Susan Hwang

I really have been doing things. Documenting things––not so much, but doing things, sure. Kinda non-stop. Making things. Sharing things. Making times––with and without accordions.

This is footage from a recent performance at Theater For The New City, representing Yara Arts Group.

I sang two songs with lyrics from poems by Serhiy Zhadan––Ukraine’s most celebrated contemporary poet.

Marlon Cherry on percussion and backing vocals. Ed Pastorini on piano.

These are the poems:

AVIATION 58 by Serhiy Zhadan

Stand a long time at the edge of a snowy field,
Hesitating to taking the first step
into the endless expanse of snow, the endless expanse of language,
observing the bird’s wing of winter,
Maybe this time you’ll manage to cross to the silence,
Maybe this time you’ll manage to find the balance between
light and dark.
Maybe this time everything will work out and the syllables will open
the heart of the smallest reader,
like a river in winter.
While taking up the hard task of reading,
I know how hard it is to convince yourself
that it will really help.
I know how hard it is to admit
that what’s really important
are the simple things –
breath held because
of an unexpected connection of words,
light which comes down from above
because of a well selected melody –
simple things that distract us from
grave illness and family tragedy.
So, let’s try it again.
From the top.
From that place where there is nothing,
but anything can exist.
Books cannot save us,
But at least we won’t be afraid of what we’ve read.
Poets cannot teach us bravery,
But a meeting them should not cause fear.
Let’s try it again.
Let’s not be afraid.
Hold books in hand,
like birds we gathered after the snow –
not all will fly
not all will return.
Still you should not let them drop.
They should all be warmed.
They should all be equal in the face of death.

Translated from the Ukrainian
by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps

LIGHT by Serhiy Zhadan

Light.
A great light rises
on all marked by darkness, on all,
so gripped by fear, they can’t
enter the dark home,
where in the emptiness you feel the presence of a stranger
and voices gone are the ones you hear.

A year of ant-like determination.
A year of calling out names
that will never answer you.

We heard inside the unsettling echo of the sound,
Like the flight of a bird though the air,
like the invisible work of plants 
that give life to a wasteland.
Because the light rises on the tame and rises on the wild,
on those broken by screams, on those mad with sorrow,
and language, like a lung, burned by pain
comes to life, resounds and does its work
filling us with 
sound like wine.

This is why we love you.
Great god of signs and letters,
generous ruler of personal names,
whose presence we notice
between silence and too much talk.
You’re in the unseen syllables of sound, where, like grass,
the important things grow:
The name of the land,
The name of the river,
The name of your beloved.

Translated from Ukrainian by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps

Here’s my latest music video!

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A post shared by Susan Hwang (@soozee3)

The band name is a word mash-up from the mind of Nan Turner, and I like that the origins have anything to do with her genius and her wild sense of fun. Her fun roams wild and free. On Saturday, she was in the audience, and on Sunday, I joined her on stage for her set presenting excerpts of her new figure-skating musical/rock opera about Tonya Harding, Nancy Kerrigan, Oksana Bayul and Courtney Love. And Scott Hamilton and Vern.

I like the idea of presenting music and story together, so it makes me think of how else to develop this and what can grow out of the song I have explaining the back story of the portrait of my mom and dad taken at the Sears in Montgomery Mall circa 1981.

That’s Leslie Graves holding up the pic. Julie Delano is on my other side and Anthony Coleman at the piano. Marlon Cherry was there, but it’s a small stage at Rockwood, and he set up on the floor (never again! I need him closer).

Here are more of the photos from East Village photographer and journalist, Bob Krasner.

Instead of having a dramatic costume change, I had a hair change. I just let my hair down as a demonstration of a beauty trick/optical illusion. My theory is––the bigger your hair, the smaller your body looks. So instead of dieting, just break out the aquanet. New years resolutions, schmesolutions!

So… We’re getting the band back together! Well, we got the band together a couple weeks ago to play our first full set in nine years at Bowery Electric, invited by our friends Jim Andralis and The Syntonics and Larry Krone.

It was kind of a dream, as you can see from the gif/animation thing above.. a fuscia dream, but still a dream. This must be what is called “living the dream.”

We are dreaming again:

January 13th (4pm Relastics s / 5pm Julie and The Dad)
Rockwood Music Hall, Stage 1
196 Allen st.
NYC

Related show

• Artist: Soozee Hwang & The Relastics
• Date: 01/13/24
• Time: 4:00pm
• Venue: Rockwood Music Hall
• City: New York , NY
• Address: 196 Allen St.
• Country: United States
• Admission: by donation
• Age restrictions: All Ages
• More information
• Notes: We’re opening for Julie & The Dads! It’s a late afternoon weekend show – 4pm start! Let’s get dinner afterwards.
• Add to Google Calendar|Download iCal

I woke up and thought of the video I made the other day. I felt satisfaction. I felt satisfaction just on having made this thing that wasn’t there before. A song. A video. This feeling was there–feeling good about this new thing, and it was separate from whether this new thing would be seen by anyone. I mean, Virlana saw it, because she commissioned it and uploaded it to the Yara sites. I might send the link to Joie. But the pleasure in making this thing exists independently of whether anyone sees it.

And then, I felt pleasure noticing this pleasure. I looked at the pleasure and thought, “That’s so cool” — which is technically another pleasure.

A pleasure on top of another pleasure. That’s a double layer cake right there. What happens if you keep finding layers upon layers… you get a croissant, which is its own realm of multi-dimensional pleasure and proof that humanity may not be all bad.

This is the video. The song’s lyrics are a poem by Ukrainian poet Oksana Zabuzhko — “DESPITE IT ALL IT WAS YOU I LOVED…” translated by Wanda Phipps and Virlana Tkacz.

Here is another video I did in the winter of last year. Keeping up with the posting.. I have to be more people to do that and make the stuff to post. There is pleasure in posting. Hey! That’s another layer! Getting closer to that croissant… mmm.. croissants.

My folks don’t know I made this… shhh! My mother hates social media.

I’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.)

I’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.

Actually, 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.

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.