Posts Tagged ‘bushwick book club’
Banned Books Week: An artist residency at the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library
September 20, 2022I’ll be joining fellow songwriters for Bushwick Book Club: Charlie Nieland, spiritchild, Patricia Santos and Thomas Teller in Indianapolis (not my first time!) 9/25-10/1 for an anti-censorship experiment at the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library. We’ll be living in the museum and writing songs all week in response to banned literature and performing the songs live at the end of the week. We talked with Chris LaFave of KVML in this interview that we’ve released as Episode 13 of The Bushwick Book Club Podcast. Take a listen! (It’s on iTunes too if you want.)
Share“Use Me”
August 6, 2022I’m posting this because it was satisfying on all kinds of levels to sing this song for this occasion with these people. Kurt Vonnegut was a humanist, and what always comes through in his writing for me is his compassion for the species. He feels sorry for us, because we have the capacity to love, and we want to be loved, but we fuck up. A lot. One of the ideas expressed in SIRENS OF TITAN is that the only thing humans are here to do is to love whoever there is to love. That’s it.
At the premiere of Bmore/DC Bushwick Book Club, spearheaded by Sea Griffin, there were all these incredible, talented, creative, fearless artists who created inspired pieces for this kick-off show and the audience who came to witness these new creations and birth a new chapter of BBC with us. There were these exquisite people to love, and half of them were on stage with me playing and singing the song I had written.
I grew up in Maryland outside D.C., and I lived in Mt. Pleasant just after college. This is where I learned the blues with Howie Feinstein and gospel with Jackie Stevens. When I first began singing blues in public, I couldn’t have anyone in the audience there that I knew. It was something I had to do, but it was also so beyond whatever I knew my identity to be, that I couldn’t have anyone who knew me in another context lay eyes on me as I did this scary thing that I could not keep myself from doing.
So to be in my home town singing with all these gorgeous, sensitive and extremely fun people––well, it meant something to this girl who was brought up to… to… do anything but perform in public.
I know it doesn’t seem like a big deal. It’s like, so what, there’s a stage, you’re on it.. okay. But really, you ask any other Korean immigrant girl whose mom became a Jehovah’s Witness once they got to America, and she’ll understand what I mean. I not only did the thing I was never supposed to do, I’m still doing it.
Thank you to everyone at the beautiful BMORE/DC BBC kick-off for being there to be loved and for using me.
A video, a Side Dish, a song about a book. Edgar Oliver. Summer, psilocybin, songs.
July 3, 2022Actually, there’s no psilocybin. I mean, there is. In my refrigerator. But in the title, it’s just there for alliterative effect.
There is, however, this video I just cut from the live stream footage from the latest SIDE DISH at Barbès. SIDE DISH is one of my favorite new things I started this year because it’s on a Sunday afternoon in one of my very favorite performance spaces in NYC/Brooklyn, Barbès. It’s laid back; it can be whatever it wants to be; and it ends before sundown.
This particular show was extra sweet for many reasons. It was Ralph’s last show in the western hemisphere before he heads to Far East Asia for a few months. We played the first SIDE DISH together after we became fast musical friends last winter.
Also, we got to bring friends Anthony Coleman (piano) and J Granelli (bass) to the stage with us which just added dimensions and realms to the music. It felt like an alternate reality to me. Reality shmeality. It was dreams coming true; I’ll tell you that much.
The song was written for the Bushwick Book Club event for Edgar Oliver that happened at Caveat earlier in the month. Holy. What a month.
You know it’s a good month if you start it with a nose dive into the gorgeous work of poet, playwright, actor Edgar Oliver and end it with a string of shows at Barbès with my favorite songwriters and musicians including Don Rauf, Jackson Pinks, Ralph Denzer, Anthony Coleman and J Granelli.
Also come on… Trout and Edgar Oliver.
Oh, and here’s this great review of the Bushwick Book Club/Edgar Oliver show from writer Maux Kelly:
Okay, so the songs from that night are out there and growing and eating snacks and making friends. Mine just learned how to ride a bicycle. My how the time flies.
ShareThe next Bushwick Book Club show – Edgar Oliver
May 12, 2022Show is June 4th, 6:30pm doors at Caveat in the Lower East Side (21 A Clinton St.)
It’s an indulgence. But I have to remind myself that Bushwick Book Club has always been so. It was born out of an indulgence of my curiosity by Steve Trimboli, so it always feels right when BBC moves from this impulse. Undulating to a little indulgence.
This time, the pleasure to give-in to is Edgar Oliver. He’s an East Village art/theater/literature treasure that if you haven’t heard of yet, you have the pleasure of coming to know now. His written work is not the easiest to get a hold of (I didn’t find any listed in the NYPL stacks) but you can start with enjoying this playlist:
AND we’ve got a tremendous line up of NYC and Brooklyn talent responding to Edgar in song and art, including fellow East Village art/theater/literary treasure, PENNY ARCADE hosting. In addition to Edgar being there to watch the show and of course give a reading in his singular (I would say inimitable, but we all try to imitate it) voice, we have performances from these most creative of NY’s creatives (the cream of the creatives?):
Penny Arcade (hosting)
Adira Amram
Ralph Denzer
Bob Holman
Rachelle Garniez
Susan Hwang
Charlie Nieland
Don Rauf
Lianne Smith
Jason Trachtenburg
TICKETS are $20 at the door /$15 advanced purchase / $10 live stream
Related show
ShareDame Darcy unapologetically yours
December 5, 2021The next Bushwick Book Club show is for the work of Dame Darcy with an emphasis on Meat Cake Bible perhaps, but really it’s a celebration of all things Darcy, because she is a celebration of what it means to be all you are, whatever you want to be at the same time, when and how you like it. In her case, it means being an artist, musician, performer, animator, filmmaker, illustrator, painter, doll maker, world maker, storyteller, witch, mermaid, pirate.
December 15th, we’ll have our event with 15 different musicians, songwriters, comedians and one chef who will respond to Darcy’s work. Darcy herself will be there and performing with us. It’s the final BBC show of 2021 and also our first fundraiser. We just achieved 501(c)(3) status this year. It’s happening at one of my favorite places that happens to have the best Ukrainian food in the East Village – The Ukrainian National Home at 140 East 2nd Ave. between 9th St. and St. Marks.
Here’s the flyer designed by the stupendous Scott MX Turner. And I’ll also include a video that Darcy made of my performance of “Cutting” written in response to Meat Cake Bible from a few years ago. I’ll be performing the song again live on the 15th. Lusterlit released it on vinyl not too long ago. The single had “Cutting” on one side and Charlie’s rocking “Waxwolf” on the other. I think you can still order the ’45! But also listen to it digitally on Bandcamp.
Related show
ShareSummer
July 28, 2021Is 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.
Brain Food: Shrimp in Aspic. 
Brandy Schillace reading from her book. 
Brandy Schillace presenting the cocktail she created for the event. “The Humble Butcher” contains tequila, simple syeup, lemon juice, hot pepper bitters, red wine and an orange slice. 
Susan Hwang records Mya Byrne for pasterity. 
Serena Jost singing “We Are Thankful.” 
Chaerlie Nieland films, Susan Hwang sings and plays, Marlon Cherry plays. 
Enjoying the show, L-R: Mya Byrne, Brandy Schillace, Mark Schillage.
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:
Some things I’ve been doing.
September 5, 2020I 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!!!
Many thanks to PINCLOUDS
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
ShareFive bags of turmeric and my right foot.
November 16, 2017I 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
Lusterlit on the West Coast and The Times
October 31, 2016I’m in Mia’s apartment on the opposite coast. My pajamas are the same, but I listened to a completely different set of neighbors having sex this morning (why do neighbors come in sets, like legos?), and it made me miss my lovely Bushwick neighbors. I don’t know why it’s preferable to wake up to their sex noises as opposed to these perfectly nice strangers. Maybe it’s just bias for the familiar. However, I’m not here for the familiar, although I am to a degree. The familiar that I’m here for is the playing and making of songs with my Lusterlit bandmate, Charlie Nieland. The unfamiliar part is the West Coast. It smells different out here. So different. I was just texting this morning about it with my friend, filmmaker Lisa Barnstone who is in Finland with her son as he listens to the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra rehearse what he wrote for a performance Tuesday of new work from composers who happen to be in the fifth grade. She likes the smells of San Francisco too… I was saying that I wish we could record smells like we do songs and sounds… We could make smell-notes to ourselves. Next iphone. Smell symphonies… holy cow. A whole new medium of art. Storytelling through our noses. Yikes. I’m getting excited.
I’m also excited because I’m in print! It hasn’t happened too much before. I don’t know how I feel about it, but I suppose it doesn’t matter (how I feel). The bottom line is, here’s the print, and the fun thing is buying the magazine at the counter at the airport and opening it up and getting to tell the cashier, “Hey! look! That’s me!” And she was happy for me and impressed. The important thing is that Bernice got a kick out of it…
Me and Bernice sharing a moment at 6:30am at JFK.
And there’s more online but here’s the spread for the Sunday NYTimes Magazine. My friend Alison took this one. She stills gets that delivered on the weekend. Like it’s 1995 or something. I like old school values too though.
AND… look, there was a rainbow outside the book store waiting for us and our first show at ADOBE BOOKS on our LUSTERLIT Bushwick Book Club West Coast Tour!
My friend Lisa pointed out that this photo looks “fake as s***.” That’s the filter I used–it’s called “Fake As S***” or “HDR.” But really, a double rainbow, and it smells good here.
And I got to meet up with Mia and meet her friend Hawa who were just gorgeous and opened up and spread their gorgeous around the room until we were all filled with it and we became so good looking we didn’t recognize each other but still appreciated it and the sharing of ideas and feeling. That’s what happens when you play songs about books. I’m telling you.
Find out about all our tour dates here:
RELEASE – Songs about books this WEDNESDAY at HiFi!!!!
September 27, 2016You know, you write some songs about books, and they seem innocent enough, but then they gain life and become their own sentient beings, and they demand things like videos where all your friends jump naked into a pool. Or they want to be played all the time and then recorded, and then they want other songs about books to hang out with and soon you have a whole album (or EP), and then that album wants to be released, so you’ve got to have art and a party. And then they want keys to the car and they’re trying on your clothes. It’s a spiral.. downward, upward, outward….
You’re invited to the party–the party that songs about books wanted–on Wednesday, September 28th at HiFi in the East Village. Producer and musician/songwriter, Charlie Nieland and I are playing as our new, lit-based duo, Lusterlit. He’s got an incredible album of songs written for Bushwick Book Club too that begged for this party. And we’re partying with the awesome singer/songwriter, Jessie Kilguss, who is also releasing her recording of BBC songs. AND we’re having special guest performances from BBC contributors Sweet Soubrette, Casey Holford, Pearl Rhein and John S. Hall. That’s the thing about songs about books–they’re very social. They’re like 20 year olds–they’re all about their friends and hanging out. Everybody dates everybody; it gets incestuous. I mean, if you’ve never hung out with songs about books, you’ll see what I mean Wednesday night. We’re all backing each other up on our songs, switching instruments and harmonies all night! And then we’ll get pizza… metaphorically. I’m still actually in my forties, and I’m lactose intolerant.
Here’s the video for the book-inspired song party!
Here are the details again:
Wednesday, September 28th, 7:30-10:30pm
HiFi
169 Ave. A
NYC
Here’s the video made by Charlie Nieland for one of my frisky songs to be released on my Vonnegut-inspired EP EVERYTHING IS SATEEN.
EUPHIO – Noise from the Void
