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).

What The Heck Was People's Beach Day and What Can Be Born of its Natural Beauty?!

“Feel free, this is the beach!” Was Miss LPK’s refrain as pedestrians encountered her, majestic, reading treatises and poetry on the sidewalk. For an afternoon in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a chunk of cement was transformed. “We often hear about midwifery, but what about housewifery?” Miss LPK embodied that ecosexual poetess, pouring truth, an orator in public. 

Miss LPK, poet and ideologue. - (Lindiwe Priscilla Kreskin)

The show did not stop and end with her transformational language. Before she took to the proverbial stage, Eli and Eliana graced our ears with folks songs from an old Greece, in the style known as Rebetiko. If a battle is to be won for the hearts and minds let it be with guitar and bouzouki.  

Eliana and Eli Hetko, playing rebetiko - (duskin drum)

Onward prowled the occasion in the form of Melanie Beth Curran, who in fact was putting on this whole event. She, with the help of fantastic fellows brought her new album, San Benedito Beach, into living, luscious three dimensions. As a crowd continued to grow, perched on Beach chairs, she serenaded the populous with popular track The Last Corona (On The Diamond Princess). A raucous singalong bringing us out of Pandemic doom and gloom could only be followed by that most soulful of entertainers, Yva Las Vegass.

Yva Las Vegass, Venezuelan-born-Seattle-native present-day-New Yorker changing LIVES. - (Stu Leach)

Yva! Who gracing us with her originals brought to life the struggles and triumphs of a thousand lives absolutely freaking done with white supremacy. She is a storyteller, a poet, a transmuter of time and space. And just right there in the middle of her musical, foot stop, deep and true oration when here comes Bochay with the sandwiches, Stu with the camera, and Scarlett with a PA.

Yva Las Vegass on San Benedito Beach - (duskin drum)

The whole thing occurred on the chunk of sidewalk where each and every Saturday there is a tradition of vending. For upon this entire block where the wares both used and handcrafted and found and repurposed being sold to those who might, at this change of season, be hungry for a brand new leather jacked painted with van Gogh’s face, ear bleeding, and the children are congregating now. 

Melanie Beth Curran, serenading the strip. - (Stu Leach)

Can imagine a way through this hurried state, this rushing state, this eager and consumptive stage, can we make time stop? Melanie Beth Curran takes up the fiddle and sings her mournful love lost dirge. She’s wearing a blue suit and between her and Miss LPK its been 1hr spent applying falsies. This is the America we dreamed about or could. Melanie Beth Curran plays Walkin’ The Line as Scarlet Dame, ambient techno artiste sets up her stage which is much more like an altar.

Scarlet Dame, melting hearts with beats - (Stu Leach)

And from this point on, all bets are off. Anything you see here you will never be able to recapture in language. But try I shall. The sun leans slanted over the brownstones and casts a yellow gold through the cast iron rails of this, Edmonds Playground. The beats begin subtlety and the audience is supercharged, immediately. Bochay is shelling black beans with Qiao and Yvonne, longtime vendor of this sidewalk, is marvelous with a smile on her face. 

Bochay and Qiao shellin’ beans - (duskin drum)

duskin really feeling it and some kids too. - (Stu Leach)

Scarlet Dame’s synthesizer - (Stu Leach)

Space and time open wide and duskin is dancing. Ricky and Dylan who came all the way from Seattle are joyful in their youth. A kid actually tells Melanie Beth Curran that when she grows up, this is what she wants to do. And that is the point. That is the point people. We make a new future, out of the old. Built from the now. Hearty and falling into fall she comes. And for one enchanted afternoon we were the Shepards of this coming realm. And for one enchanted afternoon, we opened the door.

Melanie Beth Curran celebrating her album release - (Stu Leach)

in the morning, getting set up with Dylan - (duskin drum)

People’s Beach Day was supported by The City Artist Corps Grant, given by the New York Foundation for the Arts to help revive public cultural life after the pandemic (inside of the pandemic). The grant put artists back to work! Items for People’s Beach Day were culled at Materials For the Arts, an insane warehouse in Long Island City full of Art supplies.

Thanks to everyone that came and everyone who bought an album! They are for sale here:

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