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

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

A white banjo player.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Sacramento Weekend Banjo Build April 30 - May 1

• Port Townsend Banjo Crafter Fellowship, Last week of June

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

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

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

WAYS TO DONATE:

• Buy an album from me or book me for a performance or livestream show.

• Venmo me @MelanieCurran or Paypal me: paypal.me/melaniebethcurran. Put a note that this $ is for BBRP.

• Donate directly to Black Banjo Reclamation Project. (Please send me a note that you have! So I can keep track of how effective my fundraising is, and so I don't ask you again after you've already donated.)
   

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

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

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

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

Springtime love,

-Melanie Beth Curran


Recommended:

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

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

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

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

Keepers of The Past - Winter Newsletter - 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excuse me?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

an selfie, January 3rd, 2022

News From Life in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn:

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

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

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

Recommendations:

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

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

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

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

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

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

ireland beyond colonialism podcast

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

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



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

-Melanie


PS
This newsletter comes seasonally, four times a year. Feel free to sign up and share it with anyone you think will enjoy it!

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

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

People’s Beach Day, October 23rd 2021, 200 Dekalb Avenue - (Stu Leach)

“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

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

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

Support my work and purchase an album through Bandcamp:

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

I am selling CD-Shaped original paintings there!

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

Have a pleasant time at the beach.

Glenswilly - a new old song

Glenswilly by Melanie Curran

fare thee well my honey where ever you may travel

may you never want for money far across the sea

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

nothin’ comes for nothin in the land of the free

chorus!

when you see the house of the rising sun

or lie your head in the fields of green

remember me as the one who loved you best

back in old glenswilly

take good care of this fine hewn leather satchel

remember say a prayer for your arrival at the shore

lend your hand to the ones who come behind you

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

chorus

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

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

take your time with the pangs of bereavement

glenswilly’s not a place so easily let behind

chorus

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

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

I’ll be there to meet you in the middle

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

chorus

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

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)

Melanie Curran Will Present People’s Beach Day on September 25th, 2021 as Part of Award Program

New York, NY – Songwriter Melanie Curran is one of 500 New York City-based artists to receive $5,000 through the City Artist Corps Grants program, presented by The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA), with support from the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME) as well as Queens Theatre.

Melanie Curran was recognized for People’s Beach Day, which will bring a live performance of her upcoming album, San Benedito Beach to the Clinton Hill/Fort Green neighborhood of New York in Brooklyn on September 25th.

People’s Beach Day is a live-music performance experience that channels the power of the people to create paradise no matter where they are.

The beach is a space where people can start anew after dark times. Melanie Curran’s album, San Benedito Beach, which will be released on American Standard Time Records in September of 2021, tells stories of people coming through hardship and finding new reasons to hope.

People’s Beach Day is a celebration for the public to experience a similar transformation. It is an event where visitors come together to collectively feel and dream. Instead of a real beach, the performance takes place in a park, parking lot, community garden or otherwise non-beach location in Brooklyn. This exemplifies that it is us, as people, who create that magical transformational quality the beach offers, through our will to collectively dream.

People’s Beach Day will happen around sunset. There will be a live performance of the album, and screenings of music videos through a projector. There will be a map and diorama making station on site where visitors can create their own visions of paradise. We can create the future as we move through the darkness out of the pandemic era.

Over the course of three award cycles, more than 3,000 artists will receive $5,000 grants to engage the public with artist activities across New York City’s five boroughs this summer and fall. Artists can use the grant to create new work or phase of a work, or restage preexisting creative activities across any discipline.

Members of the public can participate in City Artist Corps Grants programming by following the hashtag #CityArtistCorps on social media.

City Artist Corps Grants was launched in June 2021 by NYFA and DCLA with support from the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME) as well as Queens Theatre. The program is funded by the $25 million New York City Artist Corps recovery initiative announced by Mayor de Blasio and DCLA earlier this year. The grants are intended to support NYC-based working artists who have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. It is strongly recommended that a portion of the grant be used to support artist fees, both for the applying artist and any other artist that are engaged to support the project.

The Cycle 2 application will open on Tuesday, July 6 at 10:00 AM EDT and will close on Tuesday, July 20 at 10:00 AM EDT. The Cycle 3 application will open on Tuesday, July 27 at 10:00 AM EDT and close on Tuesday, August 10 at 10:00 AM EDT. Please visit NYFA’s website for full details and eligibility requirements.

Webinar March 4th - Finding Songs On the Air: Lessons From Bretagne, France - University of New Mexico

The University of New Mexico College of Fine Arts is hosting me for their musicology colloquium series, Spring 2021 - “Ethnography and Creative Process in The Arts”. I am honored to be presenting through a webinar, open to all. March 4th, 2-3:30pm mountain time.

In this talk, I share how learning a Breton song opened me to the ways traditional music can transmit during the digital age. Participants will examine the songs they carry. We’ll be thinking about how regional culture transforms through digital interfaces.

Please register for “Finding Songs on The Air: Lessons From Bretagne, France” here.

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. 

Black Power Naps - Image by Avi Avion

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?

Tour Mat. Great for Tourists.

 "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.

case n' point. Chanià Old Town.

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.

A menu in Sougia

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.

High tourist season 2020, Sougia, Crete

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.

mmm… tourist products…

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.

mmm… sunset on the era of mass tourism…

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:

Melanie at a California Motel, 2014

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.

Selfie With Kitty - Chanià, Crete

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

SHE WHO PREFERS FRANCE DURING ONSET OF PLAGUE

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

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

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

Thanks duskin drum for the album artwork.

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

 www.melaniebethcurran.bandcamp.com 
 

WHAT ARE THE LOST LOVE TAPES?

Watch the video about it here. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hymnals laid.

Marches laid.

Just an ode to Old Man River

who just keeps rolling along.

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

and sing my victory songs.

The Lost Love Tapes are yours Now.

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

FOUR COURSES OF PANDEMIC PROTOCOLS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I get a text from the government (translated): 

COVID-19 Alert! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8PM

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

-Eve Sedgwick , from Paranoid and Reparative Reading…
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her final words were:

“To obey equals freedom.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WELCOME TO THE NEWS CYCLE RIGHT NOW.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your friend,

Melanie Beth Curran
 

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

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

Lost Love Tapes Available Now, On Bandcamp and Spotify

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

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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Jack Keroauc’s Hotel from my window…

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.

Typical Herder.

 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.
 

The Breton Beach of Pays Pagan

 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”.

Such a huge event.

 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”.

Barba Loutig in the Vauban Basement

 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

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!

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...

Western Female's Folklife Performance Featured in The Kitsap Sun

Artwork by Sophia Tschida

Please Read Michael Moore’s Article, “Melanie Curran Hopes to GIve Back at Folklife”, here:

https://www.kitsapsun.com/story/entertainment/blogs/kitsap-ae/2019/05/20/melanie-currans-western-female-perform-folklife-festival/3719900002/

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

Interview with Francisco Cantú

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

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.

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.

image from poets and writers

Sign up for Melanie's Seasonal Newsletter, Western Female

In a time of great social media overload, I've opted out of most platforms. I have however, found a love for the email, which is slow and personal in its arrival to an inbox. To better inform those who are interested in my whereabouts and appreciations, I have started a Newsletter called Western Female. 

The newsletter focuses on musical bacchanal, American Dreams, and life updates. I will include reading recommendations and links to the best of the best of lousy youtube videos. Motel Slang is a little potpourri of words and ideas for you to smell at your leisure, once a season. Please sign up if it suits you!