Nostalgia’. A new friend, honky tonk singer and anthropologist Kristina Jacobsen tipped me off to this concept. She’s doing cool work in Sardegna, collaborating with traditional singers and players there. The Sards too have had to protect their language and traditions from same-making effects of mass tourism. Blink and the complex-awe-inducing-terrain-of-mystery-and-meaning-you-know-as-home will become just another Italian island with good photo opportunities.

Vasso at the bakery here in Sougia estimates that tourism is down by 50% this year. Michele at the Cafe Santa Irene tells me that if people don’t start showing up, some of the business owners are going to… [pantomimes gun to head]. Crete has had thousands of years of shifting rulership. There have been many seasons of vibe here. Scholar and boyfriend duskin calls what we are living in the Season of Petroleum. I believe that contained within the Season of Petroleum is the Month of Mass Tourism. That month is probably also July, and we are probably also at the end of it. Sorry about this newsletter being a month late. Happy summer solstice.

The corona confinement moment represents a clear rupture in the Month of Mass Tourism. The ease of movement afforded by cheap fuel for planes, trains, and automobiles is a thing of the past. The dream of making seamless transitions between metropoles, rural enclaves, and scenic locales is one we collectively are waking from.

Crete is refreshingly messy. France is formulaic as fuck. America is chaos. My expatriated uncle told me in all seriousness to apply for asylum. Around here I say I’m from France first. Originally from the United States- I say that as a follow up. “It’s a war zone over there,” a stranger said to me the other day.

Stefanos at the grocery store tells me to move to Sougia. What would I do all day? That’s the thing though, about a small place. It becomes more intricate the longer it is witnessed. Tourism tells us a place is its surface. Through a combination of AirSpace and Millennial Premium Mediocrity, we are supposed to slide in and slide out of travel experiences unscathed, and with formulaic documentation of the experience for social media.

I cracked up the other day watching two teenage female appearing people get their younger brother appearing person to take “hot bikini beach photos”TM for them. Returning the favor, the young women took a video of the brother dabbing. I think for TikTok. I note that the process of procuring content is never equivalent to what that content conveys as is happening. More likely getting the content involved the coercion of siblings/girlfriends/grandparents/friends/strangers into photo taking.

I was at the Anchorage restaurant last night paying close attention to the songs playing. I asked the waitstaff about them.

This is a revolutionary song, says Costas. For what revolution? I ask. There was never a revolution in Greece. He says. The songs are like a stockpile for when the real thing happens.

Then a song about labor.

Then a song by a woman whose voice sounds like a man.

Is this Rebetiko music? Yes.

But this one is a Cretan song from a place close by here, in the mountains I drove through to get to Sougia. There were two families, Jason says, and a vendetta between them. The song talks about the arrival of a cool, clear February morning. On this morning one family will attack the other family. Leaving “children without mothers, wives without husbands”. Hundreds were killed in this feud over the generations. Over what? I ask. The same usual thing. Someone stole someone else’s sheep. Then it just escalated? Yep.

Jason has a friend from one of the families who is best friends with a guy from the other.

Surely they know the history?

Yeah but they don’t care. It’s over now and no one cares.

Another guy at the table is camping down the beach. Do you work here? I ask. No, I’m a client. He says. The client/camper is happy because it’s not too busy in Sougia this year. He can camp longer. But sometimes, there is a bit of trouble with the police. It’s illegal, the camping? I ask. What, it’s legal in your country? No. It’s not the town that gives a shit, he says, but police who come in once in a while and make people move who are too near the riverbed.

The riverbed is dry. I put my hand to it on the new moon and feel the moisture below the sand. The shadows of two cats pass by. There are the outlines of cement infrastructural implements on the banks. Around here somewhere are Roman ruins. I’ve only strolled down here at night. Each time I’ve gotten a feeling to turn around.

This place does not feel dangerous though, overall. Already I know the names of enough people that if I was in danger in any place, I could call out to one or two of them.

The shipment truck pulls in front of the bakery. Mythos beers, Amstel light, kegs, Coca Cola, and six packs of liters of Samaria bottled water. So many bottles.

My first night, I go to the Santa Irene Cafe and I ask if its okay to drink from the tap. Michele, bar owner, says, yes, of course, he’s been drinking it his whole life, now he’s 57. Sure, he drinks the bottled water now, but only because it’s around. You know what’s in the bottled water? Formaldehyde he says. The same thing they put in a corpse.

The water is dead. He says this not about the bottled water but about the ocean, the Libyan Sea which once provided the commerce this place operated on. When I am at the Mediterranean, the consciousness of refugees crossing the water, sometimes drowning and sometimes arriving, is always with me. The disparity between my pleasure and the fact of this horror, this humanitarian crisis, is with me. I don’t know what to say about it more than this. I imagine these people every time I swim.

When the first campers came here fifty years ago, says the client/camper, this place was nothing. It was a place where two families fished and brought the animals down to (The feuding families???). All there was on the beach was a little dock and storage facility. The first tourists were full on camping hippies. (Joni? Is that you???)

The tap water is calcium rich. If you drink it, you will become a statue from within, says another man in the bar. By contrast, raki liquor is referred to as “Covid-Killer” by Costas.

The virus has not come to Crete, but as tourism returns this summer, there will be cases. All the locals I talk to know and accept this. I was swabbed on the tongue in the Heraklion airport. A gust of wind blew the paperwork corresponding with the test tubes onto the floor. I went to help pick them up and passed them back to the man in the hazmat suit, maybe in the wrong order. Outside of the airport, masks were in mild abundance. In Heraklion proper, there were even less. Now here in Sougia, they dangle from the ears of some waiters, bartenders, and vendors. No tourist or off-duty local wears one.

I wonder how much of the “casual, haphazard” narrative I am imposing on this place. Coming from France, the differences in social protocols are striking. The camper/client is unloading raki into a glass. He’s drinking it like water. Also next to him is a bottle of red wine he drinks from. Which do you prefer, I ask, wine or raki?

Raki, this isn’t raki, he says. The clear liquid he’s been drinking like water is water. He’s just put it in the plastic bottle that raki is sold in at the store. See, he says to me, that’s your preconception.

Welcome to Touristland! Old Town Chanià, Crete

A similar thing happened the other day. I was reading the Crete guide book, which described a traditional village day of celebration on the 20th of July. The people at the Santa Irene Cafe said there was a party on Saturday, the 19th, up on the hill above this town. There will be singing and dancing.

An image was conjured in my mind- the traditional summer festival in the rural outskirts of this ancient place. I asked some other people about the party. They affirmed it existed.

The night came and I missed it. A couple days later someone says, I thought we’d see you at the party- where were you? Oh, I got my days mixed up. Vacation, you know? How was it?

It was crazy. He goes on to talk about this event, which was actually the opening of the town’s nightclub for the season. Fortuna is the only nightclub in town. Maybe the tradition is buried in there, but more likely it was my own wishful thinking.

The garbage truck drives by during closing time at Anchorage restaurant. It’s just a regular pick-up truck like those smattered all around Jefferson County, Washington. Jason pops out of the restaurant with garbage bags in his hands, at the ready. This is a synchronized moment. Precipitated by what? He and Costas throw the restaurant’s garbage in the truck. The action takes about ten seconds, then, as quickly as the truck emerged, it drives down the road into the night.

They see the look of awe on my face. How did that happen? How did you know they were coming? “Crete Magic” they all say. Like many tourists, I come with a pre-packaged conception about Crete’s ancient supernaturalness. A waiter Tonya is nice enough to write down the Greek alphabet so I can at least pronounce the things I misconceive.

Do the old people on the post cards know that they are on post cards? How did the photographer find them? The thing that is similar between all of the faces is that they are wrinkled, tanned, missing teeth, and displaying a friendliness which makes you think that if you ran into them, they would take you into their old stone hovel and share with you their food and drink. Though they are poor, they are generous.

I walk over to a couple teens choosing postcards from the rack. They are going for more general scenic Crete ones, not the faces of the old people. 1 euro a postcard. Did the postcard subjects get any kickback? I think of the anonymous faces dispersed without consent or payment. Walker Evans’ portraits of Sharecroppers. Edward Curtis’ of Indigenous Americans. The horrific practice of lynching postcards. The lady in the postcard is somebody’s γιαγιά. Below each picture is written in script, Authentic Crete.

What does this term, authentic, mean in this context? Authentic in the Month of Mass Tourism means anything that survives in-spite of the world the tourists are coming from. Any practice that is resilient to the future the tourists return to.

Now the world we tourists came from has no form. It is too busy trying to decide what it is to impose itself on other places. This life in Crete for me is my life. It’s the only place I actually live. I’ll leave in a month, but I don’t know what world I’m “coming back to”. How can tourism exist when humans can’t go back home?

The answer lies in there being no back or forth, in time as a construct of capitalism, in possessive verbs in French in English, in America not being worthy of its creed, in Black Lives Mattering, in Indigenous language resurgence, in ending carbon dependence, in colors other than “red or blue”, in all the other stuff I wanted to write to you about. But instead, we’ll pause and shift to another story. Something about traditional music in Bretagne. It all started with a cabbage.

PART THREE

That Most Impervious of Qualities

Marthe Vassallo is one of those figures. Incomprehensibly cool and talented, she carries on the Breton signing tradition with what I identify as European cosmopolitan grace, mixed with an aura of bygone times. Her kind may have been standing on the cliffside, singing a long ballad for the return of a sailor. Not a sailor she loved but one she’d hexed with hydrangea petals and roses in the barnyard, with cidre and blood in the root cellar, or fire and metal at the lighthouse’s apogee. She was the emblem of the Bretange I’d imagined through the internet. Her presence on Youtube was as visceral to me as the moment I actually saw her, at the Saturday market in Vieux Marché, a small village in the Trégor region, where gangsters and cult leaders are said to be hiding out in estates far from the gaze of the world, and where activists for refugee rights in France are also the organizers of Fest Noz events.

I can hear Marthe’s voice even when she is silent and searching through winter vegetables. She reaches for a green cabbage a couple market stalls away from where I am standing, before a glass case of spiced chèvre. I have chosen a ball of cheese caked in turmeric, fennel seeds, and red pepper. As I pay, I turn my head to my coins, trying to decide wether or not to approach her. I turn my head back, and she has disappeared. All that is left of the woman I so dreamed of meeting was a vacancy in the pile of cabbages.

I was brought to this place by an important friend. Gabriel held the cheeses we’d purchased and I turned in the direction of his car. The smoke from chimneys laced the clear morning air. A church of sand colored stone rung 10:30 AM, ringing in yet another weekend of local life. I couldn’t tell Gabriel, a talented fiddler of many traditions, deeply engrained in the Breton music circuit, that I’d caught a glimpse of my hero, and was now wallowing in the tragedy of not having approached her. The words I might have said to Marthe floated in my brain. My regret billowed with the steam from villager’s cups of hot coffee. I cut my losses. Beyond the honey stand was Gabriel’s car, the Citroen which would carry me from the sting of missed opportunity.

“Where are you going?” He said as I walked toward the vehicle. “We have more business in this town.”

From base of my spine to nape of the my neck, I was filled with a sense of enchantment. The air was cold and I was still fragile, having spent the bulk of that month laid up in bed, suffering from the most severe flu that has ever befallen me. Perhaps it came from spending too long on the cliffside in the rain listening to the sound of distant bombard squealing in the harbor. Perhaps I’d caught my malady from the revelers at New Years festivities, from attending Fest Noz after Fest Noz, where the chains of country dancers held me close in rhythm, sweating into the night, warm with cider and the pleasure of company. The lack of food, lack of human contact, and the lack of physical movement endured from the couch had turned me into the kind of thing sensitive to invisible forces. I was the last leaf on a tree in the square, coming unstuck of its branch and floating now to the door of this ramshackle village house where our business was to be carried out.

We walked into this barn-like entry room, where antique furniture and farm equipment were situated in contrast to a stack of many fresh copies of the same magazine. Shoes and boots still warm from their wearers sat aligned next to another door. On the other side of it, I sensed the warmth of family life, peppered with another ingredient. I could taste it. The ephemeral thing which follows the kinds of people whose lives are made for art. There were people nearby whose work schedules do not align with regular business hours. There was a wooden table here in the entry, crooked with age and scarred by coats of paint. Upon it sat a green cabbage.

We entered a long stretch of living space, at the back of which was gathered a kind of council, circled around the woodstove. I passed through the air around me alert, as though every painting, every sculpture, every photograph hanging about the walls whispered yes, and urged me forward.

Her face is the same shape as the moon, yet carved to produce a jaw sharp with shadow. Her skin is like honey poured over parchment whereupon the first songs in the Breton language were scrawled. Around her were grown men paying rapturous attention to her words. They look up and greet us.

One is the owner of this home. He’s the director of a documentary about the Fest Noz, at the moment it became a piece of “immaterial patrimony”. This distinction is given by UNESCO, which keeps track of endangered languages like Breton. I sat by the director as Marthe was speaking. He and I said words to one another in hurried whispers. Each piece of language lingered in the air above the fire a moment and splashed upon him like a squall of rain, to which he responded by bursts of thought in turn. He did not have the vocal cadence of anyone I’d talked to before in this land. Artist! I had the feeling I was conspiring not so much with somebody but with something. There were chickens outside of the window in a courtyard. At one time this place was the home to a farming family. Now posters for the director’s films hang on the thick stone walls. Yet I could imagine him bent to the earth, humble, nurturing the soil outside, just as well as I could see him focused, taking in this world with a digital camera.

The place smelled of sweaters. Wet wool commingled with the steam of hot beverages and I was offered something to drink. In my hushed voice I said yes and introduced myself as writer, whose subject was the oral transmission of musique Bretonne itself. The weight of the room then shifted to envelop me. I was amidst and one of them, part of a covert operation. I’ll call it a resistance, but the threat is invisible. It is silence itself. We operate just under the surface, carrying the old way, through the tall grassed soaked with rain on a moon-drenched night.

The men are important. Along with the film director, I am introduced to the person who runs Dastum Media, which is the online archive of all Breton music recordings. The project started as a magazine at the critical juncture of the early 70s, when the last original speakers were approaching their deaths. Two my left were two professional and powerful instrumentalists. Across from me was a man from Poland, who ran a Breton music and dance association there, and was here to create a film featuring the interview he is now conducting with the queen of all of them.

She speaks in a way where I can imagine, that if elongated, her words would turn to song. She is calm and surrounded by that most impervious of qualities. Rapt attention from a group of men.

I have a hard time focusing on the words she speaks. We have shaken hands and have been formally introduced, but I am of not of the illusion we have connected or that she will remember me. This is not my goal. My goal is to be soaked by this environment. I want to remember everything. Her words crash over my ears as I sip the strong black tea. I rock in the wicker chair and notice a cat on the prowl. The window beyond Marthe’s head reveals the back of the church. We are all but meters away from the altar. I am aware that this has long been a sacred mound of land. Now the council has gathered to protect the thing with no true boundary. It is not God. It is music.

She speaks of a woman who gave her a hard time for having learned a version of a Breton gwerz from a 1990s field recording found on Dastum. She is then talking about a spring fed fountain. These stories go back and forth. She speaks, turning into the Polish man’s microphone. It is hard to catch every word. But she is talking about the limits of acceptable tradition in Breton music. I have already manufactured a belief, having seen her on Youtube, that she is the vanguard of what acceptable evolution of tradition is. Though the Breton music scene is dominated by male musicians, she shines brightest to me. She is neither pop star nor hometown hero. I’d put her age between 35 and 52, but her eyes scream childlike whimsy, and her comportment is that of a wise woman crone.

Marthe finishes a final talking point. The men start to murmur, and the circle is humming with the ideas of these people. I have a hard time accepting that this meeting should be adjourned. For I’ve arrived at the heart of my inquiry. I want to stay forever in the the unnamable core, in this world of tradition bearers, whose shared goal is to be of service to songs and melodies, which, I remind myself, are in French called airs. They are the stuff we breathe.

How will I elongate the morning so as to never make it end? I want to take a picture, or a covert video of the moment. Could I back up to the end of the room and take a shot of the group? No. Too corny. I opted instead to go the bathroom, leaving the company of all of them, and committing as much of the space to memory as possible. In the bathroom I looked over the chickens in strutting int he yard. The plucked away at the earth, scratching it with their talons, creating impressions.

There is something about that day I can’t hold onto no matter how hard I try.

I returned to the living room with desperation on my tongue. If I was smart I would ask her if I could call her and arrange an interview at her home. I should get the contact information for all of these people. By what means could I manufacture this feeling again? The sense of wonder and intrigue brought a lightness to my stomach, which was lately so twisted with flu and angst, because the constant search for comfort, as this comfort which now fades from me, drives me to want to consume the room. With a picture, I could at least prove that it once was like this. That I found the one I sought. She was putting on her coat. These people had places to be. She pulled her dark hair back and it poured over her shoulders like black water over river stones. I am not the customer, I am not the customer. I am the witness, I am the stranger, and I have heard the secrets of an ancient world, refracting through her vocal cords in this special time that she was alive, and I had the fortune of her company.

A badass from history - don't know the origins of this picture. But I found it on my computer right next to this one which was weird:

OUTRO!

Before we part, here’s an announcement. I may or may not have an online birthday party wherein I show 0-3 music videos. I’ll keep ya in the loop. My birthday is August 30th.

Here are a few more recommendations too. Molly Young is a new friend made online who wrote this incredible thing about being in confinement, and has an awesome newsletter with book recommendations. Read the book White Tears by Hari Kunzru. I've been quoting it in the newsletter- it's about 78 collecting and white people stealing Black music. The miniseries on Netflix, Unorthodox, is really freaking good. There is this musical moment that brought me into a state of hysterically crying.

Melanie Beth Curran 4/28/20 Melanie Beth Curran 4/28/20

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?... — *..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 — 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!

Melanie Beth Curran 1/6/20 Melanie Beth Curran 1/6/20

E Kreiz an Noz, Volkslieder, dxʷləšucid, Wind as Original Speaker, Circle Pits, Glottal Stop, Local Television, Rock n' Roll School Teachers, and Jack Kerouac's Hotel

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It brings me great pleasure to write you, as I have been so inspired lately, with an imagination full to bursting. This newsletter is going to be longer than the others have been, with many links, anecdotes, and ideas. So curl up with your cup of nog, or other festive beverage of choice, and come along for a ride into the depths of my mind on Bretagne.

This story starts with the first Breton song I fell in love with, called E Kreiz ah Noz by Youenn Gwernig. I encountered it while listening to a youtube mix of Breton music that might have been created by the algorithm. Youenn Gwernig was a poet who had to leave his Breton homeland for work in America. While living in The Bronx, he befriended Jack Kerouac and some other beatniks. Jack (Jacques) Kerouac and Gwernig made good friends, as Kerouac became more interested in his own Breton ancestry.

A gentleman in the bar below my apartment tells me that Jack Kerouac, when he came to Bretagne to discover his roots, inspired by his pal Youenn Gwernig no doubt, stayed in the hotel down the street. Apparently Kerouac was drunk and dejected for his entire stay on my road, la rue Victor Hugo, and had no success in finding the meaning he sought. I feel lucky to be enmeshed in the spaces named for and shared by dead poets.

I hope I can be a living poet though, and shed some light upon the also alive reality of Breton-ness. Breton is the language native to the place where I am in France, and bears no resemblance to French. Close linguistic relatives to Breton include Welsh, Cornish, and Gaelic Irish.

The language is considered ‘Endangered’ by UNESCO. Breton, like native North-American tongues, was forcefully forbade from being spoken in schools, and in public spaces, during the early half of the 20th century. These policies were a very effective way of taking Breton out of everyday life. I am a visitor to this part of the world in the decades following the Breton revival, which occurred hand-in-hand with the live amplification, and the recorded dissemination of Breton music during the 1960s and 70s.

A song is a welcoming thing, and thus it was the door I walked through when approaching the possibility of making the sounds of Breton myself. It is a language new to me as of this October. Each language is at its foundation musical, I believe, and each speaker of language is therefore a musician. If you don’t believe me, try speaking a sentence aloud, very slowly, while moving the tone of your voice up and down. Tell a story while doing this. This is how a song is created. Case closed.

So I hunkered down with the youtube video of E Kreiz an Noz, listened to it over and over again, used the slow-down feature to write down the lyrics phonetically, eventually committing the sounds as I heard them to my memory, until I was able to sing them back by heart, despite not really knowing what the words meant. Most Breton music, whether lyrical or instrumental is learned by ear, without tablature or written notation. E Kreiz an Noz, and Breton music in general, feels particularly accessible to me, as a person with very little formal musical training.

My life as a musician baffles me. My musicality “shouldn’t be”, according to the tenants of formal, western composition. And yet it is! As I reflect on my years making sounds wrongly, I realize how much of the music I know was learned by proximity to other musicians.

Just faking my way through Irish Trad Music Jam... Picture by Alexandre!

This summer, three high school friends and I visited a new exhibit at the Bainbridge Island Historical Museum in Washington State, where we grew up. Fearless Music “explores four decades (1980 - 2018) of a vibrant, independent music scene on Bainbridge Island”. The exhibit featured interviews and artifacts literally collected from the people I visited the exhibit with. A recording of Charlie talking about The Blood Barn played back from a speaker on the wall. A flyer with John’s face on it hung amongst others preserved from shows at the Bainbridge Grange. The ephemera of the music we made and danced to as teenagers stared back at us. As we walked out of the museum, one of us vocalized what we were all feeling. “Well, we’re history now”.

Was the museum wrong in creating boundaries around a time, and a movement? Was the existence of the exhibit itself the final death blow to it? Those who had created the exhibit had found that punk and DIY scene on our island had existed as a forty-year continuum. Now there was little to no sign of it occurring. This fact is corroborated by my younger siblings, who did not spend their weekends thrashing in moshpits, nor have the multifarious options to do so as I did. Commemorating the music now made sense.

The droning heavy metal, the circle pits, and the handmade fliers that accompanied performances which to me bordered on ritual, had fallen asleep, decomposed, gone back to the island whose boundaries created the conditions for a homemade creativity, as we were compelled to invent our own entertainment.

I watch videos of Bainbridge Island musicians from this period of "Fearless Music", online. The first takes place in 1983 or 84, and features frontman of Malfunksun, Andrew Wood, pandering to his audience. I write down what he says, as it seems to me a manifesto for the forty years that followed him: “We’re here. We’re not just going to let it go on like a little show. We want to see the whole place going wild like these smart people over here. Now you people, you’re wasting the floor! Go sit at the bar if you’re gonna do that. I want you to all sweat.”

His message is clear. Either you participate, or you get out of the way. Malfunkshun’s proto-grunge drone begins, and the people start to writhe. Another video exists from 1992, of a band called The Rickets playing at Island Center Hall on Bainbridge. The camera focuses less on the musicians and more on the audience, who appear between flashes of strobe, flailing their limbs in all directions as they run around in a circle, knocking into one another, bouncing off one another, becoming an extension of the music, which sounds a lot like the Malfunkshun song played ten years earlier.

From 2006-9, when I was in high school, I spent my Friday nights in that very same hall, making the very same motions, albeit in a smaller and more dense circular nebula of bodies, to bands that basically sounded the same as Malfunkshun or The Rickets. I didn’t know why we did what we were doing. Only now do I realize that these nights were manifestations of oral tradition, were intergenerational imitations, were expressions that adhere to the very definition of a regional music and dance.

Maybe more specifically, to the first category of what a folk-music is, according to the person who invented the concept of folk-song in the first place. Johann Gottfried von Herder, a German philosopher and student of Emmanuel Kant, coins the term “folksong” with his 1778 classic, Volkslieder. The “most pure” version of folksongs, are “songs transmitted from generation to generation by the oral voice, amplified in the mouths of peasants, fishermen, etc.” (translation mine)

We teen folk of Bainbridge Isle, in the period from 1980-2018, were this “etc”.

The band I danced to then, WEEED, continues to play together now, and toured in Europe this (r)oc(k)tober. Afterwards, drummer Evan and his partner Claire came to visit me in Brest. We went to a small Fest Noz together. A Fest Noz is an event of Breton music and dance that takes place at night, and a Fest Deiz is the same thing, but in the day. Musicians play and/or sing Breton pieces, and a circle of people dance arm-in-arm, in coordination. This continues for hours.

At the Fest Noz, I watch as Evan records some of the music as a voice-memo on his phone. “This sounds exactly like a WEEED riff,” he says of the Breton melody.

Rolling around with Evan and Claire at Ateliers Capucins

Interesting.

When I arrived at my first Fest Noz this September, I had the distinct feeling I’d been at something similar to it, before. The circle of bodies, the droning modal music, the cheap entry fee- it all felt so familiar somehow. As I walked into the mist down by the beach to reflect, I understood how the DIY musical renaissance in Bretange was, not only analogous to the homemade hardcore shows of my youth, the “fearless music” of my home island, but to square dances and honky tonk dances I have been playing and participating in for the last ten years of my life.

I look up another video online. It’s a clip of my friend and bandmate Joanne Pontrello calling a square dance in the Tractor Tavern in Ballard, Washington while the Tallboys String-Band plays in 2011. The band only exists because the people dance. The people dance only because the band exists. Circles form, strings moan. Joanne directs.

Call this youtube spiral of mine extreme home-sickness, but it is also something else. Through the internet, I see myriad expressions of the regional creativity of the place I am from, and appreciate what I know and do not know about it. The Tallboys used to play at The Pike Place Market. I heard a reflection recently from writer Sean Jewell, that anyone who busks at the Pike Place Market long enough, develops a kind of grating voice as a device to cut through the sounds of crowds, fishmongers, and the downtown drone of vehicles. This vocal quality is evidenced clearly in a video of Baby Gramps from 1984. I am told that I too have developed this vocal quality, which is basically just abrasive projection. I am sure this comes from having had to scream at the market while playing music.

With Davey Haul at Pike Place Market in 2016 I think. Picture by Heather Littlefield!

In the most mystical manifestation of a Christmas Miracle I could ever dream of, fish monger and proprietor of Jack’s Fish Spot in the Pike Place Market, Jack Mathers, has created this Christmas music video, “The Brand New Christmas”, which is filmed at the market, and features a wide variety of characters who hang around and work there. Jack has been the employer of least two generations of my family members, the Currans, so witnessing his creative output hits extremely close to home.

My mom wrote in our family text chain about Jack’s music video, “Now if that doesn’t get you in the Northwest Christmas spirit, u r NOT from the NW!” True. My sister wrote, “That’s the most Seattle thing I have ever seen. He even managed to make it 4:20 minutes long.” Which is remarkable, because the song itself only lasts 3 minutes and 40 seconds. My father writes one thing only: “Yes this is real”.

Although my father’s comment may seem redundant, the reality of the video’s reality, is something worthy of pointed focus. The Brand New Christmas is evidence that on December 19th, 2019, a regional, brand new, old school, low-budget, living folkloric creative entity thrived into digital existence, and defies the categorization of what traditional music even is.

When Herder decides in the late 1700s, who the real “Folk” are, he also does the initial work of removing the idea of these artists from the academy, the city, and the state progressing toward modernity. Herder was a romantic, in that he was a leading force of the romantic movement, which cast the “backwards country people” under a blanket of nostalgia.

Viewed from a place of remove by the experts, the “people” and their art forms always seem on the verge of disappearing. The authentic and pure forms of humanity, unsploit by modernity, are described in word that turns what is occurring right now, into already being history. Songs, poems, and stories are therefore relics, artifacts, excavated gems. In 1918, Breton music was described by a French intellectual Charles Quef, who came to the region to analyze Breton music:

“It is the Breton tenacity (proverbial in France) which has been able to preserve their precious and ancient artistic heritage almost intact and with many traces of its primitive origin. We must rejoice over this, for we are enabled by that tenacity (we might almost say stubbornness) to possess a jewel wherein we can admire one of the finest and most peculiar branches of the popular musical art of France.”

For hundreds of years now, the modern, advanced, knowing world has been making relics of very real, existing, arts of those tenacious enough to "preserve their precious and ancient artistic heritage."

Charles Quef, were you jealous? Were you unable to see yourself as other to something unknowable to you? Did it cross your mind that that jewel you possessed (Bretagne) might have had as much intellectual and creative power as anything you’d been touched by in your life? Did it hurt you to have this line of demarcation etched in your brain and heart? To believe so hard in the division, between the traditional, and its opposite, the now-happening?

I personally like to mess with “the traditional”, in terms of old-time music. Consider this term! Old Time. What time is that? When did it become old? This month I created a Youtube banjo video with my updated version of Fred Cockerham’s clawhammer hit from I think 1939, Roustabout, which is a tune that goes back even further in African American banjo music, first recorded by Dink Roberts, and Josh Thomas. I call my song Roustabout for the Modern Woman. In the same vein, I made a song/video a few years ago called Shady Grove for The Modern Woman.

I create these updated old-time songs mostly to entertain myself, but they function as resistance to the notion that a folksong lives in an imagined, and more authentic past.

Bretagne (Breizh) especially bears the brunt of being shrouded in a past tense by the outside world, that de-authenticates its current expressions. But they are alive! I will give you an example from a couple nights ago.

I am standing outside of a bar in Brest, talking to a couple guys in the rain. I ask them my usual questions. Are you musicians? Do you speak Breton? One of the guys says yes to both. Feeling particularly fearless (this moment brought to you by Correff Bio), I say that I know only one song in Breton. I proceed to sing E Kreiz ah Noz, the way I have learned it off of Youtube.

To my joy, he starts starts singing with me. I purposely slow my singing down, just a touch, so that I can echo his pronunciations. I self-correct in correlation with him, and learn a different way of making the sounds I thought I knew, kind of.

By having a living, breathing person in front of me, agreeing on the sounds in real time, making music in coordination, I sense the Breton language as not so endangered, but as manifesting in ways not yet considered active.

This person goes on to tell me that he himself has written a song in Breton, recently. It is about the first time a Jazz band to ever came to Europe. The band arrived by boat, here, in the harbor of Brest, he tells me, describing the arrival of a black band from America. He starts to sing his song. I recognize few words. “Jazz Afro-Americain”, and Brest, and a refrain of our/my Brest.

A song emerges that defies what an elderly archivist told me a couple months ago. If you are here to collect songs Melanie Curran, you don’t need to. All Breton folksongs have already been collected.

This is a traditionalist’s definition of tradition. I long for a more absurd definition or conceptual frame.

Ahem, for example:

The ideal field recording to me, is the one I made of the only Breton song I know, E Kreiz an Noz, being screamed by young drunk men on a shuttle bus at 6 in the morning, heading back to downtown Rennes.

In this field recording, captured on November 24th, 2019, one hears the lyrics of Bretagne’s Bob Dylan, Youenn Gwernig’s E Kreiz an Noz, being “butchered” by a very loud and passionate male. Others on the bus attempt to sing with him, while forgetting the lyrics. Other voices are heard speaking French, as the bus prepares to drop off its passengers from the night they have shared in an airplane hanger on the outskirts of the city. They were at The Largest Fest-Noz in Bretagne, Yaouank, which in Breton means “Youth”. Bretagne’s local television channel, France 3 Bretagne, created a 2 minute and 43 second spot on the event, and described it as having been “12 Hours of Dance”.

At minute 1:10 in this video, a young male-appearing person in a tank top emerges on the screen. He is, in fact, someone I danced a waltz with that night. Of the Yaouank experience, he expresses the following sentiment for the news camera (translation mine): "I have the impression that life often lacks a social connection. And the fact that it is found here, with so many people, linked arm-in-arm- makes me see how it is missing the rest of the time. It reconnects our hearts, and it reconnects us to others.”

Scene.

Through channel France 3 Bretagne, Bretagne can see itself reflected as existing, although through a kind-of removed journalistic tone. The tone is like - wow! We can’t even believe all of these things are happening, right here in Bretagne! Even though we live here! There have been multiple times in the last couple months when I’ve met someone, googled their name or organization, and found videos about them and their work by Bretagne 3. The station’s headquarters is located a few minutes walk from my house. But this local TV station’s power to represent the people of this land, pales in comparison to what is probably the most amazing homemade social networking website in the world, www.tamm-kreiz.bzh.

This website exists for one reason and one reason only. To tell people where the Festoù-Noz and Deiz are, and when they are happening. It is also a way to see who is playing at them. You can click on the name of a group and find out which musicians are in it. Then you can click on the name of the musician and see what other bands they are in. You can see when those bands are playing and where. You can see who is attending the event. There is a rideshare message board. Tamm-Kreiz gives me hope that there can be alternate social medias, people’s-facebooks, sites that actually foster human relationship in real time, at real events, instead of propagating isolation and anxiety as many report instagram does.

On Tamm-Kreiz, I have accidentally stumbled upon the profiles of people I’ve met in person. The website shows me what incredible, prolific musicians they are. One of these people is the highly badass Sterenn, who plays in many groups, one of which is this fabulous all-female trio called Dixit.

The evening of Yaouank, I meet Sterenn for the first time and get to stay at the house of her and her roommate in Rennes. I have been put into connection with the two of them through a musician named Gab in Brest, who I, of course, met at a bar. I promise I am not spending this entire Fulbright period in bars. They are absolutely a part of my ethnographic strategy, though.

Sterenn’s apartment is sort of like the Fearless Music exhibit, in that the walls are covered in flyers from Festou-Noz/Deiz she has attended, or played at, or both. Also on the wall is the of an elderly Breton man side by side with a Native-American. Which reads, Bretagne / America, 500 years of Resistance.

A vintage poster in a Rennes living room

What is different about this space, is that it is not a museum, but a place in the act of resisting. It is a smoke-filled, people-filled living-room where people in their early 20s are harmonizing together, singing what sound to me like ancient medieval ballads in many part harmony.

They do this between plays of songs on Youtube, such as Super Freak and Crocodile Rock, and other more modern songs I don’t know the names of, because I have a tendency to only notice things from the 70s. Eventually they ask me what kind of Breton music I have started to listen to.

Thank God for you, Youenn Gwernig. I put on E Kreiz an Noz, the only song I can remember, which I can barely spell at this point. I find the song on youtube mostly because I recognize the picture of Youenn, standing stoically in a field, and looking off into the windy horizon, hands in pockets.

The song plays, and every person in that room sings along. It’s beautiful to me. These young people are admittedly all Breton musicians, but for a moment I want to believe that all young people in Bretagne sing old songs together on Saturday nights. I understand that some of the people at this party knew each other from having been classmates in the Diwan, or bi-lingual Breton school system.

The system of bi-lingual Breton schools is referred to by France 3 Bretagne as this struggling, archaic entity. There is a hard-hitting news story called, What Future for the Diwan Schools? The more I learn about Diwan, the more I am impressed by the way they have resisted being un-futured by the outside world, and apparently their own local news network.

How Diwan was made is a legend of rock n' roll and passion. In 1977, a child in Bretagne was hard-pressed to find an elder who could speak to them in the native tongue. So effective was the process of language repression, that most primary speakers had been silenced.

With the Breton musical revival in the 70s, came the recording of songs and oral histories, which resulted in a boundless creativity, as younger musicians riffed off what came before them, now accessible at the newly invented Festoú Noz and Deiz, or through records.

Young musicians entwined new genre influences in their song-writing, while remaining in fidelity to lyrics and rhythmic structures of Breton sound. The most well-known pioneers of the revival, is Alan Stivell, whose 1971 album Renaissance of The Celtic Harp, is a cornerstone of Breton recorded sound from that period.

It is the band Storlok though, which is given the title of the first Breton Rock Band. The leader of this band, Denez Abernot, is described on wikipedia as a auteur-composer-interpreter, a fisherman and boat captain, and an actor. He was also the first teacher of the first Diwan class in 1977, which consisted of five children. The height of his rock n’ roll career and his teaching career occurred simultaneously.

This gives me hope. That a local rockstar/fisherman can start teaching kids the language of their elders, at a homemade school. Diwan started with five kids and a singer. Now there are 4,337 students in attendance at 54 Diwan schools in Bretagne.

Writing about and from this place, I see the Puget Sound in glimpses of memory. For the first time in my life, I look up the Suquamish Tribe’s website. These are the people whose land my ancestors homesteaded on Bainbridge Island, and whose land my family still occupies.

As I look at the map on the Tribe’s website, I see that many of the beaches I grew up on are the sites of permanent winter settlements, long-houses, and places where Tribal life articulates in the dxʷləšucid / Twulshootseed. Albeit no longer with those structures in place. Those beaches look like waterfront property and no-trespassing signs and road ends and parking lots and kayaks stacked up.

Locations of Suquamish Winter Settlements

I switch to present tense here on purpose, as a way of suggesting that the indigenous language of the Puget Sound, described often as coming literally from the land, is still there. That a white/anglo linguistic reality has been superimposed over this space, and it doesn’t completely fit. English lacks the capacity to describe and make real the Puget Sound environment, and the American environment, even to colonizer-Americans, who seem to be ever-longing for their roots.

Take Jack Kerouac, in his hotel room, drunk, finding nothing of himself in Bretagne. Listening to the same tones of wind, pulsing as they do now, down the rue Victor Hugo.

I also notice on the map that the sites of settlements of the Suquamish on Bainbridge, are now public beaches. Places that I went often alone growing up. Places I return to when I am back home now. I got to these places because I find it easy to do a few things while at them: To play music, to write poetry, and to clear my head, by listening. Tom Waits says “A song is just something interesting to do with the air.” I think the air on those beaches is the kind of air that wants to be made interesting.

The map points to the location of one such settlement in what is now called Eagle Harbor, where the Bainbridge / Seattle ferry comes. A memory comes to me. I walked down to that beach once, and put a stone in my mouth. I sucked on it, desiring for the stone to tell me something about the way my mother had lived on the island, the way my grandparents had lived on the island, and back and back. I did it simply because I felt like I didn’t know enough about the place I grew up. I wasn’t stoned or anything, I just had the literal feeling that I could access a new sense of how to understand, by putting the rock in my mouth. Sort of like learning a new word.

I enter cautiously into my research of Salish languages. As I do in Bretagne, I feel like I am a visitor to these websites. What I want to know is how language revival looks for the tribes whose land I grew up on. I am aware that I have never made an effort to consider this before. Bretagne points me toward the investigation of the place I am from, and the language that is indigenous to that place.

I learn many things online.

I learn that the indigenous language of the Salish people is alive, evolving, and being taught. The Puyallup Language Program is a very active group of people working for the language. Their mission statement is straightforward: "Our goal is to revitalize the Twulshootseed Language. The method we find most effective is to just speak the language."

One of the practices for described for implementing dxʷləšucid into daily life is to create “a language nest”, or a designated place in the house where only dxʷləšucid is be spoken. In this way, learning a language, and making it part of your life, becomes an act of performance art, according to Zalmai Zahir, who “may be the most fluent dxʷləšucid speaker now alive”.

Concurrent with state-sanctioned efforts to mute Breton language in school and public places, was a similar, but more violent effort to do the same in America with indigenous tongues. To reverse this, the making-daily of language has to be somewhat forced. Institutions like the Diwan schools in Bretagne are an example of how designating a space for a language to live, is how a place can teach a language back to its listeners.

I suggest that grunge, droning rock n’ roll in Kitsap county community halls, circle-pits, square dances, vocalizations of Pike Place buskers, are a version of authentic oral patrimony of the Pacific Northwest. That these music forms are repetitions and reactions and impressions of sounds made by ferries docking, rigging hitting metal, trees shaking, rain falling, sewer grates clogging with pine needles, the gathering of sap underneath bark, the collapse and crunch of the cement and rebar of the viaduct being torn-down.

As I watch instructional Youtube videos about the dxʷləšucid / Twulshootseed language, I think of how generations of my Bainbridge Island family have both been deaf to, and have accidentally heard this language over more than a century.

In Port Madison bay, dxʷləšucid is not lost, or dead, but rather is in the process of being concealed by a history of real estate proceedings, architectural marvels, overfishing, yachts. My family, the Johnsens, possess a text of dock, bulkhead, basement, hot tub, elevated porch, and living room, where in a few days my family will spend Christmas together. There is a language of Nat King Cole, and a language of gift paper unwrapping. How can activity of my family’s settlement at the head of the bay be interpreted as music, and a music which allows for the vocalization of dxʷləšucid?

The other night I went to sleep asking my Puget Sound ancestors, both related to me by blood and not, to let me know what I needed to understand to be a writer, artist-musician, and active-ator-ist of “the traditional”.

In my dream I was on a windy outcropping by the raging sea, in the rain, in Bretagne. It could have been a Puget Sound place too. There were many large tents designated for music making. I had to help take them down so that they wind wouldn’t blow them away. As I did this, I saw another, smaller tent, made for camping. There was blood pooling out of the back of it, where a head might be laying inside. I said to aloud, What is that, the death of a language?

I woke up to the sense that my room was full of people, who were all making the glottal stop in unison, a sound I’d practiced that night when repeating the sounds of the dxʷləšucid alphabet, from an online video.

I opened my eyes and looked around for these people, but my room was dark and empty. Outside the wind howled through Brest. The way a dream leaves you with an idea you are absolutely sure of. For example I knew then that wind taught people to create both language and song. That the hitting of something rhythmically on my window was a potential origin of the glottal stop.

To hear dxʷləšucid, I listen to the storytelling of Vi Hilbert, watch videos made by the Puyallup Tribal Language Program, and watch Zalmai Zahir narrate the process of frying an egg. I listen to an episode of the All My Relations Podcast on the importance of activating native language use in North America, where I learn that a person who is able to tell their creation story in their tribal language, is much less likely to commit suicide than someone who can't.

Words are the foundations of poems and lyrics, through and with them, meaning, time, and physical space, act.

I hope that by sharing the Breton world I witness, I can use language to make verbal, to make into verbs, the words that stand-still, like nouns! Folk (ing) Volks (ing) People (ing).

By preferring verbs, can I use language to help in the decolonizing of regions affected by the destructive migration of people who have had the same skin color, facial structures, light eyes, as me?

As a white person, as an English listener/speaker, as a scholar, as a writer, can I accept what I do not understand, without imposing English on what I witness? Can I listen to Chet Baker’s Almost Blue and not hear the words as words but only as raw sound? I almost do this in my living room one night, and it's sort of like when you repeat a word over and over until you forget what it means.

If you are not bi-lingual or poly-lingual, I can only encourage you to let yourself enter the space of not understanding a language, of being confused by it, willingly. Knowing not knowing as an alternate wisdom.

There is enough that has already by agreed upon and rationalized.

The internet provides many opportunities to get lost. I impose confusion on myself by listening to a Breton language radio station for a day. Or to the Sicilian songs sung by Matilde Politi. To music made by the Ainu people of Japan. I have no idea what the words mean, and yet, I have ideas about what they might imply, which I let pass through me like small tempests.

There is still so much I don’t know about in Breton life, and probably never will. I take account of the things I witness, I put them down in an order according to the way my brain makes meaning of experiences.

The most intricate dance in Bretagne is called The Fisel. I watch a video of a Fisel competition. Even though this is a public event, and individuals are scored, I notice how the dance relies on being passed around the circle, from person to person. One cannot do it alone.

I meet a person in a bar who is young and organizes the Festival Fisel. He is wearing a baseball cap that says Folklore, and says Folklore is like his sports team, because he doesn’t play like soccer or baseball. This hat is created by a French Canadian musician with incredible red hair whom I have met at Fiddle Tunes.

I play Irish music with my friend in Brest, who has learned tenor banjo through youtube videos. He makes a recording of me singing John Prine’s Paradise, and saying phrases about saving the environment. He puts these recordings of me to electronic beats in his apartment. This is regional music in Brest in the sense it is music created in Brest.

Yann Tiersen, the composer of the soundtrack for 2002’s Amélie, is from also from Brest (Brestois) and recently performed at a free concert for Diwan Schools, which I attended. I noticed how his compositions, particularly one for the violin, rely on what I understand as a drone in modal music. He recently released an album which was recorded on the most Northwestern island in Europe, Bretagne’s Ouessant, where he now lives.

The droning violin song is call Introductory Movement. I find it on Youtube. The recording features the use of heavy guitar, played by Stephen O’Malley, one half of drone-metal band Sunn O))). O’Malley and his band hail from Seattle, Washington.

The weather here is familiar to me, in the sense it is like Seattle’s. Rain and Grey skies abound. I hear the calls of seagulls in the morning. What I am not used to though, is the wind.

The wind sweeps away weather like a sponge over a counter-top. The wind comes from all directions at once, and transforms the day I thought I was having in the morning, to a completely different kind of day by afternoon. I am still. The lyrics of E Kreiz an Noz, speak of the phenomenon of these winds, blowing through a concentrated center. E Kreiz an Noz means, In the Middle of the Night.

“It’s weird that you like this song,” said one of the musicians in Sterenn’s living room, the night of Yauoank. “No, like, it’s weird because of the fact you’re American.”

I’m still trying to figure out what was meant by this.

I get a Breton/French dictionary from the library.

The song’s first four verses talk about four winds. A wind from the East- a metaphor for the influence coming from Paris, or the centralized French government which suppresses Breton language / culture, I think. A wind from the West, or America, where Gwernig immigrates to find employment, and also meets Jack Kerouac. Jack Kerouac, the saint of wanderers, Sûr la Route, On the Road. A third wind that comes from the sea, and a fourth wind that comes from the earth itself.

Each of these winds arrive in the middle of the night, and blow over the place where Youenn, or any Breton person, lives. House as is Chez as in Pays as in home-country as in father-land. The fifth and final verse says, It doesn’t matter from which direction the winds come, because every kind of wind carries both the desire to live with, and the potential of having already acquired, liberty in Bretagne.

The noun Kreiz, middle/center, sounds like the verb that follows it in the chorus, c’hwezit, meaning blowing.

The still middle can resemble an active blowing. A woman in a bar (yes another bar) asks me if I have ever stood in the middle of the bridge Recouvrance, which spans the Penfeld River dividing Brest in half, during a windstorm.

“The other night,” she says, “I stood at the midpoint of the bridge while the wind was blowing furiously. And I tell you, the bridge was singing.”

Wind as song maker, wind as storyteller. Wind as original musician playing the material of the earth.

I take the Breton word for “wind”, avel, and put it into Dastum’s search engine. Dastum is another miraculous Breton website, where the entire recorded archives of Breton music, called the “oral patrimony”, are available online. Following the word avel, I listen to a snippet of an old woman singing, a conversation in Breton, and a beautiful melody.

A singer in town tells me she uses the Dastum resource often to learn new songs, which she then teaches her students, by ear, by call and response. Word of mouth, literally mouth to ear, or bouche à l’orielle.

Are we not better equipped to be singing, living, and creating new traditional music today, having the company of so many ghosts?

These traces of musicians, remaining through recordings, are not limited to Bretagne. The American website, slippery-hill, has a similar archive of field recordings of fiddle tunes. Including very recently made “field recordings”.

The most beautiful Breton band I have seen so far is called Barba Loutig. This is a four person, all-female band that employs voice and percussion only. Theirs was one of the the most powerful live performances I have ever seen. I was crying a lot. My emotions had something to do with the way they took Breton music, and wove other sounds from around the world.

I go to a conference on the digitization of traditional music, and the opening sentiment is from a man who says that traditional music is not here to amuse. It is instead a river that is growing, that is gathering more force. He uses the active verbs.

Someone else on the panel says Breton music has a habitude de mélanger, a habit of mixing. I watch the Barba Loutig that evening, at a musical festival in Brest called “No Border”, which is how their music sounds.

I was at a jam session the other night, in a bar forcement, of course, and a new friend named Gab attempted to play George Michael, Careless Whisper, as a traditional Breton gavotte, on his violin. When I ask Gab, a full-time musician, what he thought traditional music is, he says “it’s whatever the audience needs.”

I need E Kreiz an Noz. First I am an audience to it. Then I am a student of the song. After enough practice, I am one of the song’s carriers. The song becomes a way to combat my isolation as foreigner. As I sing it for the first time with another person, outside of the bar, I sense myself as having arrived at a new center, though I have stood outside of this bar’s door a few times now.

Center as a place where the wind blows through. Where the element of wind instructs us on how to speak and sing.

While the West destroys, it also catalogues what it has muted. The art of creating systems of remembrance can take on many forms.

My friend and fellow Fulbrighter Ross, who has just finished his period of research in Bretagne, said of his Fest-Noz experience: It was not for entertainment.

Andrew Wood says to those in his 1983 audience, You’re wasting the floor. Breton music and dance is also not for watching.

Ross also suggests the Fest Noz is an opportunity for trance. Stephen O’Malley, from Seattle’s Sunn O))), who is now collaborating with Yann Tiersen in Bretagne, describes trance and audience engagement in a collective experience of the heavy, heavy drone metal, as the goal of the live experience of Sunn O))).

I never listened to hardcore music alone, on records. As a teenager, I didn’t care for the genre in any other form than the live experience. I could lose myself, while becoming a part of the others around me, without thinking, and without feeling judged for the way my body interacted with space.

I also admit that I’ve never really listened to old-time music. I have never really sought out field recordings, or old-time CDs, or playlists, for my at-home entertainment. Instead, I have contacted and learned that music through the live experience of square-dance, or through playing the tunes and singing songs with other people.

My favorite musicians, my favorite bands, and the most brilliant songwriters I am aware of, are people that I know and have known. People I can call on the phone. Perhaps you.

I still doubt myself everyday, and fight against a feeling that I am not good enough, nor in anyway entitled to the title of bard. Despite the many experiences I have had to the contrary, I can’t shake the sense that I have no right to make music.

How much of my anxiety comes from centuries of a cultivated intellectual and social division between the natural, authentic, folk impulse of the peasants, the fisherman, etc. as decreed by Johann Herder and those who followed him- and that of the modern world, which deals in progress and the death of things all things that came before it.

All things that are still resting.

This is why I encourage every person I know to create something, even something “really dumb”, that will not make them famous, or make them money, but will instead function as a liaison between self and environment. I will have a lot more of this kind of musical output for you soon, in the form of my second full-length-double-length album, The Great Jet-Setter Heart Disaster ! Coming out someday! More on that after I write a bunch of grants and try not to freak out about how to get money for art and try to settle more into the state-mandated relaxation period of French Vacances that starts after I press send on this letter to you all.

And remember! If you are socially awkward (me a lot of the time here!!! Even if it doesn't seem like it from this newsletter!!!) maybe just sing a song to an audience of ‘inanimate’ objects. They're great listeners. Maybe we can also be great listeners to them.

E Kreiz an Noz is now a song I carry. My body, my life, has become a vessel for it. This song is not a burden, it has no weight, but is instead like the visitation of wind, which makes bridges sing, and bodies too.

Clearly going a little nuts... In a good way!!

I am thankful to be joined in my nerd-dom by some choice correspondents.

My penpal and other inhabitant of the head of Port-Madison Bay, Emily Abby, had started to write a blog. I have long been astounded at how Emily’s family home is just down the hill from my family’s original homestead on Bainbridge. I feel this imbibes us with a similarity of language and thought.

Check out Danica Boyce’s Fair Folk Podcast, which rediscovers and shares “the sacred song and folk traditions of Europe”. With episodes like Gnome for Christmas: the Midwinter Household Spirit, and Winter Solstice, Queen of Feasts, one can gain a nuanced understanding of why we do what we are doing during the Holidays. Except I don’t know if any amount of research can explain the pagan roots of Jan Terri’s “Rock And Roll Santa”. I am excited to be hosting Danica in the spring for a collaboration in Bretange!

I am lucky to have a correspondence with fellow Northwestern-island-human turned scholar-living-abroad-who-is-thinking-a-lot-too, Duskin Drum. He has started sending out a newsletter from his post in Shanghai. I am so thankful for his perspectives on language, time, and weird regional creativities. Much of this Winter newsletter has been sparked by ideas coming on winds of him.

Anyone who is anyone knows that the best way to support Living Traditions, is to give money to the Living Traditions non-profit organization! Otherwise known as The Jalopy Theatre and School of Music in Red Hook, Brooklyn! All gifts will be matched, up to $25,000 through January 6th. Please, if you have money, consider giving it to this incredible space and entity, that also employs many of my friends, fellow musicians, artists, and performers, who together resistance the past-ing of music from the past.

If you are getting tired of Christmas music and want to listen to some badass, all vinyl playlists, please look no further than Maison Dufrene, my friend from the internet Paul Dufrene’s lovely sonic curations.

Brian Harnetty is a new correspondent in Ohio, who weaves archival sound materials, interviews, his own compositions, and sounds of nature and sounds of fracking, to create musical reflections of a time, a local history, and a brand new traditional musical vernacular in his project Shawnee, Ohio.

As always, let me know if you are creating a weird thing, and want it talked about on this newsletter. Please feel free to share this newsletter with others you think they might enjoy it.

How will I ever explain it all???

I did really want to share about a thousand other things with you, but I must prepare myself for the evenings' Fest Noz, and not go insane sitting in front of a computer anymore. I apologize for typos, my eyeballs are done.

Bonnes fêtes!

Happy solstice! Happy Holidays! and Happy New Year!

Love and love and more love,

AND the returning of the light,

--Melanie Beth Curran

Melanie Beth Curran 10/14/19 Melanie Beth Curran 10/14/19

Encounters with The Incomprehensible : Oysters, Rain, and Round Dances in France

Autumn Newsletter 2019

I greet you from Brest, France, where I have come to work on my year-long writing project on the traditional music and dance of Finistère, Bretagne. I arrived here in the rain and wind, a little concerned that I had made the biggest mistake of my life. According to Wikipedia, Brest resembles most closely in its weather patterns, Neah Bay. Neah Bay, in the very northwestern corner of Washington State. I grumbled. This place reminded me of Puget Sound's naval city, Bremerton, if Bremerton had gorged itself on crêpes. I told myself that I was not here for the quaint cobblestone streets, nor the tropical weather. On a dark night during a downpour, I forced myself to walk to the harbor, where I entered a damp and crowded bar.

My eyes took in the mass of young and attractive bodies. Overwhelmed by my own foreignness, I found some comfort in the fact that the smell here was familiar- wet clothes, sweat, and beer. I further relaxed, the moment I realized that the bodies were moving, together. The people were dancing! In pairs, in circles, in forms they'd learned somewhere. I felt I'd entered a parallel universe to the square, contra, and partner dance environs I am familiar with in North America. Some of the dancers' faces even resembled faces of old friends and acquaintances back home. Surely their smiles were the same.

Sounds streamed from the harpist, guitarist, and piper, who played the Breton bombard. The music sounded to me something between Irish traditional and a medieval melody. Tears welled in my eyes as I pushed myself into the coats and umbrellas lining a wall. The miles I had traveled now took on their meaning. The dancers taught each other steps. I noted an absence of cell phones. This dance in a round, this music, this Monday night, came right up through the floorboards, as though through the land itself, and into the bodies of the young people, reënacting the motions of the departed. I remembered a meme I saw this summer, "Tradition is Just Peer Pressure from Dead People." Here, that peer pressure is strong.

As the past connected to the present, I had the sensation that I was witnessing Bretagne for the first time. Brest is not its post-World War II architectural austerity, but a space where a long-lasting tradition emerges like moss through the fissures in the cement. Though I couldn’t bring myself to speak to anyone that night, much less to learn a dance myself, I felt assured of my purpose here. After a long summer of movement, I have encountered une racine profonde, a deep root, where I can grab hold and stay a while.

The artistic collaborations from this summer are many. I am excited to release all we have created over the upcoming year. There is a new album, an EP, and three short films / music videos. In spite of this productivity, I have battled self-doubt. My friend Molly Baker and I created and gave an original performance in Nambé, New Mexico, on August’s full moon. A member of the audience took issue with our work, left before intermission, and as a result, our show at his venue the next night was cancelled. He wrote that our performance had made him sick.

Sickening. This adjective has stuck with me and made me question my instincts. Perhaps I should not make art, and instead suppress the visions that spring into my mind. Perhaps I should go back to playing string band music for square-dancers, as that never seemed to make people mad. As the days progress in Bretagne, I feel France giving me a different kind of perspective. I am coming to understand that my ability to create unsettling work may be my greatest asset.

I have challenged myself to read Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex in French. Though concepts and new words sail over my head, this reading experience is enlivening to me. I can imagine the way this text may have been received at its publication in 1949, laying bare the truth of the female's subjugation over the course of history. I am sure de Beauvoir's work sickened many, men as well as women. I am sure that la vérité, the truth, in its nascent form, looks by nature of its newness, indigestible. But there are those that willingly suck at this oyster, live through it, and teach others of its deliciousness. The raw meat of the unknown brings on exciting sensations when encountered bravely, and yes, sometimes, violent sickness. But through encounters with the incomprehensible, the potential of the present is revealed. I feel this when I stand at the edge of a crowd that doesn't speak my language, or at the edge of a creation that has no genre. It is a terrifying and beautiful feeling, of having no form, of falling through.

Love and Autumnal Graces,

Melanie Beth Curran

Upcoming Performances, Releases, etc.

Western Female's 5 song EP with Molly Baker, recorded at Frogville Studio in Sante Fe, should be available before the next newsletter. This will be released alongside a video from our performance at The Nambé Mill House, with visuals by Shayla Blatchford. This video contains material that made someone sick.

Western Female's first hit single, Hollywood Splendor, and its accompanying music video /short film, will be released in November. This film is directed by the brilliant Allyson Yarrow Pierce of Pear Juice Productions. She is also responsible for art direction and the film's VHS cinematography. The analog tale of a Hollywood hopeful, is an exacting recreation of a 70's variety show.

No performances are upcoming that I know of, for I am in libraries, listening to the other musicians, and learning the lay of a new land.

Recommendations

DOING:

Calling all Dreamers! Are you a person who dreams at night? Do you ever wonder what those symbols and stories are trying to tell you? Do you live in the Pacific Northwest and have access to Bainbridge Island? Then you should sign up for one of my mom's upcoming workshops. Amy Curran has a gift for helping people gain meaning from their nocturnal dreams. Six week group sessions will start in November and run through December. One session meets Tuesday mornings, and the other on Thursday evenings. Sign up or find out more by contacting Amy at amy@innerdreamwork.com. You can also visit her website.

The Organizations I am working with in Brest are: Centre de Recherche Bretonne et Celtique at the Univerisity of Western Bretagne, and the Centre Breton d'Art Populaire. If any one wants to know more about this land, check out their resources.

WATCHING:

French film inspiration from Katherine Deneuve: To prepare myself for France, I watched a healthy amount Deneuve's oeuvre. If you like fantastical and classy french femme-ness, check out: Belle du Jour, Peau D'âne, or Les Demoiselles de Rochefort.

READING:

MOMBOD Zine: This publication was just released by editor and mom, Mirabai Troll. It features work from moms exclusively, focusing on both the light and dark of motherhood. "Included are stories about challenging moments, confusion, and beauty of raising a human."

From My Summer Reading:

Sing Unburied Sing, by Jesmyn Ward was a beautiful and complex tale about race and the presence of ancestors the American deep South. I recommend for anyone interested in trans-generational trauma, or how the mass-incarceration of black men today relates directly to the history of slavery in the United States.

The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead, illuminated for me what I continue to fail to understand regarding the gravity of slavery in the United States. There is a serious lack of education around this subject, at least in my experience, and Mr. Whitehead renders it clearly through the truth-telling tool of fiction.

A Grace Paley Reader: Stories, Essays, and Poetry by Grace Paley, is a collection of her decades of work. Most beautiful to me are her short stories, which contain so much in such compact amounts of text. I dream of being as brief and concise as her. She is truly the peoples' writer.

This is my last chance to recommend The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante, as I have finally finished the fourth. If you have not read this series, you are making a serious mistake, akin to not reading THE BIBLE when it WAS WRITTEN. Sorry, that is a crappy analogy. But this living, breathing, anonymous entity called Elena Ferrante has given to us, for the low low price of just call me and I will send you the copies of the books that I have, the most well-rounded gift of literature in our time. Why would you not read this? If you want a little taste of her, start with her column in The Gaurdian.

In a moment of craving self-help, I turned to a hot pink spine on a Boston train terminal bookshelf. I read The Most Powerful Woman in the Room is You by Lydia Fenet quickly, and was surprised at how tips from her life as an Auctioneer for Christies, translated to my own as budding musician/author/desperado in New York. It's never a bad idea to read books about being a successful business woman. Because its still pretty emotional for women to break into the higher echelons. Lydia taught me, that when asking for what I want in a professional context, to refrain from crying. But to absolutely cry the night before asking.

Also in a self-help moment, I read Hunger Makes me a Modern Girl by Carrie Brownstein. She's not a good writer, in my opinion, as I have never seen the word "ersatz" so many times in one text. But it was and is always helpful to see how a young woman from the Pacific Northwest escapes the social feedback loop of Olympia and becomes her own kind of rockstar. Sleater-Kinney is quite possibly, as Greil Marcus wrote, America's best rock band.

From my Podcast Bender: Podcasts are books without paper! For this I have put them in the reading section... Driving around as much as I did this summer, I listened to many podcasts. They are becoming one of my favorite mediums of sharing information.

In July I met the producer behind the podcast Caliphate, and felt that he came off as very full of himself. Then I listened to the podcast, the first one I've ever listened to, and I realized, he had the right to be proud. It's an amazing and deep-diving look into ISIS recruitment practices. I learned more about the last 20 years of conflict in the Middle East with this podcast, than has ever been taught to me in school, at protests, or via the news.

I started with the Bobbie Gentry episode of country music-centered Cocaine and Rhinestones, and became irreversibly hooked. The voice of this podcaster, child of David Allan Coe, is very abrasive. It is as though he is making hard-hitting journalistic discoveries around every turn. But, this is one of the most well-researched podcasts I've encountered. The episode about Rusty and Doug Kershaw is a wonder.

S-Town was beautiful. Its beauty is well-documented. But do podcasts about twisted American small towns actually do a lot more damage than good for their inhabitants? It's hard to tell.

Impeachment time! I enjoyed listening to season 1 of Slow Burn, focusing on the unfolding of the Watergate Scandal, and its parallel's to today's madness. The only difference was that Nixon had a sense of shame about his acts. I don't think I can say the same about the current American president.

LISTENING:

Mr. Lucky Goes Latin - Album by Henry Mancini: Specifically the song Lujon: Look. The times are trying. The world is ending. Everyone needs a little escape. I have found the easiest and most effective way of transcending the litany of bullshit, news and otherwise, is to turn on this album. Suddenly, one is transported into an idyllic afternoon, lounging on a beach in the 60s, wearing glamorous silks, waltzing back to one's boudoir, lying on a piano with a white cat purring, smoking out of an opera-length cigarette holder, before taking a bath and retiring for a siesta with a martini in hand. Enjoy!

The Music of Ann O'Aro: And this is the opposite of the escape mentioned above. Ann O'Aro uses her experience of being abused as a child by her father, while growing up on the French department of Réunion, east of Madagascar. Her lyrics are in the Island's native Créole, and her melodies are haunting and ancient. The words speak specifically to what happened to her- but foreign ears will not understand their meaning. Instead, what is transmitted is raw female rage, and ownership over sexual trauma.

Heather Littlefield's New Music Video, Loving Like That Has Only Made Me Blue: This song has been described as a Polyamorous Anthem. My friend and collaborator has created a beautiful piece of country-music history here, bringing her rule-bending social material into communication with the genre's inclinations for hetero-normative narratives. Basically, Country music says Stand by Your Man, and Heather says Stand by Your Men, all of them, unless you want tears, beers, and the blues.

A little 10-year High School Reunion Nostalgia!!!

I had my high school reunion this summer. So, in an act of self-deprecation, I will now reveal to you albums I liked in high school, and still do, because I listened to them all again in the last few months.

Bright Eyes' album from 2005, I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning: Way deep into the AM of my birthday party in Los Angeles, I professed my love for this emo classic. And I'll do it again. The lyrics are pretty good, pretty New York, and are made nearly timeless by the presence of Emmylou Harris' harmonies.

Sleater Kinney's album from also 2005, The Woods: Like I said above, I read Carrie Brownstein's book. The amount that had to go down The Woods was made, makes it the most powerful work the group ever created. The guitar is tuned to the voice, the drums beat a coming death, and the women do not shy away from the darkness. REAL DANK ROCK. They are seriously screaming and making that screaming gorgeous.

Tom Waits' album from 2006, Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards: This. This collection is the Holy Grail of Tom. In it is every reason I have ever made music. I just had to listen to the CDs again while driving around to realize it. I am this 3 disc set. I am.

Cat Power's album from 2008, Jukebox: Fine, Cat Power, fine. You have a beautiful and subtle voice and even when you are doing covers they are yours and yours alone. You have a finesse that is like a cat, and a cat from which you have harnessed power. Your songs are beautiful and sound like they are coming through a sock, which is the best possible texture for music to have. Good job. Fine.

Until next time! As they say in Breton, Kenavo!

Melanie Beth Curran 7/15/19 Melanie Beth Curran 7/15/19

Limits of the Traditional

Summer Solstice Newsletter: Limits of the Traditional

Hello there. I would like to tell you about an encounter in the wilderness. Between performances this June in Washington State, I hiked into the Olympic mountains with a new friend. There on the ridgeline, on the summer solstice, surrounded by myriad wildflowers, I saw a familiar woman coming from the other direction.

Something about her eyes and white hair drew me back to a place deep in my memory. I asked her and the woman she walked with, whether or not we were acquainted. She said that she had taught music at my elementary school, and that she was, in fact, Ms. Ramsey.

I told her what I had longed to tell her for years. That she was the first adult to ever encourage me to sing. That I remembered her coming up to me as I hung around the rickety bleachers of the public school at seven, singing melodies to myself. I remembered her looking at me seriously and telling me never to stop. On the mountain, I finally thanked her.

I am a singer now, I told her, and this is due in no small part to your encouragement. As the tears welled in our eyes, the two women asked me to sing them a song. I broke into a rendition of Edelweiss. After our harmonies ended and the two of them started back down the mountain, Ms. Ramsey’s partner turned around to say “You know, teachers don’t get to hear this kind of thing enough.”

I feel we are living in a time when earnest gratitude, when earnestness in general, is endangered. During my performances this month, I have looked out at audiences in granges, in a geodesic dome, in a logging bar, at a roadhouse, on a lawn, at a festival, and soon, this 4th of July, at a trailer park resort. I have seen in the eyes of the audiences, a longing for something I have been lucky to have had so much of. I feel rich in a musical and artistic tradition made out of the scraps of a country that dissuades its citizens from revelry. The culture I am part of seems to be thriving in a time and space where there is, allegedly, nothing traditional being created anymore.

What is traditional? Where does tradition end or begin? By keeping tradition locked in a far and distant past, are we are losing the ability to believe in and create “authentic culture” for and by ourselves? Perhaps this is specifically a problem in white populations, whose dominant cultural narrative is to forget, to move on, to have more, and to renew. The old capitalist vibration. To ever want. There is nothing more detrimental to the spirit perhaps, than forgetting we have a past. Because, by connecting to that past, to the people who have touched and changed us, even the dead ones, we can understand how the present is so very precious and real.

I devote myself to exposing the secret traditional of modern life, and I would like nothing more than to share it with you. Whether it is the tradition of girl scout sing-alongs, popcorn machines on a back porch in Chimacum, or angsty teens busking Green Day at the Northwest Folklife Festival - I see thee and I will hold you in song.

The main well of my inspiration this month comes from the recently released Bob Dylan “Documentary”, Rolling Thunder Revue, in which the troubadour takes his band of freaks on the road to perform at small halls in America. Couple in Canada too. Bob Dylan gives his songs to the public during the bicentennial year, without asking much in return. How I have felt that urgency of desperate giving during the last weeks of shows.

Allen Ginsberg closes Rolling Thunder with a benediction. These were the words he spoke, that I now hold as a compass rose, as I bring Western Female to new stages and venues this summer:

“You, who saw it all, or who saw flashes and fragments, take from us some example, try and get yourselves together, clean up your act, find your community, pick up on some kind of redemption of your own consciousness, become mindful of your own friends, your own work, your own proper meditation, your own art, your own beauty, go out and make it for your own eternity.”

Upcoming Western Female Performances:

June 27, Hotel Albatross, Ballard, WA 9pm
June 28, Cellar Door, Port Townsend, WA 9pm
July 4, Sou'Wester Lodge, Seaview, WA 7pm
July 10, Jalopy Theater Roots and Ruckus, Brooklyn, NY 9pm
August 8, Lost Horse Saloon, Marfa, TX
August 15, Nambé Mill House, Santa Fe, NM
August 16, GHOST, Santa Fe, NM

More dates TBA

Western Female Audio Artifacts:

Fair and Tender Ladies Video, Paris 2013

At age 22 I went to Paris with a banjo. It was there I came into contact with a couple of young women, with whom I made this video of the folk hit, Come All Ye Faire and Tender Ladies, in sensuous three part harmony. Thanks to Sarah Navarro for resurrecting this.

Western Female's 2019 Folklife Set is Streaming

Charlie Powers described our set as “The weirdest you could have possibly gotten at Folklife.” For a devotional experience of the Pacific Northwest, delivered in a style guitarist Davee Bolt describes as “Country Grunge”, please have a listen.

Recommendations

Rolling Thunder Revue - directed by Martin Scorsese
The line between fact and fiction is crossed, the poets clamor for ecstasy, and Scarlet Rivera is the world's biggest necklace.

Ol' Red Hair is Back - Bette Midler's 1977 HBO Television Special
Bette successfully sings Oklahoma from a clam shell in Polynesia, de-robes Dustin Hoffman as he plays classical piano, and invites the deepest and most raw compassion between herself and the underbelly of the world, portrayed by an aging Emmett Kelly.

Viva - directed by Anna Biller
Anna acts in, directs, writes, composes music for, and makes sets and costumes for this film, which is so perfectly 70s sexploitation, you won't believe it was made in 2007 by a woman, but that is the whole goddam subversive point.

Churchyard Entertainment from Book of Days - performance created by Meredith Monk
Anyone present at the Undamming of the Elwha River reënactment show complete with Popcorn Machine, last Sunday, will remember Peter Freeman teaching us the song from this incredible, strange, perfect, and pretty medieval piece of pure performance art gold.

Two Versions of "The Saddest Song", By The Riverside

1. Sur le Bord de l'Eau - Blind Uncle Gaspard
Once you hear, you cannot un-hear. This beautiful modal song has lingered in my heart and mind since listening to it all morning in Chimacum. Someone on the internet described it as the saddest song, and that feels true, even if you don't know what the Cajun french means.

2. La Fille aux Chansons - Malicorne
This song is some kind of cousin of the previous song, except it is the early 70s french psych version. YES! Ten minutes long!

Two Versions of "I see the Wolf, the Duck, and the Weasel"

1. J'ai vu le loup, le renard, le lièvre - Madame Gérard Rhèaume
Whilst nerding out with ethnomusicologist human Devon, I learned that this song has been sung in many French speaking circumstances - from Bretagne to Canada to Louisiana. Mostly, I am interested in the scene happening in this video, which seems to be a canned version of a cultural town gathering in French Canada. I love this lady's energy. A lot.

2. La Jument de Michao - Nolwenn Leroy
Woah! Same song, except performed by Breton superstar Nolwenn Leroy, at some kind of Renaissance pseudo-Roma Burning Man-esque camp situation sponsored by Free People brand. Lots of sword fighting in this one.

Native North America Vol. 1 - compilation by Light in The Attic Records
It was a great pleasure to view this compilation and listen to it in the home of John Bellows on San Juan Island. I had no idea so many Canadian aboriginals had formed bands in the 60s and 70s, and made such incredible, heart-wrenching, soul-driving songs about daily life. This compilation provides a great introduction to a movement of "the traditional" into the present tense.

Desire - album by Bob Dylan
The most enjoyable part of this album for me is how long the songs are. How complete. Each one paints a world, somewhere beyond this one, and yet so, so close.

Here are the album's liner notes, to enliven your summer:

Where do I begin...on the heels of Rimbaud moving like a dancing bullet thru the secret streets of a hot New Jersey night filled with venom and wonder. Meeting the Queen Angel in the reeds of Babylon and then to the fountain of sorrow to drift away in the hot mass of the deluge... To sing praise to the King of those dead streets, to grasp and let go in a heavenly way -- streaming into the lost belly of civilization at a standstill. Romance is taking over. Tolstoy was right. These notes are being written in a bathtub in Maine under ideal conditions, in every Curio Lounge from Brooklyn to Guam, from Lowell to Durango oh sister, when I fall into your spacy arms, can not ya feel the weight of oblivion and the songs of redemption on your backside we surface alongside miles standish and take the rock. We have relations in Mozambique. I have a brother or two and a whole lot of karma to burn... Isis and the moon shine on me. When Rubin gets out of jail, we celebrate in the historical parking lot in sunburned California...

Melanie Beth Curran 3/20/19 Melanie Beth Curran 3/20/19

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

Melanie Beth Curran 3/20/19 Melanie Beth Curran 3/20/19

Interview with Francisco Cantú

Check out my interview with Francisco Cantú, former border control agent and author of The Line Becomes a River.

Melanie Beth Curran 2/7/19 Melanie Beth Curran 2/7/19

Book Review of Girl Zoo Published in The Brooklyn Rail

Read Melanie’s review of Girl Zoo (FC2), by Aimee Parkison and Carol Guess, in February’s Brooklyn Rail.

Melanie Beth Curran 3/13/18 Melanie Beth Curran 3/13/18

Interview with Poet Layli Long Soldier about her debut book of poems, Whereas

Check out Melanie Odelle's interview in Brooklyn Magazine. Layli is an incredible poetess and her book, WHEREAS, is a potent and necessary new treaty between what is written and what is enacted.

January 2025
- Jan 8, 2025 Winter Newsletter 2024, & Melify Wrapped Jan 8, 2025
- Jan 2, 2025 Papyrus and Irish Men Jan 2, 2025
September 2024
- Sep 27, 2024 Melanie Beth Curran Oct 2024 Tour Dates Sep 27, 2024
- Sep 9, 2024 Kickstarter Launched: Unearthed Songs From Irish America Sep 9, 2024
August 2024
- Aug 7, 2024 An Evening of Irish American Songs with Melanie Beth Curran Aug 7, 2024
- Aug 7, 2024 Irish American Zines - Subscription: 1 Year, 4 Zines + Bonus Calendar Aug 7, 2024
- Aug 7, 2024 Zine 2: Happy Within: An Irish American Songbook Aug 7, 2024
- Aug 7, 2024 Zine 1: Do Me Justice: The Mary Wallopers, Arena, and Vaudeville Clairsentience Aug 7, 2024
March 2024
- Mar 27, 2024 My Irish Bridget Stereotype Article is up on JSTOR Daily Mar 27, 2024
- Mar 19, 2024 Zine 1: "Do Me Justice" Mar 19, 2024
February 2024
- Feb 7, 2024 Preview of Zine 1: The Mary Wallopers and Arena and Vaudeville Clairsentience Feb 7, 2024
December 2023
- Dec 29, 2023 Pre-Order My Zine! Dec 29, 2023
October 2023
- Oct 3, 2023 Working Melanie Magic Into The Architectural World - Fall Newsletter, 2023 Oct 3, 2023
September 2023
- Sep 3, 2023 Lyrics to "The Belle of Avenue A" by The Fugs Sep 3, 2023
July 2023
- Jul 10, 2023 I am an Irish-American Dead Head Closeted Red Sox Fan with a Buried Boston Accent Jul 10, 2023
April 2023
- Apr 1, 2023 Deranged April Fools Day Pranks to Play on Your Family and Friends Apr 1, 2023
February 2023
- Feb 17, 2023 Writing New Jersey Cultures - Course Syllabus, Spring 2023 Feb 17, 2023
- Feb 8, 2023 To View and Picture Herself Inside of an Infinitude of Apartments: True Confessions of a StreetEasy Scroller Feb 8, 2023
January 2023
- Jan 7, 2023 Psychological Advantages of 1940s Beauty Tutorials on The Day-To-Day Life of A 31-Year-Old Female in 2023 Jan 7, 2023
October 2022
- Oct 9, 2022 Verbs! Oct 9, 2022
March 2022
- Mar 26, 2022 Black Banjo Reclamation - Banjo Has Given Me Everything, What Can I Give Back? Spring Newsletter '22 Mar 26, 2022
January 2022
- Jan 8, 2022 Keepers of The Past - Winter Newsletter - 2022 Jan 8, 2022
- Jan 3, 2022 Songs Don't Die - Fall Newsletter 2021 Jan 3, 2022
November 2021
- Nov 7, 2021 What The Heck Was People's Beach Day and What Can Be Born of its Natural Beauty?! Nov 7, 2021
October 2021
- Oct 31, 2021 San Benedito Beach is Released! Melanie Beth Curran's Second Album is born. Oct 31, 2021
September 2021
- Sep 23, 2021 Glenswilly - a new old song Sep 23, 2021
August 2021
- Aug 13, 2021 Songwriter Melanie Curran recognized with $5,000 City Artists Corps Grant From New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and the New York City Department Of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) Aug 13, 2021
February 2021
- Feb 28, 2021 Webinar March 4th - Finding Songs On the Air: Lessons From Bretagne, France - University of New Mexico Feb 28, 2021
August 2020
- Aug 3, 2020 Black Lives Matter, End of Tourism, Σούγια, Crete Magic, Imperialist Nostalgia, Carey Get Out Your Cane, Peasant Authenticity, Praise for Marthe Vassallo, Vacation Music, Cabbage Aug 3, 2020
April 2020
- Apr 28, 2020 Lost Love Tapes, Left-Behinds, Quaran-tunes, French Pandemic Protocols, Plage vs. Plague, Paranoid Forms, 8 PM, Corona Speaks, Namasté in My House Apr 28, 2020
- Apr 2, 2020 Lost Love Tapes Available Now, On Bandcamp and Spotify Apr 2, 2020
January 2020
- Jan 6, 2020 E Kreiz an Noz, Volkslieder, dxʷləšucid, Wind as Original Speaker, Circle Pits, Glottal Stop, Local Television, Rock n' Roll School Teachers, and Jack Kerouac's Hotel Jan 6, 2020
October 2019
- Oct 14, 2019 Encounters with The Incomprehensible : Oysters, Rain, and Round Dances in France Oct 14, 2019
July 2019
- Jul 15, 2019 Limits of the Traditional Jul 15, 2019
May 2019
- May 23, 2019 Western Female's Folklife Performance Featured in The Kitsap Sun May 23, 2019
March 2019
- Mar 20, 2019 The Art of Elegant Confusion Mar 20, 2019
- Mar 20, 2019 Interview with Francisco Cantú Mar 20, 2019
February 2019
- Feb 7, 2019 Book Review of Girl Zoo Published in The Brooklyn Rail Feb 7, 2019
March 2018
- Mar 13, 2018 Interview with Poet Layli Long Soldier about her debut book of poems, Whereas Mar 13, 2018
September 2017
- Sep 18, 2017 Sign up for Melanie's Seasonal Newsletter, Western Female Sep 18, 2017

Summer Solstice Newsletter: Limits of the Traditional

Seasonal Newsletter

Melanie Beth Curran