The Broken Watch

Europe, ho!

2012-01-11T07:53:00.000-08:00

Je vais en Paris!

Holy fucking shit, I'm going on tour in Europe in less than a week. I'm going to Barcelona, Amsterdam, Dijon, Reims, and Paris, to READ POEMS and SING SONGS to rooms full of people. I'm getting paid to do this. I can hardly believe this is my life.

Also, I just got word that I received a travel grant from The Foundation for Contemporary Art in NYC to help me go on this tour. I got the message on the Red Line riding over the Charles. I started hyperventilating on the crowded train. This is my first artist grant. The money is wonderful, but mostly it's validation at a really tenuous time. I really needed news like this. It makes me feel so grown-up and legitimate.

ALSO, also, the indomitable Caleb Cole will be joining me and Sean for the French leg (hehe, French leg) of our trip. We'll have four days in Paris to rush around and take pictures and go to Shakespeare & Co. and visit Oscar Wilde's grave and be total cliches. We watched Midnight in Paris last week to get ready for it. Woody Allen knew my brain with that one. I definitely expect a car full of Lost Generation expats to abscond with me when I'm there. At least metaphorically.

Here's a full schedule of our tour:

Jan 19: BCN Slam, Barcelona, Spain

Jan 21: Some Bar, Barcelona, Spain

Jan 24: Cafe De Barones, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Jan 25: Slam Dijon, Dijon, France

Jan 26: Slam Tribu, Reims, France

Jan 27: Music Night @ Downtown Cafe, Paris, France

Jan 30: Poetry Night @ Downtown Cafe, Paris, France

Check out the awesome bilingual (English and French) chapbook I made especially for this tour. (Translation help by Lucie Monroe.)

I'm going to eat so much freaking jamon and marcona almonds and chocolate and cheese. I'm going to try to blog and Facebook as much as possible while I'm there, but I'm only going to have my iPhone and will only have internet at WiFi hotspots, so it may be spotty. Regardless, Caleb will be in France with me, so I should have some awesome photos when I get back.

Everything Was Vonnegut

2011-12-17T20:36:00.000-08:00

Meghan Chiampa and I made a website for the show we put on in September, Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt: A Tribute to Kurt Vonnegut Jr. You can watch all the original, Vonnegut-inspired pieces on everythingwasvonnegut.com.

Acts included award-winning authors, poets, songwriters, a children's music band, an Eastern European punk-funk group, and a shadow-puppet theatre reenactment of "Harrison Bergeron."

Enjoy, babies!

Manic Pixie Dream Girl Must Die

2011-12-11T09:48:00.001-08:00

Eff you, new girl.

You know the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. That quirky, pretty, benignly "creative" female character in movies and television programs about brooding male protagonists who fear they're losing, or have lost the best years of their lives to their careers or failed relationships or stifling families or whatever. She shows up, spouts something bubbly and idealistic, drags the lead character on some off-beat adventure that breaks him out of his tired, square routine, and in the end, teaches him how to live.

MPDGs are plot devices disguised as hippy chicks and punk rock girls. They are by definition one-dimensional and static characters. The coiner of the term "Manic Pixie Dream Girl," Nathan Rabin says "[MPDGs] don't live lives, they don't have jobs or careers, they just frolic and have fun and imbue people with a sense of life's infinite possibilities."

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl has ruined my life. People confuse me with her all the time.

Quick picture of me on paper:

I'm a poet and songwriter. I make most of my living doing things related to poetry and songs.
I perform a lot in all sort of creative projects, from music videos to short films to multimedia shows to haunted houses.
I started a non-profit to increase youth poetry opportunities in Massachusetts.
I've worked as a fine art model.
I teach yoga.
I read Tarot cards.
I've never had a full-time job.

When I'm first introduced to people, my ten-second resume screams Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Since they've seen this character so often in movies and television, they can very easily imagine who I must be, and what role I'm meant to play in their lives. This makes my romantic life absolutely infuriating.

I can tell when a dude who's interested in me thinks I'm his MPDG. He gets all dreamy when I describe my lifestyle, imagining Woodstock and Monterey Pop when I talk about touring, when I'm often performing in coffee shops and bars and crashing on futons. A forty minute midnight walk home from a club that I make because I'm too broke for a cab is, for him, a wildly romantic bohemian adventure. He says things like, "and it's all because of you."

Invariably, when the dude catches his first glimpse of my ambitious and driven side, my financially responsible side, or my not-happy-and-full-of-joie-de-vivre-all-the-time side, the budding romance drops off the branch and rots.

Granted, this means I was talking to some pretty lame, unimaginative blokes. I've since learned to walk briskly in the other direction when I encounter these types.

But then there is that part of me who does identify with the MPDG. I mean, I live a pretty unconventional life. I value art and human connection above most other things. I try as much as I can to live in the present. There's even a teeny tiny latently adolescent part of me who actually wants to be the MPDG. That part of me wants to be so full of vitality and love for life that people follow me around like I shed stardust. That part of me wants to believe in the MPDG. Maybe deep down, that part of me wishes my life were as simple as that of a plot catalyst. Or maybe that part of me hopes there's a MPDG out there for me somewhere, waiting to show me all the ways I've been blinding myself to the wonders of everyday life.

There's that speech in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind where rainbow-haired Clementine basically acknowledges that she understands how men tend to view her and tries to reject it. "Too many guys think I'm a concept, or I complete them, or I'm gonna make them alive," she says. "But I'm just a fucked-up girl who's looking for my own peace of mind. Don't assign me yours." With the reflective clarity of hindsight, the narrator Joel then instantly admits that he still thought she would save him even after she said that. (This is extra interesting because for most of the movie, she literally is a version of the character that exists in Joel's head -- oh Charlie Kaufman, I see what you did there.)

I know we're not supposed to expect people to "save" us, but people often look for qualities they lack in their romantic partners. People do come into our lives who open doors and redirect our paths and help us grow. However, for any sort of lasting relationship to manifest, you have to grow because of (and with) the person beyond the shimmery quirks (and of course, you really have to grow because of you, but that's another post). What really makes a MPDG a MPDG is that she's more Dream than Girl, more symbol than character. That's fine, even necessary, in a shitty Hollywood movie like Elizabethtown, but if your life's going to imitate art, don't you want it to be better art than that?

European Tour Announced!

2011-11-21T08:19:00.001-08:00

Exit, No Exit

Sean Patrick Mulroy and Jade Sylvan tour Europe

This January, American poets Sean Patrick Mulroy (New York) and Jade Sylvan (Boston) will embark on a European tour, performing their work to the multi-lingual literary crowds in the vibrantly budding spoken-word scenes of the E.U.

Over the past half-decade, Sean and Jade have each earned reputations as two of the most original and hardest working new artists to appear in spoken word.

Sean Patrick Mulroy is the author of The Pornography Diaries, a poetic study of love and sex as seen through the lens of media studies and film analysis, as well as a multi-media one-man show by the same name. He has toured extensively in North America and has participated in over 10 national poetry competitions.

Jade Sylvan is the author of The Spark Singer (Spuyten Duyvil Press 2009). She has toured with her work throughout the U.S., earning acclaim for her unique voice and attention to craft. She has facilitated numerous workshops on writing and teaching poetry across the country, and in 2011 she co-founded Mass LEAP (Massachusetts Literary Education and Performance), an organization to increase youth poetry opportunities in Greater Boston.

Exit, No Exit (yes, that’s a Sartre reference -- Sean’s an escapist and Jade’s a frustratedly anachronistic existentialist) tour dates include stops in Barcelona, Amsterdam, Reims, Dijon, and Paris.

A Tour Kickoff and Fundraiser performance will be held Friday, December 30th, at Gallery 263 in Cambridge, MA, with bands Gracious Calamity and ACLU Benefit.

You Are Racist, Classist, and Xenophobic

2011-11-12T08:08:00.001-08:00

This article was circling around my (very educated, well-read) Facebook network last week to much shock and appall. Apparently a holy man in India (yeah, one guy) has developed an unusual cure for sickness in infants that involves standing on them like so:

Here's the awesome non-generalizing, not-in-any-way racist commentary from the article:

"Although an isolated incident, it serves as a grim reminder of the dangerous religious traditions observed by many Hindus in India, many of which are done so for the health of their children."

This admittedly more visually-disturbing photo was used as the lead-in image for the article:

With this quote:

"When asked about [his methods], the guru claimed that he was merely speaking for God, and as such needs no other defense."

Way to diverge attention away from what's actually makes this a more visually unsettling image than the one above it. That baby is fucking starving. Oh yeah, poverty, first-world people. Like, actual poverty. That's sort of like that one time you were in college and had to live off ramen for a week so you could afford to buy weed, except instead of ramen it's your children dying and instead of weed it's your children dying.

Then the article segues seamlessly into a YouTube video of another crazy brown-person Voodoo ritual:

Nevermind that there have been no fatalities associated with this tradition, or that our infallible, forward-thinking Western medical system has a rich history of performing plenty of superstitious rituals on our own infants (check out the mortality rates of neonatal circumcision if you really want to throw up in your mouth), this is just some straight up racist, Orientalizing, Imperialist "Other"-gawking. "OMG look at those crazy brown people and their stupid polytheist, idolatrous traditions! Thank God (and by 'God,' we mean Jehovah, obv.) we have SCIENCE and deodorant. And we can like, outsource our shitty jobs to them and pay them $1.50 an hour and send our spoiled white sons and daughters on post-college month-long backpacking trips through their impoverished villages to 'discover themselves' and buy cheap drugs and silk saris so they can be super interesting and well-traveled at cocktail parties one day. Whoops, I'm late for yoga class!"

One of the posters in the dark abyss that is YouTube comments section actually calls the people in this video "savages." This is one of the comments voted all the way up to the top. Wow, I didn't realize Rudyard Kipling had Wifi on safari. And space-time-transcendent Wifi at that. It really is the future!

Honestly, until we're all making active steps to get modern healthcare/science/fucking food and clean water into the world's thousands of impoverished, parochial 4th world villages, I don't think we have any right to judge the rituals, procedures, and/or tools they've developed deal with disease, famine, and the myriad other unavoidable aspects of human existence.

In conclusion, before you recirculate an article on a social media site, please ask yourself, "Does posting this make me look like a Racist, Classist, or Xenophobic Ignoramus?" If the answer is, "Yes," "Possibly," or "What's 'classism?'" maybe hold off.

See you all in yoga class, everyone! As soon as I get my $90 yoga pants back from the Asians I pay to do my laundry.

I'm Fucking Fat

2011-11-07T15:33:00.000-08:00

I'm not fucking fat. I look like this:

J.S. circa 2011

But I feel fat. All the time. It's fucked up that I feel fat all the time, and everything around us, including myself and my relationship to everything around us, is fucked up for making me feel that way.

I was a fat kid. Well, relatively chubby. I was teased a lot, wore overalls every day, and thought I would never, ever be lovable because of how I looked. The chubbiness was a phase I grew out of. The mindset was not.

J.S. circa 1992

Now, I practice yoga every day. I bike ride and hike. I eat very well, with tons of organic vegetables, homemade meals and such. I don't overeat (usually), but I enjoy food. A lot.

I am thick with muscle. I can pick myself up onto my hands and extend my legs into the sky. I know I'm in better shape that 95% of people in America. But I still think I'm fucking fat.

I was in a retail situation (like, getting clothes from a real store with dressing rooms and everything as opposed to the usual sacks of discarded clothes I find on the sidewalk or hand-me-downs from friends) and I was absolutely appalled by my body in the mirror. Dimples, everywhere! Malleable white flesh covering up all those ab muscles! My brain was a whirlpool of fat-girl shame for the rest of the day.

At my absolute skinniest, about 128lbs, I look like this:

I have only ever been this skinny three times in my adult life. All of them involved depression and amphetamines. I do not look like this now.

I like beer, and cake, and pizza. These preclude my body type from looking like I do up there. But even when I'm enjoying the shit out of a milk stout and thin crust I still obsess over what I eat, EVEN IN THE MOMENT WHEN I'M EATING IT. It sucks.

Feeling fat is not cool. It's a #whitegirlproblem. Everyone knows white girls' problems are funny and not to be taken seriously, because we have no REAL problems, right? I mean, all of our daddies bought us new Porsches when we turned 16 and then we all joined sororities where we developed HILARIOUS cases of bulemia. (You mean you, like, eat food and then throw it up? Like, on purpose? OMG why would anyone do that? That's CRAZY! Lolz.)

If you are a woman in America, you probably have a fucked-up relationship with food. You're supposed to be thin, obviously, because otherwise you're an utterly useless slob, but god forbid you care about being thin. Then you're the vain Wicked Queen talking to herself in the looking glass like a crazy person as opposed to the benignly chaste and obliviously lovely Snow White. Disney movies have taught us girls what an unforgivable sin trying to be beautiful is. It's almost as bad as being fat and ugly. Just kidding, nothing's worse than that.

Oishii da yo!

The most desirable type of relationship a woman can have with food in mainstream culture is Sailor Moon's. This girl has the metabolism of a hummingbird, is swizzle-stick slim, yet constantly and compulsively stuffs her face with abandon. She's super-skinny, but doesn't TRY to be skinny at all. Everyone knows women who care how they look and diet or work out too much are stupid shallow bitches, because how a woman looks doesn't affect how she's judged and treated by society and her peers at all.

I'm not meaning to be super gynocentric here. I know a ton of men are probably just as fucked-up foodwise as are I and my XX-chromosomed comrades. My male roommate, Dr. Manhattan, who is a scientist and may therefore be cited as A SOURCE, told me the other night while we were drinking beer and eating pizza that studies of high-school age kids are showing that men are now competing with women in the Who Fucking Hates Their Bodies the Most pageant. So hooray for that.

Then our friend Kate came over. Kate is skinny. Fashion-model skinny. Sailor Moon skinny. She cracked open a beer and I told her about my dressing room horrors.

Then, much to my surprise, fourteen-year-old-boy-skinny Kate said, "Yeah, I feel fucking fat every time I go in a dressing room, too. I have these dimples everywhere. It's gross."

WHAT THE FUCK?

Why can't we just stop? I don't mean just stop obsessing over losing weight or staying skinny, but stop being so fucking focused on the way our bodies look in general. Stop being so concerned with the eating habits of your our skinny coworkers. Stop being "empowered" to wear a bikini when our thighs rub together. Stop buying fucking yogurt.

I don't care if you're fat or skinny, thinking about your weight for more than ten minutes a day is simply a big fucking waste of time. I mean, with climate change and healthcare debates and the Occupy Movement, don't we have more important things to do with our lives?

MPTJ hits the ground running

2011-11-02T04:38:00.000-07:00

It's official. Steve has started to send out the book proposal of More Popular Than Jesus: The Beatles and the Mythology of Rock to agents and publishers. There's been some initial interest from small presses, but we've yet to send it to the biggest people and places. We set up a super-cool website here: morepopularthanjesus.net

This is going to be a long process. Let the games begin.

Sleeping w/ Pete + Keith

2011-10-27T19:07:00.000-07:00

This is what my bookshelf* looks like right now.

We've moved into the nerve-wracking portion book-proposal of More Popular Than Jesus. Steve is handling the sales part of it (Thank Effing Christ), and I'm trying to write my little** piece on The Who and not think about the uncertainty and capriciousness of the publishing industry. Not that I have any negative experience with that or anything.

I'm learning how to say no. It's hard to say no to social invitations or performance requests when you grew up dreaming of being wanted. Writing needs space. Needs aloneness, if not loneliness. It's a weird thing to cultivate intentionally for someone who's felt lonely her whole life.

Other than that, I'm focusing on working at Karma Yoga, making new Madame Psychosis songs with LoWreck, applying for grants, and mailing out poem submissions. It feels good to be working on my own art again.

I've been popping in and out of Occupy Boston. I've been down there several times -- a musician friend of mine played a set last week, and I taught a free yoga class on Friday. I've been down there about four times all together, and it feels super important and I'm thrilled that there are so many people who seem to think in line with all the crazy shit I've been muttering to myself for years, and are using their bodies (peacefully!) to let this behemoth of a system know that its habits are unacceptable. At the same time, half the times I've been down there I've gotten some pretty creepy vibes. A lot of anger, a lot of confusion. Of course, living outside in a tent in the middle of the Financial District in October in Boston would sour almost anyone's mood.

It really felt like winter today in Boston.

*the left half of my bed

**really fucking huge

"On Breathing" on YouTube

2011-10-12T06:38:00.001-07:00

new poem.

Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt

2011-10-06T14:55:00.000-07:00

Sneak-peak of photos by Caleb from the Kurt Vonnegut Tribute show at Precinct on Sept. 22, 2011.

We got a ton of great footage, and will be putting up a full website soon.

New York City is where dogs look like Luck Dragons

2011-10-02T11:51:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I finally understood why people love New York City.

SFTD and I played a set at Pete's Candy Store on Friday night. It was a smallish but really attentive crowd, and I got to catch up with my friend Jess and my former roommate Emily, both of whom are going to NYU right now studying Nutrition and Food Systems, respectively.

Our friend The Sneaky Mister came, too. She is brilliant and told us wonderful stories about tattoos and Joseph Campbell and Scotland. You should listen to her.

Then the next morning, I went to NYU to teach a workshop at the Preemptive Education conference at the Silver Center. It occured to me afterward that I was technically teaching at the school who's art school rejected me ten years ago. One more tiny little victory in my heart.

Then as we were walking back to the Subway to catch the Green Living Fest in Brooklyn, we ran into the Slut Walk. I got a "Consent is Sexy" button.

When I was a teenager I dreamed of dropping out of high school and running away to New York City. I wonder sometimes if I'd be further along in my art now if I'd done that, but that's kind of a ridiculous road to go down since EVERYTHING would be so incredibly different that it's hard to say what would have happened. Maybe I would have burned out or gotten addicted to heroin or started sleeping with a record executive. I was so fragile when I was that age, and for a few years after that I was so depressed and whacky who knows.

You have to know who you are, I think, to go to New York. This time, walking around, I felt comfortable. It was the first time since I was seventeen I thought, "Hey, I could live here."

Jade Sylvan's Year in Review

2011-09-15T09:48:00.000-07:00

photo by caleb cole

I'm a year older.

I feel generally better about getting older than I ever have before. I know everyone tells you that happens as you grow out of your fledgeling phase, but hearing it and experiencing it are two different things. Let's recap and try to make some sense of it all, shall we?

Jade Sylvan's Year in Review

by Project

1. Music

I recorded and released a crapload of music this year. Last September I debuted Madame Psychosis, her first EP, and the Zombie Apocalypse! music video (with the help of LoWreck), which people seemed to like quite a bit. I got in a few publications and got some radio play. MME P performed at a bunch of venues around town, and generally had some fun.

All winter I worked on recording my first album of indie-punk-folk (it is so a genre) music with Lee Wizda producing and some amazing musicians and singers. This was a labor of love and obsession. I'd never had to organize so many people and keep the faith so long in the face of uncertainty. I think it paid off, though, and in the spring, Blood and Sand came out. It got some really good reviews, and opened a lot of doors as far as performance opportunities. It got me some press and radio play and all that neat stuff. Oh, and Caleb and I made a music video for this, too. Overall, I'm so happy with how the album came out. It was made with absolutely no money, just drive and love and passion.

Then in the late spring, I met Greg McKillop, an incredible songwriter and musician who wanted to play drums for me. We started touring around a bit and I couldn't be happier about it, and one of our first gigs was at Pete's Candy Store in NYC. We have the same aesthetic and musical philosophy, and working with him has been unbelievable inspirational. We recorded a fun four song EP together in my bedroom one day, and listening to it makes me so happy.

2. Poetry

I performed quite a bit of poetry this year. In addition to many local shows, I was honored to be asked to perform at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in Salem. I also toured the East Coast (Savannah has a piece of my heart), and featured at the Berkeley Poetry Slam in California. I received a standing ovation at the Port Veritas Poetry Slam in Maine. It was my first one ever.

Caleb and I also put on Here and Now, a show about ephemera and a reaction against the hyper-documentation of modern society. It was super successful and a truly special night. We're working on plans to do it again this year, and even better.

I really feel like I've come to a new level as far as my performance goes. Partially inspired by Marina Abromovic, and partially by my yoga practice, I approach performing and my responsibilities as a performer in a very different way that's both more and less serious. It's not about ME the ego. It's about the moment, being present, and creating a ritual. The art happens in between the performer and the audience. I could go on about this forever, but this is a long enough post as it is.

Caleb and I made this video.

I also got a gig writing regular articles about poetry at Radius Lit Mag. It's a really smart, interesting publication run by my friend Victor Infante. It's a playground for my brain.

3. Teaching Poetry and Mass LEAP

I really grew as a teaching artist this year. I taught a three part workshop on Spoken Word Poetry at 826 Boston, and one-day workshops at the Mass Poetry Festival and the Andover Bread Loaf Writer's Conference.

In the winter, I met Anna West, who founded Louder Than A Bomb and Young Chicago Authors. She was in Boston for the year and was interested in starting a similar program here. She helped me, along with our cofounders, Alex Charalambides, Amanda Torres, Regie Gibson, and Ayano Strickland, start Mass LEAP, which just finished our first successful Kickstarter campaign and found a fiscal sponsor in Mass Poetry. I feel so honored to be a part of starting this organization, and I'm really psyched to see how it continues to grow and take shape over the years.

4. More Popular Than Jesus

The non-fiction book project I've been working on for the past two years with Steve Wagner really made strides this year. We've finished our book proposal and have the entire outline nailed down, as well as solid drafts of about 40% of the text.

More Popular Than Jesus is a book that lays out the mythological and archetypal resonances of the Classic Rock icons of the 1960s (The Beatles as the Savior, Dylan as the Prophet, Jimi Hendrix as the Shaman, etc.) Initial response from agents and publishing contacts has been incredibly positive. We're really excited to wade this out into the world and see where it's going to take us.

In July, Steve and I performed the maiden run of a multimedia presentation about The Beatles as the Savior archetype to a packed house at the Brava Theatre in San Francisco. The audience responded incredibly well, and the night was filmed for a forthcoming DVD. I loved this performance and I'm looking forward to doing it again and again.

5. Yoga

I got really weird this year. I quit my job and went on foodstamps for three months and work-studied at Samara Yoga Studio. I started practicing 5+ times a week and took it very seriously.

The incredible teachers at Samara helped me improve at a lightening pace. I grew so much, and yoga helped me with so many of my lifelong issues, mental, emotional, and physical (depression, OCD, Tourette's Syndrome, allergies, bad knee/hip, chronic pain, drinking too much, insomnia, falling in love with the wrong people, anxiety, and headaches, just to name a few), that I knew I wanted to make it a big part of my life.

I met Jesse Winder and Doina Contescu, the owners of Karma Yoga Studio. We connected so strongly on our ideals and visions that it became instantly clear that we should work together.

And a few days ago (technically after my birthday, but let's not split hairs) I taught my very first yoga class. :)

Onward

I honestly feel so blessed and grateful that I'm able to do so many things I love with so many people I love on a daily basis. Yes, there are hard times and dark times, and I don't make much money, and I work 80 hours a week, but look at all the stuff I get to experience, and all of the people I get to experience it with.

Thank you, Universe. That is all.

reset-switches and eye-twitches

2011-09-04T03:44:00.000-07:00

I feel like I just stepped out of a timewarp. This entire past year has been un-effing-believable. One of those that seemed to rush past highway-fast, but then you look back and it feels like you've lived seven lifetimes.

My birthday is in five days. I'm going to be old. Like, getting-so-close-to-30-I-can-tell-that-it-doesn't-wear-deodorant old. Oddly, I feel better about this birthday than I have about any birthday before. It feels like what I'm doing finally makes sense. Like my life is kind of looking how I want it to look. Like the story is turning out.

My Revolution Resolution is to blog more, Facebook less. I bet I had really cool things to say about all the stuff that happened last year, but it's now lost in the seaward-rushing river of the ceaselessly chattering social media.

I'm slowing down for a while. I need to write more. Reflect more. Get back into the space where I can be a lonely novelist lost in her head. I've been performing and schmoozing and Being Cool for a year. Playing at being a rock star is all well and good inasmuch as it furthers The Art, but The Art is always and must always be the important thing. The drisdi and the germ of every action.

I'm still reconfiguring looking into this fall. There's a lot of work to do here in Boston. I've taken a job at Karma Yoga Studio handling special events and community outreach, which I'm actually really excited about. The nonprofit I cofounded this year, Mass LEAP just had its first successful fundraiser and found a fiscal sponsor, and I'm now on the board of Mass Poetry. I'll be helping to plan the Massachusetts Poetry Festival this year, and the first Louder Than a Bomb in Boston.

All this should give me some sort of stability and routine where I can carve out the space to create new work. It's hard to explain the love/hate relationship I have with loneliness. One of the things I love about performing and making music is the community and social aspects of it. When I started making music I was blown away by how much fun it is. It's inherently a social thing, which for a writer is a novel (npi) artistic experience.

But that means that you can't really write, or at least write much or deeply when you're in that performance mode. And if you try to schizophrenically shift back and forth, you'll drive yourself crazy. And of course, by "you" here, I mean me.

I visited my parents in Indiana at the end of last month for my first nonworking weekend in I can't even remember. We went to farmer's markets. Cooked meals. Took a day trip to Bloomington, where I went to college. We ate dinner at the Upland Brewery, which, if I've ever had A Place in my life, this was My Place. I saw my Spiritual Guru (long story, but he bought me my first Tarot cards eight years ago). We even watched TV (and I'm now obsessed with Battlestar Galactica). Then on my second day of relaxation, I developed an eye-twitch.

Thankfully, it only lasted a few days. But Jesus, it's amazing how much more aware of things our bodies are than our brains sometimes.

So I'm home now, and I keep reminding myself, Slow down. Focus. Find the solitary place in the woods or in your room where you can build worlds. Where you can see clearly enough to chisel the truth.

Also, because everyone loves pictures of food, here is the Best Homemade Pizza Ever, made by me and my mom and dad:

It tasted even better than it looks.

new split EP and sort-of band with Speaker for the Dead

2011-08-24T13:41:00.000-07:00

Long time no write. I know. I suck. I'm a Facebook whore now.

I'm planning on coming back to this blog to more cohesively chronicle the madness that is my life, but in the meantime, the big news.

I have sort-of a band, meaning my friend Greg McKillop, aka Speaker for the Dead and I play shows together a lot, and he plays drums for me while I play guitar and sing, and plays behind my poems, and then we both play our acoustic stuff and sing on each other's songs, and that's sort of like a band, right? Anyway, we've played in Portland and New York and it went over super well, and we can't wait to do it again and again and again.

Here's a split EP we recorded together in my room. Two are mine, two are his.

<a href="http://speakerforthedead.bandcamp.com/album/songs-for-no-one-we-know">Songs For No One We Know by SFTD+ Jade Sylvan</a>

Also, my trip to the Bay Area was massively successful and life-changing. The lecture for More Popular Than Jesus went off as well as we could have dreamed, and I met a bunch of brilliant, vibrant poets around the scene out there. Am seriously thinking of moving out there this coming spring.

More soon, I promise!

my essay on Bob Dylan

2011-07-12T08:05:00.001-07:00

My first article as a regular contributor to Radius Magazine is an excerpt from my collaboration with Steve Wagner: More Popular Than Jesus: The Beatles and the Mythology of Rock.

The First Patriarch of Rock n Roll: Bob Dylan and the Prophet Archetype.

feature in the Boston Herald!

2011-06-25T10:53:00.001-07:00

I talk about psychics and Saraswati.

of course, the intro font they used had to be Papyrus.

Hard Times Are Coming

2011-06-17T11:41:00.001-07:00

light and shadow

2011-06-13T10:43:00.000-07:00

Caleb and I did this last winter while we were taking a break from a work-date. The sun was coming in through the blinds in such crispy slices and he was all, "Take your shirt off and get down in that light." I did.

you're the reason I'ma travelin on

2011-06-05T07:32:00.000-07:00

I have been horrendously delinquent about updating this blog situation, partially because I AM SO FREAKING BUSY it hurts my veins to think about, and second because I've been being more and more of a Facebook and Twitter (ew) whore.

I went on a mini tour of the Southeast in May. Highlights included a drunken walk through the National Mall in DC with an old high school friend ending in a 1AM pow-wow with Abe Lincoln, randomly opening up for an underground hip hop show as Madame Psychosis a ham, eggs n grits southern breakfast in gorgeous, gorgeous Savannah, and performing in a Masonic Temple in Asheville, NC.

They filmed my whole feature there. I'll be cutting it up and posting it bit by bit on my youtube channel. Here's the first bit:

Right now, I'm over at Caleb's house. We made banana pancakes and a mushroom scramble. He'll be gone at a residency the last half of this month, and I'm away at the Bread Loaf Writer's Workshop the first half of July, and San Francisco the second. We're so grown-up all of a sudden.

release

2011-04-06T15:29:00.001-07:00

Spent twenty-four hours packing up cds to be mailed out to radio stations and reviewers, baking thank-you cookies for my studio musicians (vegan coconut cardamom oatmeal cookies -- ridiculous), and uploading my freaking album to bandcamp.

Caleb and I have been having "work dates" lately, where we spend the whole day together working on our own boring shit side by side, with an occasional break for food or commentary. It's surprisingly productive, and cuts down greatly on the working-from-home isolation/depression/craziness factor.

Album release show this Friday. Biggish events always freak me out a bit. Residual childhood fears about no one showing up. It's incredible how much we keep working through over and over again in our lives. How growing up means more appreciating these things than "getting over" them.

stop-motion music video

2011-03-16T11:35:00.000-07:00

Nifty music video for the first single off my album, Blood and Sand:

Caleb Cole and I shot this all in about four hours time. I feel like I should thank my high school art teacher who kicked me out of Independent Study my senior year.

jade sings!

2011-03-02T07:33:00.000-08:00

I hate those blog posts that are all, "I'm sorry I haven't posted in forever!" so instead I'll just say, I've been insanely busy with mostly good stuff, and I have a record album of music coming out on April 5th. Lookit!

More info in the next coupla weeks. And a new music video!

snow days

2011-01-25T14:41:00.000-08:00

are not so bad when you can walk to your friends' houses.

and play with Holga cameras.

lucky to be where I am, with who I am.

let it burn

2011-01-14T08:01:00.001-08:00

So Caleb and I are setting up this show. It's on March 4th.

More info:

Here & Now: Ephemera is a multidisciplinary collection of unconventional writers, visual artists, and performers seeking to create an ephemeral artistic experience in reaction to the hyper-documentation of modern social life.

Five writers will read new pieces from type-written pages with no additional hard or soft copies. Other acts will include burlesque, visual art, and a lecture on ephemera by a physicist (performers' credentials range from The Slutcracker to Harvard, if you care). Once the performances are complete, the writers' pieces will be ritualistically burned along with all materials from the other acts.

No cameras, recording devices, or other forms of documentation will be allowed in the space.

By the end of the night, the artists will render a timely manifestation of the phrase, “One night only.”

furry finger

2011-01-09T21:00:00.000-08:00

on our way back from New Hampshire, we decided Jeddo Stars needed a new name.

01-01-11

2011-01-07T09:33:00.000-08:00

my new year's day:

polaroids by caleb cole.

hello 'leven

2011-01-05T14:00:00.000-08:00

After a mostly-positive December that almost drove me insane from business, I flew home to Indiana for a week of sitting around, eating, and drinking Champagne.

On Christmas day we did the traditional Italian seven course dinner. I learned to make braciole and proper lasagna from Grandma:

This is a life skill that will surely come in handy.

My bro and I were dago-ing out.

It's good to get back to my routine though, and I wound up missing home (Boston, that is) quite a bit. It's crazy how much I really do love my life here. Plenty of people dread getting back to their "real life." I need it to feel like myself.

I do need to take better care of myself, though. I literally ran myself to exhaustion toward the end of last year. I loved almost everything I was doing, but I started having panic attacks (a new experience for me) and major anxiety. If I believed in New Year's Resolutions, that would be mine.

My new living situation helps. My roomie (who I can't name because he's all businessy and fancypants, so I'ma call him Dr. Manhattan) actually gets me to relax sometimes and watch movies(!). Yoga helps, too. Maybe I don't need to work from the second I wake up to the second I go to bed.

Also, my brother got me a ukulele for Christmas! I played it at a show in Portland ME last night. Check it:

booze pilgrims

2010-12-22T05:56:00.000-08:00

I desperately needed a roadtrip, and Caleb had read about Root, an organic, root-based, pre-prohibition-era-recipe liquor that purportedly like root beer, while simultaneously being 80 proof.

Oh my god, check out that website. They know exactly how to market to me. That font? Those precious hand drawn roots and handwritten ingredients lists? They are inside my mind in all the right ways, and I respect that.

Only problem is, because of its indie awesomeness, you can still only buy the stuff in Pennsylvania and this one random liquor store in Burlington, Vermont. (No, you can't have it shipped to Mass. Illegal. We checked.)

Of course, like a precious metal, its scarcity made us desire it even more, so we took a day and drove ourselves up to Burlington (4 hours each way -- have I mentioned how insanely busy we both are?), where I'd never been, and relieved The Burlington Bay Market and Cafe of their entire supply.

They never knew what hit em.

Success! Even the label gets me. Check out that font. And all-caps? Way to go against the ewwiness of the currently ubiquitous all-lowercase helvetica fad. <3<3<3

Burlington turned out to be lovely, and catered to my demographic with flying colors.

We ate some delish local by-the-pound veg food at the cutest cafe evar (wish I remembered the name, but awwww look at the picture).

And I bought some new old clothes to replace my old old clothes at a rockin attic vintage shop from a cute boy who told me how fur was coming back. Good thing I still have all my grandma's old fur hats and stoles.

These are men's Levi's from the eighties. Caleb took this picture for LATFH. I am what I am. I don't try.

Also, Lake Champlain.

Also, it was freezing.

But we got our Root.

live vid of Madame Psychosis @ Great Scott

2010-12-14T07:38:00.000-08:00

from the Save Horror Business Benefit Show, Halloween, 2010

where I am

2010-12-13T06:55:00.000-08:00

listening to christmas music (the stone cathedral kind) on a pandora station while staring at a computer screen and composing html. no sleep for four days and I left my warmest sweater at the Slutcracker cast party on Friday. haven't had a day off in, like, god, a month? pain in my side and strange bruises. hypochondria gnawing at its ropes.

I need a christmas party, a fireplace, some hot cocoa, a road trip, a big pile of friends and/or family to sleep in, a statue of Buddha, an unexpected phone call, a hot tub, a quiet walk down a brick street, a kiss on the mouth with tongue, some good news, snow falling in streetlights, a kept promise.

Unwritten Suicide Note

2010-12-07T11:06:00.000-08:00

Caleb and I got bored the other day, so he filmed me performing this poem.

The Commonwealth of Entrepreneuria

2010-11-27T07:34:00.000-08:00

I am uprooted, but in a good way. Last week was an amazing lovefest, starting with two incredible features in Portland Maine, an offer to teach a workshop in December at 826 Boston, a surprise mention of one of my hip-hop projects in a national magazine, and a disgustingly love-dripping Boston Poet Thanksgiving.

However, this was underscored by a general sense of loneliness and unease in my living situation. For financial reasons, I'd been sharing a large apartment with three other women, all of whom were perfectly nice, but who lived drastically different lifestyles than me.

I found myself coming home after a success and having no one to tell. A house full of people who didn't "get me" was really starting to depress me. It was bringing up some bad stuff from childhood. I was the weird girl again. The outcast, even though in most aspects of my life I was being met with love and acceptance.

But as my friend Jess always says, the Universe always opens a window. Turned out one of my good friends, who I can't name here because he's the founder and director of a biotechnology company and therefore (unlike my cah-rayzee artist ass) has to be careful what gets written about him on the ole internets, had a spare bedroom that already had a freaking bed in it, and had been toying with taking on a roommate for a while. I'm partially moved in now, and we're taking it in phases to make sure it's a good fit, but I already feel more comfortable and better about life.

An inventor/mad scientist/business executive and a poet/songwriter/performance artist living together as roommates? Is this a 70s sitcom? No, it's just Somerville.

Being around people you like, relate to, and can talk to is absolutely integral for any sort of anything called happiness. It's really so easy.

Picture from Thanksgiving! Sean Conlon and I playing "Ninja" into the wee hours of Black Friday:

Thankful.

Shout-out in Heeb Magazine

2010-11-23T13:22:00.000-08:00

Check it out: http://www.heebmagazine.com/chosen-video-drunk-in-public/

The Drunk in Public video was written about in Heeb Magazine. That's pretty freaking sweet. I love that mag.

"Jewish or not, swarthy rap troupe, The Delusions, sample from ye old yiddishkeit music pages, and are pretty f****ing funny..."

"Drake aside, Jewish rap is an unfortunately under-appreciated sub-genre, but The Delusions have definitely arrived, at a place where humor meets sincerity, and skill meets buffoonery. Indie-rap still has new places to go."

Not too shabby. Shabbat Shalom.

Also, Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I'm going to spend the day getting bloated with all my favorite poets and seriously thanking some very generous stars.

New music video!

2010-11-16T05:01:00.000-08:00

Madame Psychosis's hip-hop collective (group), The Delusions, has released their first single: Drunk in Public (my mother continues to be proud of me).

Here's the video:

Cheers and thank you.

Suicide, too, is a Cultural Construct

2010-11-11T06:27:00.000-08:00

I've been really moved by the It Gets Better project lately. It seemed like growing up (and still, actually) a disproportionate number of my closest friends are gay, queer, trans, or something of the rainbow persuasion. I think partially that's because I grew up feeling like something was inherently different about me, and was on the business end of more than my share of bullying, ridicule, and general nastiness. I went through long stretches without any friends, and was absolutely certain that I was completely unlovable.

For a kid or a teenager, this fucking sucks and beyond. You don't have the life experience to know that things CAN get better, because all you've ever know as a human being is feeling like a freak. What I'm trying to say is, I get why young people attempt and commit suicide, and the seemingly simple (to us old people) message, "it gets better," is an extremely powerful and novel one to a middle-schooler.

I was performing the other week and one of the other writers (someone I like and respect) mentioned the It Gets Better project, and followed it with, "I don't care how much bullying you put up with, anyone who takes their own life is a fucking coward." A few Facebook responses to this article, which I posted a few weeks ago (or a month or two, keeping track of linear time is sooo 20th century) seemed to echo the same sentiment. I didn't post any sort of comment along with the video either condoning or condemning the man's choice, just the link itself. Still, a few people seemed to become lip-quiveringly enraged over the very idea that someone would elect to take his own life. A few of the them did mention they had had friends or family members who had killed themselves, so of course that would make the concept of suicide way more personally charged. It's hard to divorce that type of emotion enough to discuss the issue in the abstract. I get that part.

What I don't really get is that the standard cultural American attitude regarding suicide is that it is inherently a selfish and/or cowardly act. I guess I could see situations where you could apply one of these adjectives, but definitely not always, or even most of the time. Of course, Americans seem to be more eager than most to decide something is "inherently," "always," or "absolutely" one way or another.

It's not just the dismissive blanket labeling of an extremely personal and profound act. It's the assumption of the people casting judgment that they understand a suicide's situation and inner landscape well enough to label their motivations. I don't think anyone comes to the decision of suicide lightly, no matter how old they are, no matter if they're a coward or not, or if they're selfish or not. It's not like, "Oh gee, I wonder if I should go to school today and maybe have Biff throw my books on the ground and give me a swirlee. Naw, I'll just shut the windows and turn on the oven and die." Suicide is literally a last resort for people in so much pain they can see no other way out of it.

Maybe you are lucky enough to have gone through a similar period of pain and have come out on the other end, and so you now have the perspective to see that yes, it does get better. Well, I'm willing to bet that you had family or friends who helped you through your darkest times. Or even if you didn't, not everyone's situation and timeline is the same. Some people get stuck in the darkness. That doesn't mean they are automatically weaker, smaller, or stupider than you.

I remember nights when I was younger when everything, everything was dark, cold, and screaming. The very fact of my existence, and of existence in general, was horrifying, and I don't mean because some kid pushed me in a locker or a boyfriend broke up with me. Breathing, moving, talking, walking around, the sky above my ceiling, the motion of the planets, was literally hopeless. One of the main reasons I didn't kill myself was because death terrified me even more than life.

Come on. Killing yourself is cowardly? Death is fucking consternating for most people. If you are in a situation in which you believe there is no hope (and I said "you believe" not "there is objectively and definitely"), then within that reality, taking your own life is braver than almost anything I can think of.

Does this come from something Protestant? I tend to blame everything I don't like about America on the Protestants, so maybe that's an unfair assumption. But something about this vitriol screams "USA! USA! USA!"

In other cultures (famously, of course, Japan) suicide has traditionally been regarded as one of the most noble and selfless acts a person can commit. It is, after all, the auto-destruction of the self as we know it. Maybe that's what freaks the hyper-egocentric Americans out so much.

Also, there's this idea in this country that the length of any given life is the most important part of that life. That anything at all that "cuts life short" is the greatest evil in the world. I had a professor in college who made the observation that Americans seem to be the only people in history who believe that if you do everything right, it's possible not to die.

I am in no way saying that suicides by bullied teens are noble. I'm just saying suicide is not necessarily cowardly OR selfish. Oftentimes suicides believe that their lives are a hindrance or curse on people they love. It may seem like warped logic to those of us on the outside of it, but to them in that time, the selfish thing would be to go on living.

Plus, who hasn't entertained the idea at one time or another? When people lash out against big-S Suicide in the abstract and start making generalizations about everyone who's ever done it, I often detect a hint of desperate fear in their speech. Anyone, after all, always has the choice to end his or her own life. For the determined, it would be relatively easy.

Holy fuck, that's terrifying, isn't it? We all know the Sword of Damocles is up there, lingering, but a simple hop on our parts would lance our cerebral cortexes with the same trueness as a snip to the blade's suspending string. Maybe that's why they're always trying to get us to keep our feet planted firmly on the ground.

#9

2010-11-05T10:16:00.000-07:00

looks just like me

I haven't posted here in a while. Partially, it's because I've been so crazy busy with shows and projects and planning. These are all good things, don't get me wrong. I'm performing lots of places as myself and as Madame Psychosis, and it's super fun and exciting and I'm madly grateful, but it does leave little energy at the end of the day for detailed accounts or ponderings on the day to day. The closest I've been able to manage are regular Facebook updates.

Also, other than performing and spending time with close friends, I've really been in Hermit mode lately. Even though I've been super social for the last few years, this guy has always been my card. I'm a writer and an artist before anything. There is a sort of contemplative loneliness that is integral to these "professions." I do love to perform, but the performer is alone, just in a different, more public way.

So what am I doing, day to day? Writing, working, mentoring, doing yoga, making art, playing music, cooking, eating, making kombucha, figuring out how I want my life to look. My future is very uncertain in many ways right now, but while that used to terrify me, now it seems exciting to me. The world is so big and there are so many possibilities. I am fortunate to be where I am, doing what I am doing, and I may even have some control over where things go in the next couple of years.

Previews of things to come:

The Delusions are finishing up their first single and EP. Video to drop this month.
I'm finishing up the recording of my first folk-type album this month with the help of the Amazing Lee "Wizard" Wizda and a bunch of incredibly talented musicians.
Caleb and I own the domain, www.thepornomag.com. Be afraid.

Also, I'm performing all over in the next couple of months. Here's some places to say hi.

Sunday, 11-07-10: Madame Psychosis @ BIg Night Out, The Phoenix Landing, Cambridge MA

Wednesday, 11-10-10: 11:3PM, foik music @ Plough and Stars, Cambridge, MA

Tuesday, 11-16-10: featuring (poetry) @ Port Veritas, Portland ME

Wednesday, 11-17-10: featuring (poetry) @ Mama Crowbar, Portland ME

Thursday, 12-30-10: folk music @ Plough and Stars, Cambridge, MA

faces

2010-10-10T09:03:00.000-07:00

I've been hanging out a lot at Caleb's studio, which means spontaneous pictures sometimes happen. I used to hate getting my picture taken, but I like my face more right now than I've ever liked it. I'm nearing the age I always thought of as sort of the most beautiful age for women, whether I consciously knew it or not. The baby fat is finally gone, and there's that thing called "character," or something.

Last Wednesday Tara (check out her new website) and I went apple picking in the morning and spent the whole rainy afternoon baking pies and listening to Bon Iver. Ended that night with Dan Blakeslee's CD release party at Club Passim. This weekend was a co-feature with Jamie and Sam Cha's surprise birthday party. Life's so good I could burst.

Gearing up for a bunch of performances later this month, booking more, writing, playing music, and recording. I'm getting a new tattoo in a couple of weeks. I'll be sure to post pictures when it happens.

jade sings without pants: somebody to love

2010-10-04T14:09:00.001-07:00

The second in my new YouTube series. Subscribe for more.

beginnings

2010-09-30T13:15:00.000-07:00

The last several weeks have been intense, but positive. Had the Analysis Paralysis (now on iTunes -- yay!), played the Lizard Lounge Open Mic Challenge Main Event the next night. I made it to the second round, which was my personal goal. Half the performers didn't even make it that far. Not bad for coming out of nowhere.

On a personal note, my relationship ended on the same weekend. I've had some readjusting to do, but I'm feeling very positive about the future. It helps that I'm doing tons of yoga at Samara. I feel very connected, and am seeing very clearly.

They played "Zombie Apocalypse!" on WFNX last Sunday. And the Zombie Apocalypse! music video will be screened at J. Cannibal's Feast of Flesh at the Somerville Theatre this Saturday. So much to do!

the Zombie Apocalypse music video is here!

2010-09-15T05:56:00.000-07:00

Finally! Madame Psychosis's (and my) first real music video. Boston Band Crush calls the video "awesomely awesome" and the single "contagiously catchy."

Help spread the word by reposting, emailing, commenting, twittering, liking, talking to people, and whatever else you do on the digital and/or analog internets.

birthday post

2010-09-13T06:53:00.000-07:00

birthday photo by caleb

Last Thursday was my birthday. It's been my tradition to do a sum-up/gazing-nobly-forward bog entry on or around my birthday for the past five years or so. No time to stop now.

This past year has honestly been the best year of my life so far. My first book was officially published, I went on two independent tours of the country performing, met incredible people, reconnected with the hippy parts of me, began writing songs to unbelievable support and response, and became so much less fraught and worried in general about where my life is going.

I have an insanely talented, giving network of friends who I am absolutely in love with. I have an incredible family who are weird and quirky and so, so smart and interesting and all of whom love me and support me. Right now I am healthy, have shelter and good food and a high daily laughter quotient. In so many ways I am the luckiest person in the world. I will try to go into this year remembering that.

I'm not saying things don't get hard. I'm not saying I don't have moments, hours, and days where I freak out and curl into a Kafaesque ball because I am still pathetically poor and nothing in my future is guaranteed. But, as my mom said, I am free. Yes, I am freer than anyone else I know, and that is worth it.

This is as good as it gets.

This Friday is Caleb Cole's solo show opening!

2010-09-09T02:11:00.000-07:00

Hello Bostonians and beyond. This Friday, September 10th, my very dear friend and artistic life-partner, photographer Caleb Cole, is having his very first solo show at Gallery Kayafas in the South End.

Caleb took all of the photos for the Madame Psychosis EP, and a bunch of other promo pics for me. His work is already gaining national renown, and I am so proud of him and happy to show my support. You should come and meet him so in twenty years when college fresh(wo)men have posters of his prints up in their dorm rooms next to The Scream and Starry Night, you can say you were there at his first solo show and shook his hand.

The opening is a day after my birthday. Last year I celebrated my birthday with the release of my first book of poetry at the Cantab. This year I can't think of a better way than to show up at Caleb's opening with a HUGE CREW of awesome people and cheer him on.

Come by the gallery (450 Harrison Ave in Boston [yes i just totally bolded something in parentheses]) this Friday, September 10th, from 6-8, say happy birthday to me, and help me support one of the only truly brilliant artists and genuinely kind people I know.

jade sings the pop hits w/out pants

2010-09-07T16:31:00.000-07:00

A new series. Someone told me sex sells.

Gearing up for the Madame Psychosis release

2010-09-05T12:22:00.000-07:00

Finally, after over a year of working with LoWreck on this quirky, geeky hip-hop project, we are releasing the very first Madame Psychosis EP. It's mastered and everything, and will be available on all the major electronic distributors. Like Madame Psychosis on Facebook to get updates and make me happy.

The official release date of Analysis Paralysis (EP) and the Zombie Apocalypse! music video is September 14th, but it's already on Bandcamp.com. If you believe in supporting independent artists, please pick up a copy and/or tell your friends! If dorky hipster-hop isn't your thing, you can still buy my books, The Spark Singer and Backstage at The Caribou. Producing and releasing an album is expensive, and even artists need to eat and pay rent.

performing runs in the family - birth name spoiler alert

2010-08-31T07:00:00.000-07:00

Many of you may not know that my great-great grandfather was a famous vaudeville ventriloquist. He toured the country for years under the stage name "Johnny Raymond" and later with his wife (my great-grandmother) as Raymond and Ann.

I apparently look a bit like Ann, which is weird -- seeing a physical resemblance in someone who lived a hundred years before you.

Anyway, recently, I was Googling members of my family as is my periodical wont, and I came across Ventriloquist Central, a major collection of classic ventriloquist dummies and other memorabilia. The blog post that Google found was on my great-grandfather. The collector, Dan, was very excited that he had obtained Johnny Raymond's very first ventriloquist dummy, and also ten of his diaries that he kept on the road. (I wasn't Googling my great-granddad, but he has the same name as my dad and my brother.)

It didn't say on the website where Ventriloquist Central was located, but sometimes I get these... feelings. Call them premonitions if you want, but however you want to describe them, sometimes I just know stuff. Something told me that this place was very close to me, and that I would be able to get there easily. This feeling was supported when I watched the intro video and noticed that the man speaking had a wicked Boston accent. I emailed him.

It turned out the owner of the collection, Dan, did in fact live fifteen minutes away from me. He was super friendly over email and seemed really excited to have me come over and see my great-grandfather's stuff. We made a date and I came by last Wednesday morning.

Have you ever walked into a room filled with nearly 200 antique professional dummies? This picture doesn't really do justice to the experience:

Dan and his wife Helen were extremely warm and friendly. We got along right away. Dan had laid my great-grandfather's stuff out on the pool table in preparation for my visit.

Great-grandpa's first dummy. He has a hollow head and a leather lower lip and smells like old books.

It was incredible to see his handwriting, and the meticulous (some might say obsessive-compulsive) documentation of everyone of his shows. An old picture fell out of one of the diaries when I opened it.

Hey! I know Central Square! I've performed in Central Square. Like, a lot. Funny. I wonder if he ever performed at the Cantab. I know it's been there forever.

An airplane ride must have been pretty exciting in 1930.

Here's me, Dan, and great-grandpa's stuff. I'm so glad all of his things are with someone who really appreciates them. Dan and Helen are wonderful, and Dan is really committed to preserving the legacy of the performance art of ventriloquism.

It was a great visit, and I hope to come back again soon. Thanks Dan!

passing time

2010-08-23T08:27:00.000-07:00

Caleb and I were playing around with some 4X5 Polaroids the other day. The film itself is not produced anymore, and the stuff he had was a score - a partial payment for some barter work he did a while back. The film was expired, and it all came out with this creepy ethereal ghost-line through the middle.

Before digital cameras, Polaroids used to represent immediate documentation. The instant freezing of a fleeting moment in time. The fact that the film is not produced anymore and the eerie effect of the expired film got me to thinking about documentation and ephemera. Everything is so hyper-recorded right now, it's become the norm. Of course a country founded on Protestant Christianity is obsessed with the idea of eternity (specifically the eternal body and personality) but I can't help thinking the prevalence of documentation lulls us into a false sense of permanence, and that can lead to complacency, fear, and/or dullness.

In fact, more and more, I'm finding my friends and I consciously choose NOT to take pictures of really special events or moments, as if allowing the moment to exist in time and pass without being ravaged by Facebook and Tumblr was some sort of holy ritual. Even five years ago, it was the special moments that you were sure to snap pictures of.

The world of art and the artist is changing completely. When I began this blog, I had no idea most of the things I have done in the past three years were even possible. It's the Wild West in the working artist world right now, and we're all out there trying to navigate this wilderness while being true(ish) to our forms of expression.

My friend Jenee got back from tour a couple of weeks ago with nowhere to live. I offered her my bed and she seemed so shocked, but it was just the natural, right thing to do. So many people helped me while I was on the road, and all of us artists need to look out for one another.

It's never going to go back to the way it used to be. It's extremely hard, but it is possible now to make a living as an artist on your own. The difference is we artists need to support each other instead of cutting each other down. The old competitive, back-stabbing attitude just doesn't work anymore. There's enough room for everyone now.

what lazy summer?

2010-08-17T17:00:00.000-07:00

Show last night at the Whitehaus in Jamaica Plain. Good turnout for a Monday. Got to share a bill with Dan Blakeslee, who is out of control good, a lovely person, and a breakdancer.

My favorite music shows thus far have been super-crunchy, seated acoustic with no amps and a bunch of cross-legged smiling folks all around me.

Books of Hope youth workshop today at the Mystic Learning Center. We rewrote the lyrics to "Bad Romance." Then we got peaches and ice cream. Some of the BOH kids from last year performed outside to the whole community, and they NAILED it.

The boy's birthday is Thursday. Fried chicken in the park and a walk by the river awaits him. Among lots of other things.

gulf cleanup charity calendar

2010-08-12T16:21:00.000-07:00

You know your life is on the right track when a normal Sunday activity involves covering yourself in faux crude oil for a pin-up charity calendar to benefit Gulf cleanup efforts.

More information here. Preorder yours today!

back home in the Ville

2010-08-09T05:34:00.000-07:00

I'm taking my time a little more than usual settling in after my trip. Making a few changes in my life - more yoga. More concessions to my hippy side. I bought a bike and have been riding almost every day. It's good for my leg and good exercise better for the world. Also, when I go zooming down the bikepath on a Sunday and smell wet grass, I'm jolted back to all the best parts of being fourteen.

I had a Shamanic healer draw the black spiderweb of my fear and loneliness that lived in my hip with a crystal. After that, all weekend, I was completing other people's sentences. There's a lot we don't understand.

southwest

2010-07-23T10:30:00.000-07:00

I'm in California right now recovering from the awesomeness that are(?) the Berkeley and Oakland respective Poetry Slams, but here are some pictures from Arizona.

I finally saw the Grand Canyon.

Here's a clip from my performance at Arcosanti, an incredible community out in the desert in northern Arizona.

We went on a hike and found this cow carcass. Such an agonizing position. It was nearly hollow inside.

Bighorn sheep!

Clay!

Monsoon!

pictures from Tucson

2010-07-16T01:08:00.000-07:00

scenes from Tucson

2010-07-11T18:59:00.000-07:00

watched a mass trial of 60 illegal immigrants who wore jangling chains and saw the judge begin to cry. went to a punk-bluegrass show at an anarchist collective where the punks clapped along and stomped their feet while jumping into one another - there were little kids and dogs and a sink and the sweat flew in fat drops from everyone. went through the drive through liquor store on bikes and got a ice cold six of tecate - drank it in a church parking lot. dug swales in the hard, dry, red earth as the sun rose until my hands began to spasm. took a shower in the open air with the sun shining down - my shower had a rainbow in it. played music at the farmer's market as the sun set and the mountains turned purple and the whole sky turned red. performed poetry at an anti SB1070 rally by the courthouse. sang amazing grace at a tiny round adobe church. sweated a whole lot. discovered byrd baylor. ate watermelon and agave and prickly pear and really good mexican food and a sonoran hot dog. saw a dust devil and a tumbleweed and a lot of cacti.

more and pictures to follow.

Cowboys and Gold Diggers

2010-07-06T11:27:00.000-07:00

As I write this, I am procrastinating from packing for my trip to Arizona and The San Francisco Bay and trying to assuage my fear of flying. Aerophobia aside, I'm excited to be leaving tomorrow to snake my way up the Wild West to the Golden Gates for three weeks. That's a long time for lots of alliteration.

I will be doing some volunteer work with sustainable farms in schools in AZ, and working on a book in San Francisco. On the way, I also have some tour dates set up. Some are poetry, some are music, and a couple are mixed (I'm especially excited about the show at Arcosanti in Arizona.) I have dubbed this trip: Cowboys and Gold Diggers.

I'm not sure how much I'll be online while I'm out there, but I will try to update this blog and my Facebook pages as much as possible. There will be a lot to talk about. In addition to the volunteer work and book writing, Emily and I are going to stop at the Grand Canyon.

Hope to see some of you out there on the road!

MME Psychosis and the Zombie Apocalypse!

2010-06-28T10:51:00.000-07:00

Madame Psychosis was so busy over the weekend filming her Zombie Apocalypse! music video she barely had time to sleep.

The video will be released alongside her full-length EP in the fall.

Check out a few behind the scenes shots in the meantime. (Photos © Caleb Cole.)

back from the cape

2010-06-20T13:18:00.000-07:00

Back from a much-needed week vacation on the Cape with my family. There was much eating and drinking on the beach. Delightfully generic and special and wholly relaxing.

I'm flying a kite in that picture, in case you can't tell. My kite is awesome. He's a shooting star with a tail and he soars skyward. His name is Lady Stardust.

We went to the whaling museum in Nantucket. I freaked them out with my Moby Dick geekiness.

Dad caught a big fish that we cleaned and cooked for dinner.

We all said thank you to Mr. Fish's spirit, but somehow, even though I know it's so much better to do it this way than to buy something someone else killed who knows how, it still made it harder to eat. Every bite was more weighty when you envisioned him alive and flopping around. I appreciated the flavor and the nourishment more. I think that's how it should be.

art and beer

2010-06-08T08:25:00.000-07:00

From Caleb's art opening this weekend in Fall River. We showed up with Dunkin Donuts and found a tub of PBR. This was our kind of opening.

big ol' update with pictures!

2010-06-01T08:38:00.000-07:00

I've had a wild few weeks, so I figured I'd update in one long picture-ful entry. To start things off with some intrigue and excitement, today I was almost struck by lightening. See picture:

I realize I misspelled "scorch," but I'm honestly too happy to be alive right now to care. It looked like it was about to rain, and I had just bought this sweet tomato plant I was going to put in that pot you see, so I was digging out the roots of the plant that was currently in there when everything suddenly went very silent, and I felt this intense vibration/buzziness in my whole body. Then everything kind of went black for a second and then the powerlines above me sparked, and I was left just feeling kind of tingly and weird. These two construction workers who saw it pulled up in their car and asked if I was okay. It wasn't until I saw the scorch mark that I realized what a close call I had. My ears have been ringing on and off, and I'm a little shaky, but otherwise I feel okay. Whew.

Anyway, on to more predictable things.

A couple of weeks ago I finally made it to a Kitchen Sessions and Mike McGee's house in Worcester. It was such a wonderful salon-type setting with piles of amazing home-cooked food. I tried sweet potato pie for the first time and wow. How did I live without that?

The feature was RC Weslowski, a great surrealist from Canada. Everyone was rapt.

And Mike even managed to fit me on the swollen open mic. I read a new piece. I think there's video somewhere but I'm not sure where.

Madame Psychosis has been busy this month. She's planning her video for Zombie Apocalypse!, and has also teamed up with a few other highly talented roustabouts for a hip-hop group, The Delusions.

Making beats:

A few tracks are up on Myspace and Facebook, and here's an intro vid we just put on YouTube. (This song was inspired by Trololo, and is one of my favorites.)

In other news, a couple of Mondays ago I won first place in the Lizard Lounge Open Mic Challenge. I'm really psyched about this. Not only is that contest full of other extremely talented singer-songwriters, and not only did I win a whopping $70 bucks (no food stamps again this month!) but it means I get to play in the BIG contest that they have in September. First prize for that one? $500!

Someone snapped a picture of me playing at the Lizard:

And finally, some fun. A Memorial Day barbeque at my friend Dan's house climaxed when my friend Meaghan had the brilliant idea of making a lady pyramid. Behold:

photo by the awesome Mick Murray

So many muscles!

goddess culture

2010-05-10T13:14:00.000-07:00

Reading for a project has recently led me to a lot of literature on the divine feminine and goddess-worship. Though I never really got "into" any of this, somehow it feels familiar in a comforting way, as if it were something that used to be very important to me that I somehow forgot about. I imagine it must be what once-and-future Catholics describe when they come back to the Church after a long hiatus.

I read tarot cards. I see symbols. Sometimes I know the future before it happens. Witches always tell me I'm a witch. A priest told me I had the temperament of a monk once. A psychic told me I'm followed by a male spirit who has more influence over me than I'd probably like to think. I used to know I believed in things, then I knew I believed in nothing, and now I know belief isn't the point.

Don't ask me what this is supposed to mean. I just think it's interesting. I've never been religious, but the way I've always seen the universe would probably be described as spiritual by most people, and I do have a huge portrait of Saraswati tattooed on my upper arm.

Books of Hope on the Web

2010-05-05T12:11:00.000-07:00

Books of Hope has a new website: www.booksofhope-ma.org

The kids are all gearing up for their release party next week. I'm frantically trying to make sure everything is ready. I need a massage.

just deserts

2010-05-02T18:12:00.000-07:00

I've been planning the tour this July for months, starting in Tucson, up through the Grand Canyon area, and into San Francisco. In Tucson, in addition to performing, I was exited to help my friend Emily with her work creating sustainable farms for local elementary schools (so up my alley), and also help her volunteer at No More Deaths, which is a program that brings supplies of water and food to illegal immigrants who are dying of hunger and thirst in the desert because they may have run across the border with nothing but the clothes on their skins. It incredible how many people die in that desert just trying to make it to the "better life" America seems to promise them.

The recent controversy in Arizona makes me a little nervous about that leg of my trip, but in a way, even more invigorated. Maybe I'll write a special protest song or something, you know, Times They Are A'Changin' style.

New York, New Guitar

2010-04-27T07:54:00.000-07:00

I spent the weekend in New York City to perform at Le Poisson Rouge in the Village. I think I performed well, even though I got lost in Manhattan and arrived at the venue about ten minutes before I had to go on. It's nice to feel like you're at the point in performance where you can walk in off the street and nail it without sitting around psyching yourself up for an hour. After popping into the Cafe Wha? just to see it (I've been reading Dylan's autobiography) we wound up at a little wine cafe off the tourist strip and listened to a local jazz band who played and passed the hat.

Saturday Derek and I went to Coney Island, a place I never expected I would go. It's all the fifties electric optimism you would imagine, and the pier is legitimately beautiful. We strolled down the boardwalk and watched the human parade separating the ocean from the rollercoasters and hotdogs.

Saturday night our friend Greg was playing a private party at this cool little beer garden in Brooklyn. It was an old school barbecue -- ribs and burgers and probably more salad and veggie options than potato chips (thank you, food revolution). I ate a cheeseburger as the sun was setting in a small sea of fabulous, fading hipsters, listening to a blue mohawked geek in an Image Comics tshirt sing about how he wanted to fuck us all in the ass New Orleans style.

And Sunday, back home, I searched Craigslist on a whim and found the exact guitar I had been looking for. I called the seller and it turned out he was coming into Davis Square that night for a movie, so he brought it for me to try out.

It was a perfect fit.

mad tasty

2010-04-16T08:22:00.001-07:00

I'm guest-blogging this week at Mad Tasty. Loads of pictures and tons of butter.

rockstars and faeries

2010-04-08T06:07:00.000-07:00

I was backstage at a Jon Anderson (lead singer of Yes, for those my age and younger) show and someone recognized me from my poetry at the Cantab. That felt pretty cool.

Then Jon Anderson proceeded to tell me about multidimensional reality and how that's the reason why faeries and angels and such are real, which I actually sort of believe in, but I mean, way to put it all out there, guy.

I guess he has nothing to prove. That must be nice.

Here I am getting a thumbs up from him, probably while he's telling me about the faeries.

(repost) Food Revolution: It's a Wonder We Can Even Feed Ourselves

2010-04-02T08:37:00.001-07:00

This post originated at the Boston Healing Blog. I just reposted it here because I liked it so much.

We're idiots, babe.

I watched the first two episodes of Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution on Monday. Every health/wellness/food blogger (a rapidly growing cabal, to be sure) and her mom has written about this show already, but I figured I may as well throw my hat into the ring.

I'm not going to recap the plot, or comment on the sad state of school food, or the bullsh*t, bullsh*t "regulations" that require "two breads a day," allowing kids to eat pizza twice, but precluding brown rice as a valid form of carbohydrates.

Nor am I going to comment on the transparency of the script and the perfunctory prime-time reality TV melodrama, how a few lines and plot devices are painfully contrived (one lunch lady [sorry, cook] practically reading off of a teleprompter the awkward, beating-the-drooling-audience-over-the-head line "Change can't come from us. It has to come from the top!" or the commercial break while we wait for shy, fat, twelve-year old Justin to wait for his diabetes test results), or how the entire premise of the show (a school board gives a random chef one week to prove himself in an elementary school full of hostile opposition before they will let him continue with other programs -- will he succeed???) would never exist outside of the vaudeville of reality television.

At face value, the show calls attention to a major problem in America. People don't know how to cook for themselves. In fact, I think this highlights a larger problem in The United States: modern Americans have not the foggiest idea how to take care of themselves.

I'm not talking about the health care debate. That's another mind-bogglingly sociological discussion. (And in case anyone cares, if it were possible for someone to be MORE than 100% in favor of something, I would be that for universal health care.) I'm talking about simple things, like saving money, planning for the future, and feeding ourselves. The basics of human survival within a modern capitalistic society. I think it's pretty obvious we haven't been doing too hot in this arena.

I think you could view this show, and the whole modern fad/fascination with home-cooking and real food as an emblem of our collective realization that we as a culture have absolutely no idea how to survive without our fabulous, money-driven, made-up society spoon feeding us some corn-based product resembling chicken in exchange for imaginary money.

We grew up being told that we would be taken care of. That if we went to college we'd get a job and could have a house and flashy vacations and an Italian Spinone bounding in the yard. When you want a car, you go to the dealer and buy a new one from a car manufacturer. When you want food, you go to the people who make food and buy it.

When this mythic model started to crack, people felt cheated out of the fantasy life they'd hoped for. Fortunately, the perfect currency with which to buy a fantasy is fantasy money. People started charging everything. And buying more useless crap. And eating more nutritionless junk that tasted good for about five seconds, because it's all fake anyway, and nothing matters but instant pleasure. No really, I read this book by this German guy named Nietzsche. Really eye-opening stuff, man.

Not only do we not know how to take care of ourselves, we don't know how to take care of each other. Parents sending kids off to schools where they're fed processed food-like substances that make them unhealthy, then having them come home to pizza and deep-fried chicken week in and week out. Why? They don't have time to cook. What? I'm sorry, what are you doing that's so much more important than feeding your children? Is "Lost" on?

And schools don't care. And cooks don't care. And the government officials sure don't care. Everyone's just waiting for the end of the day when they can go get their bikini lines waxed and drink Sex and the City Appletinis at the Sky Bar, or read celebrity gossip magazines because did you hear that Brangelina broke up and Brad was seen canoodling with his ex? OMG. WTF. LOL.

In England, the same show was called "The Ministry of Food," but in America, of course, everything has to be a revolution. (Has anyone noted the irony of a British person coming to America to start a "revolution?") I wish we could use less violent language in this country. I think "rebirth" is a much more productive and accurate picture of what needs to happen to our culture right now. But oh, wait, that sounds pansy, so revolution it is.

More interesting than what eventually happens to Huntington West Virginia's school food, the people of Huntington, or even young Justin (who, BTW, does not have diabetes... yet) will be seeing if my generation will take any lasting lessons from the Great Recession about self-sufficiency, awareness, and (gasp!) caring about the health and well being of others. Like it or not, we're all in this together.

we just might be as good as we always suspected we were

2010-03-28T12:18:00.000-07:00

Walking down the brick sidewalks of the South End pre-dusk, Friday after-workers unbuttoning their coats and loosening their scarves, I have a cinema playing in my head. Caleb and I are four years younger, still in Bloomington, and having some wide-eyed late-night discussion about our big dreams of being artists.

Then, flash forward to 2010, and I'm walking past the Beehive to the Mills Gallery, where Caleb's name is on the door as one of the featured artists, and he and Leyna are inside and there is a champagne reception and a toast and strangely behatted characters asking to get their pictures taken with him. I couldn't have written it better myself.

Caleb wearing my clothes, circa 2008

Back on Track

2010-03-25T07:37:00.000-07:00

Okay. March sucked. I barely had time to shower I was so damn busy.

On the upside, most of what I was doing was positive. I started working for Somerville's Books of Hope, which is an awesome program that gives teens a safe space to express themselves through creative writing and performance. It was so nice to find this program and write a cover letter in which I actually believed everything I was writing. That never happens.

Don't get me wrong, this is a great gig and a fantastic opportunity, but it came at a time when I was already semi-overloaded getting ready for an April dedicated almost solely to writing new stuff. Updates to this blog have suffered as a result, and I've been using the more brief and immediate Facebook and email to communicate to the world.

Not sure if I wrote about this here, but the Spuyten Duyvil show at the Pierre Menard Gallery that was sponsored by Victory Brewing Company was a great success. The place was packed and everyone turned in a stellar performance. I would definitely plan another event there.

On the music front, my little songs are growing up! I've been recording with the help of the fantastic Lee Wizda, along with Joe and Ellie from Jeddo Stars. There should be a bona fide album out before the end of the year.

We're pretty cool.

Heading to Caleb's Artadia opening tomorrow night in South Boston, followed by La Vie Boheming somewheres.

Talk to you soon.

Backstage at The Comicon

2010-02-26T13:08:00.000-08:00

A sneak peek at the Backstage at The Caribou comic Dan Mayzee and I have been working on. The first is the cover (check the Degas reference) sans logo and the next is when Michelle first meets Samantha sans text.

So excited. The first issue is almost finished and will hopefully be out by the summer.

networking, not working

2010-02-12T16:41:00.000-08:00

WIth all the promotion around The Spark Singer and Backstage and various shows and trips, I feel increasingly that I don't have time to just sit down and WRITE.

It's a common problem, I think. But it seems like that time that used to go to holing myself up and losing myself in that creative space so often now goes to emails, phone calls, photos, website updates, event planning, and endless, endless, "networking."

I feel like to write you have to keep a little part of yourself secret. It's a hard balancing act when you're also trying to put your work (and yourself) out there. I feel like you have to develop a persona that's separate from the inner creator that sort of acts as the external face of that private part, but whose real job is to throw people off.

If any artists are reading this, do you experience this? With a modicum of success comes a titanic time-suck. Do you find it frustrating to carve out time to work on NEW work?

the dread legume

2010-02-05T11:34:00.001-08:00

Posted about my harrowing brush with death over at MTW's Boston Healing Blog. Read about it there if you will.

It's an important message.

a picture from the weekend

2010-01-28T12:55:00.000-08:00

Here's a story in Hollywood Today about the event at the SFAE last weekend. It's a little weird to read about it as a news story and realize I was one of the people "mouthing along" to all the words in almost every song.

And, because I like you, the money shot:

Left to right: Steve Wagner, Brian Wilson, yours truly

rockstar for a weekend

2010-01-25T09:56:00.000-08:00

Back from a whirlwind in San Francisco. Salons, champagne, old and new friends, private performances, exclusive gallery events, celebrities -- it was a little taste of being a rockstar. (My collaborator, Steve Wagner, is the best host ever.) It's strange and good to come home, and it makes my life here seem calm in comparison.

On Thursday I performed at a private Salon in Sunset to an incredibly attentive, listening audience. I even managed to unload a few books to this intimate crowd. Then on Friday I swung by Lower Haight to stop into Cafe International for their open mic. I met up with one of the three people I still keep in contact with, my brother's best man, Orestis, and we drank whiskey at Molotov's till my jet lag turned me into a nodding pumpkin.

Then the big day -- the show at SFAE. We wound up drinking across the street from the gallery at the Clift Hotel with a Fellini-esque assortment of musicians, artists, and scientists.

Being in the same room as Brian Wilson, a Talking Head, and the artist who did the cover of The Dark Side of the Moon (whose given name, hand-to-god, is Storm Thorgerson) is, in case you wondered, not that surreal at all. If anything, it's weird how normal it is. Like it's a room full of any other group of people, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. I guess the weirdest part is knowing you should feel weird. The idea that someone should feel uncomfortable and/or privileged to be included in such a coterie.

Maybe it was the open bar, but I felt perfectly at ease.

Little Jade

2010-01-13T16:26:00.000-08:00

During a break at a photoshoot today, the photographer began showing me photos of his daughter, a two-year-old Chinese orphan who was born with a cleft pallet (fixed now) and who is, coincidentally, named Jade. After a few more yards of red tape, he and his wife will finally be able to go get their baby and bring her home. They already have her room set up (she has a rocking dragon instead of a rocking horse), they're just waiting for that final okay from their little girl's old and new governments.

I can't imagine having to count on bureaucracy in a situation like that. I would be a nervous wreck. I know these things go through all the time, but knowing your baby is in another country where anything could happen and still will be for months before you take her home? My stomach would be eating itself.

My late-twenties maternal kick in the pants is raging. Little Jade was so cute I almost started crying. She has the biggest smile. I hope everything goes smoothly for them all.

Ten

2010-01-04T06:25:00.000-08:00

Two three-day weekends in a row, including a trip to Connecticut, cookie-baking, knitting, reading, playing music, playing video-games, movie watching, and basic all-around lounging has made me loathe to return to my routine. Over Christmas, I spend hours sitting in the little wooden New English nook with the china cabinets in Derek's parents' house reading and playing guitar, the house silent, with snow falling outside. That night while Derek made pizza, his mom showed me how to play XBox and I spent hours happily creating a world for my magical orphan girl in Fable. I felt completely relaxed, like a kid. The whole day was my playground. I was just having fun, without worrying about what I should have been doing. I realized it has been so long since I've felt like that.

My one New Year's Goal (I don't like resolutions) from last year was to play the guitar more, and I definitely accomplished it. This year, I think I'll add to my existing list:

1: Read more.
2: Hang out more with writer friends.
3: Take more time that is really for you.

All of these, of course, involve time, and it's something that seems to be leeched away from me more and more. I remember back in Indiana, whole weekends of reading, of walking to the bookstore as the sun sets and snow falls just to get out of the house, maybe wandering off to a bar or the neighborhood pizza place or Caleb's house to meet with friends, but basically bored crumbless. I remember waiting for that one big night that would come once a month or so. The big concert, a friend's party, a play. Some reason to get dolled up and live and be young.

I imagined life on the coast in the city would be so exciting, and it is. But sometimes I get nostalgic for those long, internal days. Those long walks that don't go anywhere. Trips to the woods or the Zen Center or the Art Museum because there's nothing better to do and you don't have to be anywhere until late. You discover something about yourself and the simplicity of the world when you live like that. As hard as I try to hold on to that knowledge here, I know little by little it's being buried by calendars, cameras, appearances, parties, and endless nights.

I made something for you.

2009-12-27T18:05:00.000-08:00

It was an October Saturday in Salem of all places and we'd all just been to the fortune teller who told me of my responsibilities, which turns out were what I'd always expected them to be. I was in the exact middle of some hoopla over a book of poetry and some travels when a cocktail by the ocean seemed just what I needed.

Beside the fireplace, Lady looked at me and said, "What are you doing?" I hadn't known for a while at that point and my desires and purview had been for weeks keeping me up at night, so when she said, "Make music," all I could say was, "I will," and I did.

put the x in x-mas

2009-12-20T14:12:00.001-08:00

My Dickensian Christmas Party last night was a smashing success. The eleven-plus pounds of pork roast marinated for three days in a Nigella Lawson-inspired brine bath went in a flash, and everyone brought such amazing dishes (Black Forest trifle, Mexican meat loaf, eggnog thumbprint cookies, broccoli casserole). It was just what it was meant to be. A group of people celebrating their thanks for each other around a lot of incredible food.

Maybe it was the formal wear, or the roast, or the champagne flutes, but this party felt very grown-up to me. I wonder how old you need to get before you stop marveling that you're an adult.

Man Dies After Sex With Horse

2009-12-17T11:44:00.000-08:00

The earliest gods

were human figures

with heads of beasts.

remember the days of the radio star?

2009-12-03T11:59:00.000-08:00

The talented Ms. Christine Bower (who's piece is in an art show opening TOMORROW at the Washington Street Art Center in Somerville helped me make this video about Backstage at The Caribou:

I will never be able to comfortably watch myself on video. Good thing I never became an actor.

chill

2009-11-22T20:51:00.001-08:00

In Boston there suddenly is a winter chill in the air that feels oddly comforting to me. Maybe it's that crisp pre-snow smell that makes me think of coming days of baking and staying in with a movie and a bottle of wine, or maybe it's the holidays, with all the bullshit-eschewing love and feasting and warm sweaters and dresses and lipstick and champagne flutes, or maybe it's an olfactory nostalgia for my first winter here, that first November-January almost two years ago now when I really felt like Massachusetts was my home, my friends here a new, bizarre ad-hoc family.

Derek is coming home with me for Thanksgiving on Wednesday. Everyone will be there. Dad, Mom, John, Val, Grandma, and MJ. I can't wait to spend all day baking with my mom and sit with everyone in front of the fire with a glass of Baileys or champagne. Amazing how much these little things mean to you when you grow up.

2009-11-18T09:06:00.000-08:00

As if I needed more proof: "One New York Times Bestseller a Year Will Barely Keep You Above the Poverty Line"

First show of mostly songs this Saturday. I'm trying to figure out how to incorporate the music I've been doing in with all the other stuff. Is it going to be too all-over-the-place? I've spoken to a few different people about producing the songs I've been writing. Do I need to wait to have an album to start playing out? I really know nothing about this.

old friends and singing

2009-11-12T17:23:00.000-08:00

Brunch today with ex-roomie, the fabulously talented Chris Johnson. Eggs and grits and mango mimosas and talk about music and art. Forget never being boring. We'll never be bored. There is always so much to do, employed or not, dating or not. So wonderful to remember that.

Yesterday I interviewed my old housemate Sara for The Boston Healing Blog. It was great to reconnect with her. She's a married, petite, blonde Christian girl who has her M.S. in biochemistry. On paper, we are polar opposites, but we are actually the same person. How did I forget how much I loved these people?

In other news, I went to my first singer-songwriter open mic this week and performed a couple originals. I think I did pretty well. Fortunately experience has pushed me past the major fear of making an ass out of myself on stage. It's better to start when you're not ready and learn the world doesn't end if you don't knock them dead than wait neurotically till everything is "perfect," in my opinion.

Anyway, I plan to play songs more. Hopefully I'll be in good shape to sing for my Lizard Lounge feature this Sunday.

Congratulations, Dad

2009-11-04T20:57:00.000-08:00

http://indylaw.indiana.edu/news/current.cfm?nid=402

I am so proud and happy for my Dad. He's worked so hard and deserves this so much.

rose tints my world

2009-11-02T07:31:00.000-08:00

Here's a review of my Nuyorican feature from the Columbia Spectator's entertainment section. It's extremely complimentary, so much so I'm almost embarrassed to put it up. At least I know one person liked me in New York. And if that person happens to write for a paper, well, bully.

And a picture from another stellar Halloween in Boston:

Photo Credit: Jason Liu

I didn't have much time to plan a costume this year, so I threw on my old standby. My mom and I spent hours sewing this thing when I was fifteen. I wore it for several Halloweens in high school, and then later when I played Columbia in the Louisville Rocky Horror cast. If you told me while I was hand sewing shimmery ribbons on those short on my parents' beige living room carpet that I'd be wearing it again in 2009, I would have been skeptically ecstatic.

And this was 100% unplanned:

Video Credit: Mick Murray

2009-10-27T06:59:00.000-07:00

I have been writing songs of late. On the guitar. I sing them. I'm pretty excited about it.

I'm coming to NYC this weekend for my feature at The Nuyorican on Friday night. I'm thinking about doing it in costume. I haven't really been able to get into Halloween this year, which will probably bother me in retrospect more than it does right now.

The witch told me to live with the earth, not with people. I take that partially to mean live with the earth, partially to mean live with art. If your work hurts your feelings, you know it's your fault. At least you have a little more control over it than you do over another person. You can manipulate it without feeling bad. That's what you're supposed to do. You're its creator, not its friend.

A Chorus of Cities

2009-10-19T08:23:00.001-07:00

Derek's album is now available on iTunes. If you haven't heard it, it's really something, and I swear I'd say that even if I weren't sleeping with him.

Now on sale at Amazon.com, eMusic, and iTunes!

a few tour pics

2009-10-13T18:50:00.000-07:00

More pictures are up on Facebook, but I just felt I had to ask if any brilliant photographers have done a series of photographs from El Station platforms in Chicago? Cuz...

Right?

One of the trains I was on passed Wrigley Field. A game had just gotten out, and for a moment I was back in Boston, scrunched in a Green Line car at Kenmore, except here we were elevated and the fans were all dressed in blue instead of red. They all looked dour. An old man who had been riding the train called out to a young woman wearing a Cubs jersey who boarded across from him. "Who won?" he asked. She looked at him. "Who do you think?" she said. The old man shook his head, looked down, and sighed.

Also, the Kapoor mirror ball thing in Millennium park is, for lack of a better term, a ball.

2009-10-12T11:03:00.000-07:00

In bed for a few days with what is most likely H1N1. The entire bridal party and most of the people my age came down with chills and coughing (some puking) at the reception on Saturday. I went back to my parents' house with a 103 degree fever. I haven't felt that sick since I had food poisoning.

But regardless, it was one of the most beautiful weddings I've ever been to. Amber looked absolutely stunning, just like a 20s movie star.

Two shows in New England this week. Thursday is The After Nine Poetry Series at the Hotel Vernon in Worcester, MA. Friday is Slam Free or Die in at the Bridge Cafe in Manchester, NH.

Mark at Slam Free or Die was really excited about the flyer they made for me. They used original artwork from Sin City, and he said he found a picture that looked "just like me." Usually when someone says that, I get a little nervous, because when I see the picture it either looks nothing like me, or looks like all the parts of myself that I hate. But check this out.

It's uncanny.

2009-10-10T05:23:00.000-07:00

My clothes smell like the dogs and cats of 12 different houses. I have sold out of books. Amber's wedding is today. Home tomorrow.

I have learned:

1. College kids buy the most books, unless they live in a vegan co-op.

2. I really like living in Cambridge.

3. All of Amber's friends are awesome. It makes sense.

bible belt

2009-10-03T08:51:00.000-07:00

In Cincinnati I read for a gallery full of students who treat me like a real writer. I can see in these faces that they are ready for a new verse. They respond astoundingly to my performance. They have never seen anything like this, and I want to say, I am only bringing a fraction of what I am a part of back home. That there are so many others like me writing urgently and modernly who would blow you away if you could see them. Most people now read the poetry of dead people, so they think poetry is dead, or at least unrelatable. I feel so fortunate that I am part of a small group of people bringing poetry into the Internet Age.

I meet other writers who are young and full of flames and we trade books. Then at a reading in Indianapolis a woman wearing a jade necklace comes up to me and tells me she is a seer. She says I have a male presence following me and he is perhaps a very minor influence in my work. I ask her if he's a spirit, like as in a dead person, or something else. She shrugs. Tells me she's not sure, but she thinks he's been with me since I was young. That he became intrigued with my talent at an early age and has followed me, though she's not sure how much time he spends with me. Her first idea was that he is a writer of the past, but she's not sure about that part.

If that's true, I hope he's not someone too crazy. And I kind of wish he'd talk to me once in a while so I wouldn't feel so lonely all the time. I guess I've always been too cerebral for those types of conversations.

2009-09-30T05:19:00.000-07:00

Monday I spend some good quality (windy) time outdoors, then spent some good eating time at my old haunt, The Runcible Spoon. I hate to be that guy who moves to the city, then comes back to small-town Midwestern restaurants and is all like "Oh my god, everything's so cheap here!" But Jesus Christ, everything's so cheap there! Seared Salmon with horseradish sauce on smashed potatoes, black beans, and braised vegetables for $7.50? A Maudite beer for $3.50? Fuggetaboutit.

Monday evening I taught a workshop on Campus, and the kids were awesome. Ten students attended (the max that were allowed), and they all remained engaged and really interested throughout the whole two-hour workshop. This is AFTER they had to hear me read for a half-hour, and also from 8-10 on a Monday night. Plus, the group really had some writers. I was very impressed. Go IU.

feels like old times

2009-09-26T23:45:00.000-07:00

Even though the near-rural darkness and the subtle constant hum of crickets outside Lacey and Ryan's house is the perfect sleep-inducing environment, I'm having a hard time getting there tonight. Must have been my nap this afternoon after we spent a good two hours walking around town. When will I learn that naps are evil?

I realized that I forgot the computer hookup for my camera, so I likely won't be able to upload any photos from my camera till I get home. In the meantime, here are some pictures from my show at Lotus Fest at Rachael's Cafe in Bloomington, thanks to a fan:

Thanks, Charlie!

Tomorrow is all mine. Teaching a workshop on Campus here on Monday, then off to Cincinnati.

Yo ho ho!

2009-09-21T09:49:00.000-07:00

From backstage at the Y'arr! show Saturday night. What a blast. Thanks Big Moves Boston for having me.

PS: I have the best friends in the world. Me: "Hey, Alana and Mandy, do you want to be backup dancers next Saturday for my hip-hop side project? I'm doing a Pirate Cabaret." A&M: "YES YES YES!"

setting off

2009-09-18T11:58:00.000-07:00

I've recently experienced a resurgence of several chronic and crippling fears that I all but thought I'd defeated. As these things typically go, they are all tied in together, but manifest in different factions.

One of the most oppressive factions of this fear brigade is aerophobia, which is (come on, etymology people) the abnormal and persistent fear of flying. When I was younger this fear was so bad that I would spend the weeks (and sometimes months) preceding a plane ride in abject terror and certainty that I was going to die.

I would find ways to avoid planes. I would skip out on trips I had planned (I'll never forgive myself for missing Bjork in New York City when I was 20). I took a train from Chicago to San Francisco and a boat across the Atlantic Ocean to avoid getting on a airplane.

Then something happened. I went into therapy and pretty damn near close to conquered many of these persistent fears. When I got to Boston, I remember I boasted I wasn't afraid of anything anymore.

Like many boastful twenty-four-year-old statements, this one only proved to be half-true. For years I flew all over with relative confidence and a minimum of wimpering and hyperventilation, but this past year I noticed the return of the anxiety.

It might be because the press has been publicizing plane crashes this year. It might be because I've experienced some success in my writing and am excited about where things are headed. It might be because I'm generally pretty happy, have solid friendships and a wonderful relationship and am looking forward to seeing what the future has up its sleeve. It might be because the there's a poem in the very book I'm flying to tour with about my Fear of Flying and the tour itself is called The Cruel Accident Tour, and I can never seem to talk my fear out of the certainty that fate is always looking for that ultra-ironic kick in the groin.

So I decided to write a blog about my fear, since in my mind writing about something and deconstructing its meaning and origins takes away some of its power (unless that assumption would somehow make it more ironic for the fears to come true - in which case, I'm in trouble).

Whatever it is, a lot of my recurrent fears, including that of flying, have been bubbling up lately. I know that most of these fears involve lack or loss of control. Everyone knows your safer in an airplane than a car, but in the car you have the illusion of control. On the airplane you don't.

When faced with these uncontrollable situations when I was younger, my OCD would act up and I'd make believe I could control the outcome of say, an upcoming flight by walking around trees on the left or tapping my foot behind each crack or doorframe I stepped over. This would drive me crazy because I would have to know that I had done the ritual "right," or else it meant certain doom. I always managed to convince myself I hadn't gotten it right, so I'd have to like, stand in a crowded door way with my head down stepping over the threshold again and again. This behavior typically does not make you friends.

Fortunately I'm better at coping with the fears now than I was when I was younger, but paralyzing fear is never a good time, and not very productive. Maybe I've been thinking too much, retreating back into the ego, the "I" that I worked so hard to remind myself isn't the important part of what I think of as me. Maybe it's like what my old Mysticism professor at IU, Mary Jo Weaver, used to say about getting older.

"You always think you work through your issues, but really you're on a spiral, and you'll keep encountering the same issues on a deeper and deeper level throughout your life. It's like everyone gets a deck of ten cards at birth, and that's your hand, and all you can do is keep playing the same hand in different ways."

So Happy

2009-09-11T10:59:00.000-07:00

My book release/feature/birthday party at the Cantab went very well. I was happy with how I did (which is rare for me) and SO grateful to have both my parents in the audience.

But since I hear a video's worth 10,000 words:

(by Mick)

Tonight's the Night.

2009-09-09T07:42:00.000-07:00

growing up

2009-09-06T10:08:00.001-07:00

Derek and I went to Ten Tables in Jamaica Plain for my birthday dinner last night. All the great things I've heard about that place were 100% accurate. Dessert was this dark chocolate mousse torte with Thai basil ice cream. It made me make sounds I was embarrassed about.

I've been so busy planning the tour and doing stuff with the books coming out, I haven't had much time to WRITE write. I'm telling myself that's okay. That it's all part of the bigger picture. But it seems more and more time I would have used to write a year ago is now used to network, email, fix websites, attend events I should attend, and other schmoozey bullshit. It's turning me into more of a social hermit, since staying in at night seems to be the only way to get anything I actually care about done.

Maybe it's just growing up. I'm going to be 27 on Wednesday, after all.

farms

2009-08-31T19:11:00.000-07:00

Spent the weekend at Derek's parent's house and went to a pig roast on Sunday afternoon. Best pulled pork I've ever had, plus the chance to pet real piggies and goats and play horseshoes while people sing karaoke under beg tents covering long picnic tables. It made me feel a little homesick.

I was reading an article by Michael Pollan and I was struck by how much I've let myself slip since living here. I who used to be a vegetarian, who only got her water RO style in reusable jugs from the co-op, who used to carry around straight-up hankercheifs to blow her nose on so as not to waste all that paper.

One could argue that by living in a city, you use much less energy than by living in a more sprawled town environment. But the fact remains this has been a very important part of my life that I've sort of... forgotten about for the past few years. It's time to be more conscientious.

PS: My last meal of today consisted of a bowl of 365 Organic Apple Cinnamon Os with soymilk, a spoonful of almond butter, a raw ear of corn on the cob from the farmer's market, and a vegan white russian. What's the vote. Sustainable or not?

bye-bye brother

2009-08-24T13:52:00.000-07:00

My brother John and his wife Val came an visited this weekend. John and I cooked Italian dinner on Sunday night (his meatballs put mine to shame) and we stayed up late drinking, talking, and playing music.

I drove them to the airport this afternoon. It's good to miss your brother, since so many people have lousy relationships with their siblings, but I often wish we didn't live in different regions of the country.

Get Provoked

2009-08-15T07:36:00.000-07:00

Aside from selling absolutely gorgeous lingerie, the photography on the Agent Provacoteur website is some of the most beautiful and interesting catalogue photography I've seen.

Yes, please. All of it. Yes.

Madame Psychosis and the Delusions

2009-08-10T20:35:00.000-07:00

Want to see Madame Psychosis in action? Come to the Cantab Lounge this Thursday.

The Spark Singer Cover

2009-08-05T06:57:00.000-07:00

Here's the cover of The Spark Singer. Cover design by the awesome Lauren Recchia. Cover photo by the awesome Mick Murray.

Officially on-sale on 09-09-09.

Book release party on 09-09-09 at the Cantab Downstairs.