Susan Hwang

Is it boring to talk about the weather? Is it mundane to mention the seasons? I don’t know, sometimes boring is great. Sometimes boring is just what you need, and it takes a lot for me to say that, with my general stance since I was born being that everything should be fun all the time. But I’m thinking now that there’s fun even in boredom. See those threads of fun in the fabric of boredom? What a trick.

It’s been kinda an explosion of extroversion. I was not exactly ready for it, but I think I did okay. Remember that first “party” where it was everybody’s first time in a room with other people, and you were all trying to remember how to socialize? Everyone felt conversationally clumsy. I was all thumbs. My friend Virlana said she was having trouble discerning whether she had just spoken a thought aloud or not. Boy, was it thrilling just to feel that awkward. With people.

Ooo. I’m just realizing that you need people for awkwardness at all. I mean, you can’t feel awkward alone. Can you? So “social awkwardness” is redundant. There might not be such a thing as solitary awkwardness. At least I hope not.

Other thrilling (and somewhat awkward) things in my book:

Released this video for Yara Arts with lyrics from Serhiy Zhadan’s poem “Psalm to Aviation #58.” And thanks “Ukrainian Weekly” for covering the release event in this article by Olena Jennings!

And Lila Eaton, the daughter of my best friend from freshman year at college, was here with her TRUMPET and learned the parts *that day* to perform at the release with me and Marlon! Omg. Trumpet dreams do come true.

Journalist and photographer Bob Krasner also covered Bushwick Book Club‘s first in-person and live streamed event for AM New York. It was a creative feast and a much needed, heartening gathering of artists, musicians and author. I would describe that show for Brandy Schillace’s Mr. Humble & Dr. Butcher as spectacular and deeply satisfying, and Bob’s article really caught the moment and all the layers of meaning in the article and photos.

Okay THEN… Bushwick Book Club presented our first stage at the Porchstomp music festival on Governor’s Island. Here’s some of the documenting I was able to do:

There’s music happening. It’s in multi-dimensional realms with mythical creatures like in the new music video for Charlie’s TIGHTROPE. It’s also right here on the stoop in the East Village with special guest drop-ins like the magnetic irresistible Penny Arcade coming up to sing a few songs.

I’ll include the video clips here, and just so you know, there will be a live stream on January 23rd for 7MPR Dance Company on Facebook. Plus, the first Bushwick Book Club live stream of 2021 is coming February 13th for Kurt Vonnegut’s TIMEQUAKE. There are incredible songwriters chomping at the bit for this! Or rather, they’re chewing their Vonnegut and turning every bite into brand new literary-song GOLD!

On the stoop for Accordion Fridays:

It was great to have Penny Arcade there to do a cover of Marlon Cherry’s “Just How Beautiful (You Are)” with Marlon on percussion. She sang to all of 2nd Avenue… when she performs, she opens all of her heart. I felt like she was extending her love to everyone who passed the whole city of course. It was exciting to have her be our special guest for the live stream.

We’re happy to be participating in this year’s Jeff Buckley Tribute. Charlie and I played with Marlon Cherry with footage by NYC filmmaker and artist, Rick Rodine.

Friday, November 13th, 6pm-9pm
Tickets available at: bit.ly/34jdVK3

Related show

• Artist: Lusterlit
• Date: 11/13/20
• Time: 6:00pm
• Venue: Jeff Buckley Tribute Online
• City: New York
• Address: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2020-brooklyn-jeff-buckley-tribute-concert-livestream-worldwide-tickets-125696209747
• Country: United States
• Age restrictions: No Minors
• More information
• Notes: Lusterlit (Charlie Nieland and Susan Hwang) with Marlon Cherry on percussion and backing vocals submitted a video piece for this year’s Jeff Buckley Tribute. Footage was shot by NYC filmmaker Rick Rodine. We’re happy to be in such talented company, celebrating Buckley’s life and work. The whole line up is great with over 60 artists from Australia, India, Ireland, Italy, Northern Ireland, Spain, and the UAE, UK, and USA, performing a marathon tribute to 31 of Jeff’s works (plus an encore)! GENERAL ADMISSION ($13): The livestream URL will be posted on concert day on the online event page accessible only after ticket purchase. The concert will begin promptly at 6:00 p.m. EST/11:00 p.m. GMT. CONCERT ADMISSION, PLUS ENTRY TO VIP ROOM & VINYL LOTTERY ($35): This experience includes entry to a Zoom VIP meet and greet with Mary Guibert, who will mingle with ticketholders and answer your submitted questions as time allows (4:30 to 5:30 p.m. EST/9:30 to 10:30 p.m. GMT). Purchase of this ticket will also enter you into a lottery to win a vinyl record from the Jeff Buckley Music archives. Winners will be randomly selected during the VIP hour! Performing: Melody Angel – Chicago, Illinois, USA Nicky Barbato – Port Chester, New York, USA The Barnets – Camarillo, California, USA/Kilkenny, IRELAND Angela Bove – New Paltz, New York, USA BSKi & Friends – ShapeShifter Lab, Brooklyn, NYC, USA Carvel – Brisbane, AUSTRALIA Mary Chin & Jia H. Jung – Boston, Massachusetts, USA Randy Coleman – Los Angeles, California, USA Curtis J – Brooklyn, NYC, USA Ingrid Elkner & Demetri Sampas – Melbourne, AUSTRALIA & Lexington, MA, USA Linda EPO w/ Matt Gilmartin&Seth Faulk – Brooklyn&Queens, NYC, USA FloodWaves – Long Island, NYC, USA Ernesto Hex – Brooklyn, NYC, USA Mike Horn – Long Island, NYC, USA Mischa Igor – Coffs Harbour, AUSTRALIA Jack Jaselli – Nidaba Theatre, Milano, ITALY Matty Jontiff & Friends – Valencia, SPAIN Jupiter – London, UK Mark Lesseraux & Thom Loubet – Long Island & Manhattan, NYC, USA Lusterlit – Brooklyn, NYC, USA Ruth McCavery – Belfast, NORTHERN IRELAND Mishti – Brooklyn, NYC, USA Nimit Nilesh (aka Dorian Days) – Gujarat, INDIA/Dubai, UAE Off Broadway – Lowell, Massachusetts, USA Opaline – Los Angeles, CA, USA Overthought – Pavullo Nel Frignano, ITALY Yuri Padashi – Turin, ITALY Remayn – Herstmonceux Castle, Hailsham & Eastbourne, UK Aaron Shragge & Neel Murgai, Brooklyn Raga Massive White Bonsai – Melbourne, AUSTRALIA Alan Williams/Birdsong at Morning – Lowell, Massac

Here’s the October 9th set with Marlon Cherry and special guest, Ray Brown from my East Village rooftop (also known as Banduristan). We play again October 23rd with special guest, songwriter Phoebe Kreutz!

I’m not always good at updating all this and that everywhere one is supposed to. I’m happy if I can keep my plants and cat watered. I don’t have a green thumb. Not something I inherited from my dad, whose thumb was in fact green.

I’m starting another batch of fermented black garlic this week, and I shot this video with Marlon on the roof today. It was an experiment. I think it worked. We have a live stream set tomorrow, Friday, October 9th at 5pm Eastern at facebook.com/susanhwanglalala . Everyone is in a context. I create mine in part with commitments to present music.

Here’s our last live stream on Sept. 11th which was… really fun.

Hope to see you tomorrow, 5pm Eastern, October 9th at facebook.com/susanhwanglalala.

I do a lot of nothing too. Just swaths, gobs of nothing. And sometimes, even if I am doing something, whatever it is, it is surely not the right thing or enough.

Here is some documentation of things I have done the past few months. I should document the nothing too I suppose. Why not? Oh, I get it now… What I’m presenting here now is the documentation of nothing. Here’s the nothing I’ve been doing.

Interview on Sub Rosa Sound Radio

Host, Ariel Wang, and I had a lot of fun talking about music and songwriting, Bushwick Book Club, creativity, what to wear for zoom meetings…

Fermented Black Garlic

Fermentation is a journey. Here’s the path of Black Garlic timed to the Full Moon in Pisces.

The start

The finish

A clip from a Lusterlit set in Seward Park. Music in front of actual people without a computer!!!

Speaking of PINCLOUDS, here’s a video I put together of Claudi from that afternoon set to music I recorded of theirs in Tompkins Square Park earlier in the month:

Accordion Babes’ Accordion Fridays

Also, here’s my latest live stream from Accordion Babe’s Accordion Fridays performance series. Oh, the joy of accordioning accompanied by the wonderful Marlon Cherry on percussion, backing vocals and kazoo.

Related show

• Artist: Susan Hwang w/ Marlon Cherry for Accordion Babes Accordion Fridays
• Date: 09/11/20
• Time: 4:00pm
• Venue: Facebook.com/susanhwanglalala
• City: New York
• Country: United States
• Age restrictions: No Minors
• Notes: Playing a live streamed set of songs on accordion accompanied by percussionist, Marlon Cherry. Join us at facebook.com/susanhwanglalala or the Accordion Babes FB page! This is part of whole afternoon of performances from Accordion Babes’ international accordion community!

• Artist: Bushwick Book Club
• Date: 09/24/20
• Time: 7:00pm
• Venue: Facebook.com/bushwickbookclub
• City: Brooklyn , NY
• Address: facebook.com/bushwickbookclub
• Country: United States
• Admission: by donation
• Age restrictions: No Minors
• More information
• Notes: DANCERS ON THE SHORE by William Melvin Kelley. This is the first of three live streamed shows in response to “Lost Giant of American Literature” and godfather of “woke” William Melvin Kelley’s book of short stories, DANCERS ON THE SHORE. Kelley’s daughter, artist Jesi Kelley, will be giving a reading and presenting her own art inspired by the book along with performances from 12 artists and musicians from NY, LA, London and Las Vegas. This kick-off event for DANCERS ON THE SHORE will feature performances by BBC Founder, Susan Hwang, spiritchild, Prince Akeem, Charlie Nieland (Lusterlit), Ray Brown, Troy Ogilvie w/ Sean Gannet, Teresa Toro, Sung Uni Lee, Stacy Rock (LA), Timothy Dark (Las Vegas), Amanda Thorpe (London) and Grace Solero (London). Future shows for DANCERS ON THE SHORE will also be live streamed by Bushwick Book Club London and Bushwick Book Club Los Angeles later in the year. Proceeds from the live stream show will be shared with arts education and revolutionary community building organization Urban Art Beat. Founded in Brooklyn in 2009, the Bushwick Book Club meets every month and employs the talents of local songwriters and artists who plumb the depths of a chosen literary gem to create that rare and beautiful thing–a new song (or visual art, dance, film or snack). All songs are then performed at a live show. The Bushwick Book Club now has several branches all over the world, including Malmö (Sweden), London, LA, Seattle, Maplewood (NJ), Greenville (SC) and New Orleans. Listen to The Bushwick Book Club Podcast on iTunes and SoundCloud. About DANCERS ON THE SHORE The first and only short story collection by William Melvin Kelley, author of A Different Drummer, and the source from which he drew inspiration for his subsequent novels. Originally published in 1964, this collection of sixteen stories includes three linked sets of stories about the Carey, Bedlow, and Dunford families. They represent the earliest work of William Melvin Kelley and provided a rich source of stories and characters who were to fill out his later novels. Spanning generations from the Deep South during Reconstruction to New York City in the 1960s, these insightful stories depict African American families—their struggles, their heartbreak, and their love. About the author: William Melvin Kelley was born in New York City in 1937 and attended the Fieldston School and Harvard. The author of four novels and a short story collection, he was a writer in residence at the State University of New York at Geneseo and taught at The New School and Sarah Lawrence College. He was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for lifetime achievement and the Dana Reed Prize for creative writing. He died in 2017. In 2014, Kelley was officially credited by the Oxford English Dictionary with coining the political term “woke” in a 1962 New York Times article entitled “If You’re Woke You Dig It.”

It’s been three years since my last post. THREE YEARS.. ha. I’m EXACTLY the same. Actually, I don’t remember who I was, so I have no one to compare myself to except, Christina Aguilera, because she’s the last person I saw (on Netflix – “Burlesque” made in 2010 with Cher and Peter Gallagher and cameo by Alan Cumming who really should have had a much larger role, don’t you think?).

I did the unthinkable. Invited over of a bunch of strangers to my bedroom to play a short accordion set. This is a lot for an introvert.

Here’s the set from last Friday, May 8th. I don’t have any wisdom to share. Man, do I wish I could offer you something like wisdom or perspective, whatever you desire, really. I wish I could offer that to you! I may not be able to give it to you, but I believe you will or are in the process of getting it! So congratulations on that, no matter what that feels like… but I hope it feels good or somewhere very close to good. In the vicinity. Meanwhile, there’s awkwardness and accordions in my room. That I can give you. Lots of love..

I have five baggies of turmeric in the top of my luggage right at the zipper.  They are tucked into another ziplock baggie, because if the bags break… everything I own will be a different color.  Plus I’ll have to run and get more turmeric, which I do on a constant basis anyway, because, you know, like everybody, I’m living my life, and I take every avenue to avoid pain.  Like, you know, you might have a friend who likes to talk about how mercury’s in retrograde all the time because some kind of planetarily-inspired chaos is more exciting than the pain of the deep sadness for the connection he doesn’t feel in his daily life and his inability to take in life’s basic pleasures.  I inherited my mother’s trick of keeping myself very busy, and you figure if you run around doing a bunch of stuff, you won’t feel the pain of your own uselessness.  Honestly, it doesn’t always work.  Self loathing is bad, but self loathing and being over scheduled is worse.  If you’re going to hate yourself, you should do it lounging on a beach.  Sipping a margarita.

What does work, however, in terms of pain management, is turmeric.  For me.  It’s something that works. I need it to work.  If it doesn’t, the I go back to my old routine, which was as follows:

— open my eyes.

— go the bathroom to pee.

— stand at the sink to brush my teeth for as long as long as I can before the pain gets so bad shooting down my lower back and left leg and through to the bottoms of my feet that I run back to my bed and lie down.

— lie down until the pain subsides enough for me to get up and go downstairs to make coffee.

— stand there making coffee for as long as I can until…

That’s kind of how it went.  And then I’d take advil, and I’d eventually be able to move around enough to do fun things like walk to the medical center down the block from the pawn shop to wait hours to see someone who wouldn’t have any idea what was going on with me and send me to someone else who would give me tests and tell me to come back to see someone else who you’d have to re-explain everything to so you could be told that you would be in pain for a long time and you should take large horse pills of ibuprofen until you decided on cortisol injections into your spine, and when that stopped working, you could have surgery to cut the nerves in your back that were giving you all the trouble.  Hooray!

And you know, in between, I would do my experimental paleo cooking and worry about money.  And write songs and record an EP with Charlie and schedule shows and edit video for BookClub and wonder what the big deal was about being alive anyway.

I had a running joke with myself that the dirtiest part of my body was the bottom of my right foot, because my left foot and leg was in so much pain that I couldn’t stand on it long enough to lift my right foot and wash the bottom of it.

So you see, this turmeric thing is important for me and for the cleanliness of my right foot. 

It’s kind of a turmeric anniversary for me, because Charlie and I are headed to Seattle to play Bushwick Book Club and Lusterlit shows on the west coast for about a week.  We did this last year, and in the bucket seats of our cheap rental Hyundai is where I really made the connection between turmeric and normal, pain-free functioning.

I had been using turmeric in the paleo cakes I ate daily, and I was taking less and less advil, and feeling better and better.  I didn’t realize it was so connected to the turmeric until I stopped cooking those cakes on my trip, and the symptoms returned.  Sitting in the car was excruciating.  I couldn’t stand up straight without being in pain.  It was hard to walk.  It was hard to be.  It scared the shit out of Charlie.  I told him to run to the Safeway and get me eggs, cocoa powder, flaxseeds, coconut flour, stevia and a shit ton of turmeric.  I returned to the cakes.  The apartment we were staying at was a bachelor pad with minimal cooking utensils, but I found a milk frother and frothed all my ingredients together.  It worked, sort of.  It worked enough.  I was on my way back to relatively normal functioning!  I found ways to keep baking and baking the whole rest of the trip.  I’d sit in the car and shove turmeric cake in my face looking at the Red Wood forest, stretches of that farmland in California where all that gorgeous produce comes from.  Those strange Star Wars oil pump crane things.  The west coast is turmeric tinged for me.

So, that’s the long way of saying, look, I want to share a recipe with you.  And I want to let you know, in case you were on the fence about it, that um, yes, what you eat affects you.  What you put into your body matters, and there are ways of giving yourself what you need.  And what you need may not be a cortisol shot that you wait half a day at the medicaid medical center office for.  It may be cake that you make in your oven that smells great each morning.  It’s amazing that what you put in your mouth affects everything, even the cleanliness of the bottom of your right foot. 

Here are some turmeric cookies I baked in Don and Monique’s kitchen.  Don’t they look great against a Seattle back drop?

Here’s a video of cooking turmeric cakes I shot with Larry Krone in his kitchen in the East Village.  We used a dozen eggs.  I forgot to mention that.

Tonight is the third Bushwick Book Club show for Chuck Palahniuk’s LEGACY – An Off-Color Novella For you To Color.  It’s at The Last Bookstore in downtown LA.  Please come out and hear the new songs about books!!

I’ll be the one wearing turmeric-colored shorts tonight held up by Lusterlit/BushwickBookClub tour buttons because the zipper broke.Share

Tonight I’m playing a show called The Current curated by writer and musician, Deenah Vollmer that raises money for immigrant advocate group Make The Road.  Musicians and poets are performing new work in response to the times at CounterEvolution – the beautiful venue created by Jim Malone (who knows what to do with reclaimed bowling alley wood).  Doors are at 7pm tonight.  37 West 17th St., 2nd floor, Door code 2695.  It’s BYO so I’m headed to the Trader Joe’s for some snacks in a minute, and we can all share.  Lusterlit (my duo with Charlie Nieland) are on the bill with poets Deenah, Niina Polari and Josef Kaplan and also musicians, Gary Lucas, Phoebe Kreutz, Vincent Caccione, Devon Church and Jeff Lewis.

But you know how when you’re working on something, suddenly it’s everywhere.  I spoke a lot about music and my family’s experience as immigrants in an interview last week.  I didn’t intend to.  Writer and radio host and producer, Jia Jung approached me about participating in her podcast with John Asante, Play It Back, which focuses on songs and the stories around them.  I didn’t know when she asked me that I’d delve into my earliest recollections of songs sung, how music reflected my family dynamics and how a single song can steep layers of personal history with understanding and meaning that keep being revealed to me.

You can listen to the podcast here:

Jia Jung and engineer, Steve Francis of Stush Music were both really receptive and sensitive which made it easy to share.  So much more came to light for me as I responded to Jia’s questions and curiosity, but I wanted to include the text of my initial email response to her invitation which was the jumping off point for the interview.  Here it is:

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Sometimes there are too many storylines you can’t pick.  In this case, the threads keep getting longer and more entwined.  I better just get started now and end up where I end up because the information is too good to keep it to myself.  Although, if you know anyone who knows me, or if you know me, you know that I don’t shut up about it.  It’s what I do everyday.  I eat cake.

Sometimes I just call it Survival Cake (not the sexiest of names).  Or what about Fun-Fun Anti-Inflammation Cake?  Listen, this cake by any other name would keep you alive and pain free enough to be jumping around with kids half your age and double your talent in a joke-folk musical about the epic tale of Gilgamesh written by your genius friend, Phoebe Kreutz.  This is my present reality, and it’s made possible by many things, including my ever-evolving recipe for turmeric cake.

It can look like this:

 That’s the lemon/vanilla version.

I make chocolate/cinnamon/cayenne too:

Is that a car dashboard in the background of that landscape of chocolate turmeric cake?  Why yes it is.  It’s part of my turmeric journey.  The turmeric journey includes an actual road trip that illustrated to me via bucket seats in a rental Kia the importance and effectiveness of this substance to my daily functioning.  I laughed that on other tours, it was pot brownies that were the medicinal snacks of choice in the minivan.  This time, it was turmeric cake and tons of it that I wouldn’t share with Charlie, because his back is fine. The ones I made on the road were pretty hardcore — made with whatever we could find at the Safeway.

But I want to give you my basic recipe before we go further, because it’s important.

• 1 carton of eggwhites (or 10 eggwhites equivalent in whole eggs)
• 2 Tbsp flaxseed (meal or whole seeds.  I like Trader Joe’s golden toasted)
• 2 Tbsp  chia (optional)
• 2 Tbsp coconut flour (also kind of optional)
• 2 Tbsp Turmeric (heaping… heap it up)
• 2 Tbsp Cocoa (raw or what have you)
• 2 Tbsp cinnamon
• 1 tbsp vanilla if you want
• pinch of cayenne to taste
• sweetener of choice – sugar, maple, agave.  I use tsp or 2 of powdered stevia (the straight stuff is best, like from Trader Joe’s. Don’t get it cut with anything like dextrose if you can avoid)
• 1-2 tsp apple cider vinegar
• shake or 3 of baking powder

For lemon version, just use lemon juice from one lemon or lime.  And I like to add about a tsp or so of whole pepper kernels.

You put it in a bowl, usually dry ingredients under the wet ones, and then you blend the shit out of it with a hand immersion stick blender until the batter is a batter.  Like pancake batter.  Thicker or thinner depending on your taste.  If it’s thicker, it’s likely to come out more like biscotti which is also great.  Put it in a small-ish baking pan or pie pan at about 350 for like 15-20 minutes.  Go take a shower.  Come back and press on the surface to see how done it is.  It’s usually done when you can smell it.  It smells great.  It’s the smell of anti-inflammation.  It’s the smell of pain-free mobility!!  Which, to an arthritic accordion player, drummer, singer who once missed a gig because standing up made her cry, smells pretty fucking good.

The thing that I learned about turmeric is that you have to eat a shit ton of it.  The dumb capsules say like one or two of these pills with a meal.  I don’t know; maybe that helps Barbie’s arthritis, but for my degenerative disk disease-aggravated sciatica, I had to start at two big honking tablespoons a day until I noticed a difference — the difference being I would spend less and less of my days in exhausting pain.  And now… like I said, I’m singing and dancing and acting with this very exuberant cast of Go Go Gilgamesh.  And my midtown chiropractor misses me.  We just don’t see each other like we used to.

And of course, turmeric you can take in so many different ways.  Teas, milk, curries…  You’ve heard about the golden paste?  Another sexy name.  There’s just no way to make “paste” sound like something attractive that you’d actually want to put in your mouth.

I find that the cake is the way for me, because cake is actually something I do want to put in my mouth.  Just about any time in fact.  And I love coffee.  So now I can have coffee and cake.  Also, sometimes I do an unsweetened, savory version omitting sweetener and sometimes adding an herb, like cilantro or rosemary.  The recipe is versatile and travels well.  Look, here it is with me on this bus to Washington D.C. for a gig I played there (three hours solo accordion playing Russian and cowboy songs – it’s a living).

I will write more about my initial road trip (Lusterlit West Coast BBC tour!) that opened my eyes to the effect of turmeric in my life and on my body in my next post.  It will make sense, sort of.  But I wanted to get this out there.  Get it started.  Let the tale be told.  My tale includes my participating in the telling of this one:

Go Go Gilgamesh! has five shows as a part of the 2017 Frigid New York Festival.  We open today.  TODAY.  8:50 pm at The Kraine Theater in the East Village.  85 E. 4th Street.

Get tickets here: http://www.horsetrade.info/event/67153edafbf86148a1617559c8cd08ba

I know that second picture doesn’t make any sense to you, but it was yesterday morning as we were going to the theater for our 9am tech rehearsal.  Wake up and make the art!!  You don’t even know the super-human feats of maneuvering I did with two bags of costumes and two instruments on that morning commute from Bushwick to the East Village.  There was one moment when I looked at the guy behind me who wanted to get out too, and I just said, “I don’t know how to do this.”  And then somehow, I had the lip of my drum and the handle of my accordion case in one hand and 2 bags in the other and I heaved myself out before the doors closed.  It was like I was some new kind of superhero or something.  New kinds of superheroes are born everyday as new circumstances create them.  I became Remarkably Agile Overloaded Multi-Instrumentalist Actor Girl able to maneuver morning rush hour commute without killing or being killed!  And it’s not radiation that gave me my superpowers, but cake.  Mmmm… cake.  And I guess that would mean my kryptonite is still… bad conversations I can’t get out of?  Something like that.

Come to the opening of the play tonight!!  I get to play a goddess and an old man!!  It’s written by a genius and performed by brilliant people who are directed by a dedicated visionary!  And we got a very nice lighting director yesterday.  Come come!  You need to be entertained.  You’re not on this earth to not take my advice about where the great entertainment is.Share