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

SHE WHO PREFERS FRANCE DURING ONSET OF PLAGUE

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

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

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

Thanks duskin drum for the album artwork.

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

 www.melaniebethcurran.bandcamp.com 
 

WHAT ARE THE LOST LOVE TAPES?

Watch the video about it here. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hymnals laid.

Marches laid.

Just an ode to Old Man River

who just keeps rolling along.

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

and sing my victory songs.

The Lost Love Tapes are yours Now.

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

FOUR COURSES OF PANDEMIC PROTOCOLS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I get a text from the government (translated): 

COVID-19 Alert! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8PM

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

-Eve Sedgwick , from Paranoid and Reparative Reading…
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her final words were:

“To obey equals freedom.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WELCOME TO THE NEWS CYCLE RIGHT NOW.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your friend,

Melanie Beth Curran
 

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

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

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!