Filed under: art, Entries with songs attached, music, resistance | Tags: music, resistance, rough seas, singing, survival, turbulence, Women's March
I thought I was going to die. I was clinging to the side of the boat, absolutely sure that this was it. We were on a ferry from Naples to Capri, in what could reasonably be called a tempest, because my friends and I had thought it would be romantic to spend Christmas on the island of Capri. And as I gripped the rail, as sea water washed over me, I sang. The storm was loud so I sang, loud, until we reached the shore.
When the sea gets rough, I sing. When times are at their toughest, I sing. I do lots of other creative things but it’s singing I turn to when it feels impossibly turbulent. And so, this past year, I found myself singing a lot. I had to. The waters have seemed so high, as if they would rise up over our boat and wash me and all my loved ones overboard.
I had not played my guitar much in recent years. There was dust on it when I pulled it out of its case. There’s no dust on it now. There hasn’t been any dust there for months. I’ve leaned on songs I loved decades ago and been comforted by songs I only learned this year.
I recorded them for the handful of people who listen to my podcast, just in case these songs might help them through these turbulent waters, too. I gave them to my patrons on Patreon, as a thank you for being a railing to which I’ve been clinging. And now, if you could use them, I offer them to you. I recorded them in my living room. They are not perfect recordings but they are the sound of an artist singing through a tempest.
This is the first batch, in honor of the Women’s March this weekend. They are songs of Resistance. Click here to hear them on Spotify. Or if you’d like to help me recoup the cost, you can buy it directly from me via my website. You can download them from iTunes or listen on Apple Music. (And something called Deezer?!)
In any case, I’m singing. And surviving.
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Writing on the internet is a little bit like busking on the street. This is the part where I pass the hat. If you liked the blog and would like to give a dollar (or more!) put it in the PayPal digital hat. https://www.paypal.me/strugglingartist
Filed under: art, business, Entries with songs attached, music, theatre | Tags: art, Getting, Gifts, Giving, Lullabies, Thank You Note
My dear friend Robyn sent me a Thank You Note for something I sent her. Robyn is a beautiful writer so the note is a bit of art and moved me deeply. What I had sent her was a CD of lullabies I recorded for her son. This was not my idea (or at least not entirely.) Robyn had expressed a wish, something to the effect of “I wish I had a recording of you singing lullabies.”
I had been trying to think of what I could give her in honor of her son’s birth and simultaneously, I’d been searching for a creative project I could do on my own – one that wouldn’t require a team and fundraising and such – so this was perfect. Robyn’s wish was a pretty offhand one. I think when she said it, I’m pretty sure she had no expectation that such a thing was actually possible. I made the thing, yes, as a gift for her and her family but also for me, to keep my creative juices flowing. I feel Robyn’s suggestion of the project was a gift. I made a gift of that gift. Then she returned it to me with this Thank You Note. Art from Art from Art and I think the circle of Art will continue in the context of a friendship that has always featured the sharing of art. It’s a wonderful thing to be given the gift of inspiration. It’s a wonderful thing to give a gift in return with a piece of art and then to have that gift answered with more art and more inspiration. It makes me want to keep giving and giving.
Essentially, this is why I’ve found so much of my artistic life a struggle in recent years – because it has moved from this GIVING sense to becoming all about GETTNG. How to Get grants. How to Get audiences. How to Get donations. How to Get publicity. How to Get materials. Hot to Get space for rehearsal and for performance. How to Get somewhere. How to Get ahead.
I want to turn this around. I want to figure out how to Give in the context of my art. How to Give audiences hope and pleasure and fun and something to think about. How to Give artists opportunities. How to Give the form some dignity and delight.
I get frustrated when so much of what I have to give is ungiveable. It feels like I have a box full of pedigree puppies with fancy ribbons that I want to give away but no one has space for a puppy and they’re all allergic. So the puppies remain with me, tearing up the house and making trouble. A teacher once told me about Border Collies. Apparently, you have to give them something to do or they’ll tear the place up. That’s what my Art’s been doing for some time, tearing the place up – that is until I found this opportunity to give. Giving puts the Border Collies of my Art right to work and it makes them feel great, too.
For more on Art and the Gift Economy, you can read The Gift by Lewis Hyde (my review of it on Goodreads) or Linchpin by Seth Godin.
This is the song I wrote for Robyn’s son. Sacha’s Song
Filed under: art, dreams, Entries with songs attached, theatre | Tags: collaboration, creative block, creativity
In recent months I’ve been feeling pretty blocked creatively. This is new for me. I’ve never really had trouble generating projects or completing them. If there’s one thing I thought I’d always have, it’s my creative flow. But lately, instead of the river of creativity, I’ve been seeing little faucet drips. Drip! (idea – oops, there it goes, down the drain!)
I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Then I saw my Rubenfeld Synergist (my version of therapy. Check it out. It’s awesome stuff. Rubenfeld Synergy) and discovered a fundamental truth about myself that ought to have been obvious.
I’m a collaborative artist. (duh.) I thrive when ideas are bouncing back and forth. But with most of my chief collaborators scattered like dandelion seeds across the world, I’ve been attempting this new thing of creating all on my own. And that just don’t work!
I also realized that my best friends are my best collaborators and vice versa. There are people who work best with strangers and never get close to the people they work with. I am not one of those people. I am happiest with blurry lines in love and art. I love when they feed each other.
For a while now, I’ve been exploring the more “professional” world – which can mean doing things more impersonally – and I just don’t dig it. I started my company with my friends. I started my band with my friends. And the people that became friends through working together remained so and returned to work and be friends together again.
I want my art to feel like one of those conversations that seems like it could go on all night and all my night conversations to lead to art.
That’s a tall order, of course.
So meanwhile, I’m just looking for someone to get into artistic trouble with me. Someone who wants to knock over the bank of creativity with me and see what spills out.
This song was the first I ever wrote all by myself and a kind of mourning for the collaboration that began my songwriting life. It eerily feels pretty appropriate for these days, too. Earthbound
In the interest of making the struggle a little less struggl-y, I’ve been going to the Actors Work Program for some career guidance. At the Job Search session, the head of the program talked about this survey that some big work agency did. They asked people what was desirable in a job and what was undesirable. Based on their findings, the best jobs were accountant, hospital administrator and some other job that sounded so boring to me, I couldn’t even keep it in my brain. The worst jobs, again based on what most people wanted, were cowboy, lumberjack and dancer.
And almost every single one of us at the table (actors, designers, writers, directors, etc.) dropped our jaws at this news. We all were WAY more interested in being cowboys, lumberjacks or dancers than hospital administrators. There wasn’t even a question of which jobs we’d choose. The facilitator of the session told us that she’d told us this story to illustrate that artists think much differently than most people. The implications of this are still reverberating with me. Is it really true that most people would choose to be hospital administrators or accountants when they could be a cowboy? Really?!? It’s like I can’t even believe it. My whole world looks different. I thought I was metaphorically roping steer with my brothers, home, home on the range or felling towering trees or at least, circling the dance floor with my fellow dancers, but it turns out I’m roping steer in the accounting office. Stapling steer? Filing trees?
It’s a brave new boring world.
A song about what it’s like to keep believing in cowboys when everyone’s administrating hospitals:
Filed under: business, Entries with songs attached | Tags: day job, flow, teaching artist, water
A Day Job.
I need a new one. For most of the time I’ve lived in New York, I’ve worked as a teaching artist. When I first got started, it was the best day job in the world. It was in my field. It helped me clarify my art. It felt like I was doing something for the greater good. And even though the work was inconsistent, it paid pretty well. I got to the top of the food chain pretty quickly.
Then I got burned out – too many restrictions, too much unpredictability and a sense of frustration about the state of public education all added up. So I left New York, went to graduate school and got an MFA. When I came back to New York in February, I was a bit refreshed and picked up a few of my old gigs just where I left off. I had some good residencies and some lousy ones. When I taught my last last class of the school year in June, perhaps the best residency/class I’ve ever taught, I thought, “That was it. That was my last class.”
Then, all my schemes and dreams to make my life overseas work sort of fell apart (see my earlier post, “The Tyranny of a Dream” for more) so I came back to New York, fully prepared to dive back into teaching. But life seems to have other plans for me. Despite the lovely feedback I got last semester for my work, no one has ANY work for me this fall. Not one class. I don’t know whether this is because of the recession or because I fell to the bottom of the totem pole when I left New York in 2005 or because I was out of the country for most of September, but whatever the reason, I’ve got nothing. Not one stitch of work. Problem is, I can’t think of anything else I’m fit for, besides the stuff that I can actually do that I need the day job to support. And the only breaks I’ve gotten since I’ve gotten back are in ACTING of all things.
In the amazing book, Creating a Life Worth Living, Carol Lloyd offers a really fantastic practice for finding the right day job for your artistic soul. I spent a long time with that chapter and now have long lists of ideas for qualities I’d like in a day job and a long list of skills. Yet, when I look at the two together, I can not for the life of me figure out where they meet. When I talked this all over with my career counselor a few months ago and sent her the lists, she couldn’t come up with anything either. In fact, the first thing she said was , “Have you considered Arts in Education?”
I’m trying to live my life with more FLOW these days, trying to break my pattern of swimming upstream but I can’t even figure out where the river is with these issues. Every line I cast into the water just hangs there, so I keep casting lines with not even the vaguest idea of whether it makes sense to do so.
I’m looking for flow. I’m looking for the path of least resistance, I guess they call it, but I’m mostly just running in circles at the moment. Or to fling yet another metaphor around, treading water, wondering which direction I should swim in.
Any suggestions? I’m considering everything.
Here’s a song about how I’m trying to live my life these days. Listen to: water river stone
Filed under: business, Entries with songs attached | Tags: blog hits, Edinburgh, Fringe, marketing, marketplace, Pot Noodle the Musical, promoting, Publicity, selling
Art as commerce has been on my mind a lot these days. I took a show to Edinburgh this August and was amazed at what a marketplace it was. Theatre there wasn’t so much about theatre as about promoting theatre. Every day most artists spent an hour a day doing their show and two to eight hours promoting it. The festivals main drag (The Royal Mile) was full to bursting of artists handing out flyers to passersby. By simply walking two blocks, one could collect hundred of flyers in a few minutes. Gimmicks were legion. Pot Noodle the Musical handed out free Pot Noodles (cup-a-soup like things.) Hamlet Experience gave out fans. Some valentine show gave out heart shaped candies. All of us were there scrambling to get people in to see our shows.
Now, I’m not opposed to marketing. I understand that people need help finding out about things they might like. My producer and I even took a marketing class a few years ago, which I actually enjoyed. I liked thinking about who would want to see our work and figuring out how to get in touch with them. But that felt very different to me than the practice just trying to get numbers in. Sometimes making art can turn into a game of getting butts in seats, hits on a blog, plays on music sites, downloads or views.
What I’m wrestling with is the necessity of promotion and wondering if it actually works and if so, how. I learned a long time ago that if I wanted to “get somewhere” with something, I’d have to worry about promoting in some way or another. From sending out headshots, to handing out postcards, to sending out emails, I’ve done all of it. And cross-promoted some of that, too. Sometimes it’s even fun.
But, we were such unsuccessful promoters in Edinburgh that there were shows where no audience turned up at all. I’ve posted my music all over the web and there are still songs that have never been played by anyone but me. This puzzles me. I have friends. I even have friends who like my music. If I played a gig next week, I’m pretty sure I could bring in a decent audience. And yet hardly anyone listens to a thing I post. No one reads these posts on this blog when it comes to that. (This I understand, however, since I’ve only told a couple of people about it.) I try not to take personally people not showing up or not listening or not reading or whatever and for the most part, I manage that. I just find it endlessly curious. What tips something over from un-listened, unwatched, unexamined to hundreds or thousands people becoming interested in it?
The web feels a bit like Edinburgh, there are so many things competing for our attention on it, that it’s easy for the songs of our friends or their blogs or their essays or their You Tube clips to get lost in the shuffle. I guess I’m just wondering how much of my soul do I sacrifice when I get all promote-y and pushy about getting my work forward, and is it worth it? I’m happier when I can just make shows and not give a damn who shows up and who doesn’t. When I can write something and not care who reads it or compose something and not care who hears it. I guess that’s the answer for now – no more promoting until I’m in the mood for it again. At the moment, the thought of promoting even one more thing makes my stomach turn. Publicize this blog? Nope, not yet.
This is a song that never gets any hits at all. Maybe putting it here will up its numbers. Not Your Type
Filed under: art, business, Entries with songs attached, theatre | Tags: Egypt, porn, Shakespeare
I’m not kidding. I’m reading Germaine Greer’s Shakespeare’s Wife right now and it’s her assessment that Shakespeare’s best-selling poem, “Venus and Adonis” was Renaissance porn. It’s not EXPLICIT porn and it’s couched in a beautiful metaphoric form but yeah, I can see how it could be interpreted as porn. I’d put it more in the lyric erotica category myself but it was the 1590s after all, so who can say?
It seems that during the plague when all of the theatres were closed and Shakespeare had no income coming in, he composed these erotic verses to bring in some much needed cash. Greer points out that “Venus and Adonis” was widely read, had at least eleven reprintings in Shakespeare’s lifetime and that most of the copies remaining had been handled so much that they were in tatters. Greer makes a lot of fascinating arguments around this idea (about Ann Hathaway, older women, sexuality and patronage) but what I’m most interested in at the moment is that this, our most treasured playwright, turned to this form in times of economic hardship. He wrote a best selling erotic poem when he couldn’t pursue his work in the theatre.
I too am short on cash and while no plague has closed down the theatres (gratefully!) they may as well be closed to me given the level of my current access to working in them. SO, I’m thinking about going the way of Shakespeare and Anais Nin and who knows who else and selling my art in a new form. Of course, if I’m going to do it their way, I’ll need a patron first, I guess. And I don’t really relish the idea of writing porn, per se. Maybe I’ll write some good feminist erotica instead.
On a podcast of Radio Lab (my current favorite radio show) they talked about this archeological dig in Egypt at the start of the century, which is essentially an ancient garbage dump. Among the fragments of gnostic texts and gospels of Jesus, they found lots and lots of the same scraps of paper. Something that had been sort of mass produced, and clearly very popular. Guess what it was. That’s right. Porn. (Here’s the show if you want to hear the story: egyptian trash )
I suppose all this makes me wonder what else I could do that might be in this neighborhood. I mean, I’m not going to make a porno, clearly but how can I sell out just a little bit just like those that have come before me and my hero, Shakespeare?
Here’s a pretty “Venus and Adonis”-y type song although instead of horse metaphors, I’m using something a LITTLE more contemporary. It also has pretty silly instrumentation. Listen here: Laptop
Everyone says “Never give up on your dreams.” Or, at least your average film or children’s book will repeat it a few times. It’s a maxim that most of us would support.
“Should you ever give up on your dreams?”
Say it with me now,
“No!!”
Yes, yes, it’s true. You should never give up on your dreams. Especially if you’re a little wooden puppet who dreams of being a real boy, then, yes, yes, by god, you should very definitely not give up. I think we can all agree on that.
However, I gave up on a dream of mine recently and it feels amazing. It’s an extraordinary relief, like I’ve suddenly stopped banging my head against a wall.
Now, I didn’t give up on this dream of my own free will, I have to say. If I’d felt I had a choice, I might have banged my heard against that wall forever – but life said “Hey. That wall is not a door and it’s not going to open right now.” So I stopped pounding on it, despite the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that seemed to shout “How DARE you give up on your dream?!?!”
To keep myself sane, I’d say, “I haven’t given up. I’m just re-strategizing.” But now, here on the other side of the dream (and the ocean) I’m sort of delighted to say I gave up. Yep. I gave up. I surrendered! Yippee!! I’m free from the tyranny of my dream! I can do whatever I want to, now that I’m not expending all my energy trying to achieve the damn dream!
It was a nice dream. But NOT scrambling over gravel and alligator pits and what-not to achieve it is even nicer.
So, hey kids! Give up on your dreams! Let ’em fly! Don’t hold fast to them. Don’t grip them tightly.
I think the thing of it is, it’s like anything you love – and that old maxim of “If you love something, set it free” and maybe that dream will come walking back one day.
Listen to Luck
This song features the line, “Forget that dream.” so I’m posting it here. However, it was written when I was still fighting the surrender with all my strength, so it’s a pretty different perspective. Same artist, different day.
Filed under: art, dreams, Entries with songs attached, music | Tags: Dave Matthews Band, interdependence, location, London, New York
“Turns out, it’s not where, but who you’re with that really matters, that really matters.” – Dave Matthews Band, The Best of What\’s Around
I’ve quoted this line to myself so many times in my life, it’s a little bit ridiculous. It’s a lesson that I apparently need to learn over and over and over and over again. I have gone on multiple searches for the perfect place, the perfect city, the perfect community. I drove up and down the East Coast looking for a place to move my theatre company in 2002. I interviewed cities as if they were candidates for marriage before ending up back in New York. Years before that, I went searching for a theatre town I could settle down in and make my home. I tried out Atlanta, DC, San Francisco and Chicago, looking for the perfect spot. Then I moved to New York on a whim, because I was in the mood and because most of my friends seemed to be there. “Turns out: It’s not where but who you’re with that really matters.”
Then I left NY to go get my MFA in California and found my way to London, where for the first time, I thought, “This is it. This is my community. This is the place.” Everything I did after that was an attempt to get back there to this perfect location for my art. The reasons were many. Some were logical, some not. Some were illusions, some truths. And I found myself there last year fully intending to put down roots and stay for the rest of my life. I thought I had found the perfect location. Immigration law thought otherwise and so six months later, I was back in New York. I was, however, just as determined to get back to this place I had been searching for all of my life. I put all my efforts into the scheme to return. And return I did, this summer (with a show in the Edinburgh Fringe to facilitate my re-entry) and spent many weeks afterwards searching for ways to survive on the restrictions of a tourist visa. In brief, I’ve been fighting for this location for well over a year. Maybe two years, actually. And I’ve surrendered.
This hasn’t been easy. I am deeply attached to place. I think of cities like lovers and leaving them feels like breaking up. In my dreams, if I remember nothing else, I am likely to recall a sense of place: the shape, the architecture, the feel of a place. Location has been everything to me, just as it is everything in Real Estate. To be in the right location, I have sacrificed space, amenities, and so much more. But when there comes a point where the sacrifices outnumber the benefits so extremely, it’s time to shift. And it turns out, it’s not where, but who you’re with that really matters.
I’m back in New York now (bruised and battle-scarred from my attempts to stay in London) and I have so many extraordinary people here welcoming me back, offering up the best of themselves, displaying incredible generosity and compassion. In the face of that, it is hard to really bemoan my location (especially since this particular location has a lot to recommend it all on its own.) I also left lovely generous people behind in London, which is what makes leaving the most difficult. The new friends, the ones who would be close if there was time, the old ones, the ones like family. . . it hurts to leave them. “Turns out. . .” But these friends here, these OLD friends, the ones I’ve been through fire with, they are the balm, the reflection, the encouragement and the hope of THIS location. It has been these friends that I created with in the past. It was these friends who’ve seen me through all the phases of my art thus far. It is these friends who ask after some dusty corner of my art and wonder how it is. It is these friends who have seen me through all these locations thus far.
“Turns out, it’s not where but who you’re with that really matters. . .”
To that end, here’s a song about a shift in how I think about my relationships with people in general, learning how to accept help like this, etc. Interdependent
Filed under: art, Entries with songs attached, music, theatre | Tags: art, music, struggle, theatre
I’ve gotten so used to struggle, I even struggled for a long while about what to call this blog. Do I really want to reinforce this notion of artists struggling? And no, I don’t. But really that’s what I’m looking at here. For better or for worse, what’s really UP for me is this struggle that seems attached to being an artist.
I had lunch with an old friend last week, one who has taken a decidedly different path through life than I have. She’s in business now and called herself a “sell-out.” (How horrible! We suffer even when we give up the artist’s life!) This business friend of mine, after hearing about my current troubles, suggested that I start a publication for struggling artists. As she saw it, there are so many of us in the same damn boat, in need of support, and there’s no real place where we can meet and help each other. I don’t think I’m ready to start a magazine or anything but I did really respond to the idea of opening up a forum for us. And not just for those of us who have stayed on our artistic paths over the years but also those who have stepped off of it and those who are about to step on. We’re all in here trying to create our lives creatively. Maybe we should all start a magazine. I’m all for it. I’m just a little busy trying to make 17 other things happen, as, I’m guessing, are most of you.
Anyway, this is my introduction, for myself really – to understand the evolving relationship with the struggle that making a life in the arts seems to be. If any of you have managed to do it without struggle, good god, please share your secrets!
Question of the day:
What have you sacrificed on the altar of Art?
Here’s a song about one of my struggles in this business: Trying
Songs for the Struggling Artist 