Archive for June, 2009
R Bar This Wednesday
Got a small show coming up at 7pm this Wednesday. I’ll be doing a smaller arrangement than normal. Me on acoustic. Paul on laptop. Noah on guitar if he can make it (he just had a baby girl so we’ve got to cut the guy some slack). And maybe a new backup singer if it works out. Regardless, I’ll be there with my acoustic and some downstrokes. I’ll probably try out a few new ideas I’ve been working on and maybe do some interpretations of older tunes.
The setlist will include Dirty White Coats, Hold My Heartache, and If You See Something. Others in the mix will include Erica, One More Time and Honey Eyes from the first Lipstik record, and then Valentine’s Day and then some other ideas including a song I wrote for my grandfather.
R Bar is 218 Bowery between Prince and Spring. Try and swing by.
RIP Leo Seligson
On June 12, my grandfather, Isadore Leo Seligson, died suddenly of a heart attack, while sitting in his car after an afternoon at the pool reading his paperback and, presumably, staring at a few nice looking ladies in their bathing suits. He was 93.
I have been thinking about whether or not to write about him. On the one hand, some part of it feels exploitative (or something). I don’t know. But on the other. He was my friend. He was a wonderful man. Truly. He was different than you or me. I don’t mean some rags to riches story or his incessant drive for fame or power. I mean that a light shone within him and anyone who met him knew it immediately and he showed people and me how to love and how to be something good in this world. So you should know about him. You should remember him and you should know that even in a world full of pain and misery and corrupt institutions and tyranny and quests for power and fame and mindlessness. Even in that world, there are people who are good. Simply good. Honest. Giving. Open minded. Loving.
I am not a geneologist and this is not a formal obituary. So I’ll just share some recollections and thoughts and if it means something that’s fine and if not that’s fine too. But he was here.
Sharing This Experience
The reason I like Twitter is because, like Bob, the world feels a lot less lonely in some ways. It’s the reason I love the Internet. The connection to other humans. That is an emboldening experience and one that instills confidence.
I was shaky. I still am. It’s scary. But the essence of life comes from being out, interacting with humans, having enough confidence to give your personality a whirl and see if it attracts any takers.
Bob’s funny because, like all of us, he wants to have it both ways. He wants to be sensitive and vulnerable and let you in and, at the same time, he wants to be above it all and on top of the mountain, opining and all that.
But you don’t have to read his shit if you don’t want to. So that’s up to you. But I’m on the same tip as him, albeit on a smaller scale. Life is about having the courage to listen to all the doubts in your head about whatever you’re doing and then say, “Fuck it” and do it anyway because what else are you going to do.
We live in public. I have to see that movie. It’s true. I wonder what it means on the level deeper than the sneering ironic, “We’re all such narcissists and pathetic” meme although that could be true but there is something to all this connection.
All these bytes and electrons that are capturing the collective human experience in a way that heretofore has not been possible. So that we may live on although our consciousness may evaporate into the ether or take other forms against which it is unknown whether we’ll have the memories of these moments within us. So this is a record. And we were here once. And I guess that means something or it doesn’t.
Meanwhile, the universe continues to expand and from the sky we are small and to a mouse we are big or a rat and then from a different scale we are giants and then there is the dark matter pushing all of us away from each other into something else.
I wonder if all of this, the Internet, was destiny or a fluke or what. Predestined. Ordained. Human progress and the inevitable result. Or just a happy accident. What other ways could progress have taken us.
We want to be together. In some way shape or form. We want to be together. And accepted.
Circling The Big Domino
Seth makes points that I agree with in his post ‘Circling the Big Domino‘ Now I may agree with them because I don’t have a choice. The “big one” hasn’t yet hit The Flying Change and so it’s not really up to me. But on other other hand, it does feel like the right Zen/Buddha thing to do which is focus on what you can achieve and leave the rest out of your head and accept what you can do and focus your power on a very small point and then slowly grow the circumference of that sphere until its white hot. Also, don’t divide your forces, except if you’re Jackson and you’re up against Hooker and it’s Chancellorsville which is another way of saying, “Just be right” but mostly it’s about working what you can work and getting the reviews and the shows that you can and make the connections and let the flame become a blaze and if it doesn’t at least let it become a nice sized fire and think about the work that you create over the longer term and don’t focus on, to use a crude image, blowing your wad all at once.
But if you line up all the dominos one by one, in the right order, you may just have enough energy to push over the first one. That one, of course, adds momentum so that when you crash into the second one, that one goes too. All the way to the Queen.
If you can do a good thing more than once than you should be doing it and if you can’t than you never really had a chance to begin with.
And the beat goes on.
Transitions
There’s a moment when things begin to change for you as an artist and one of those moments was last Thursday when my friends told me they couldn’t come to my show and still there were people in the audience and while many of these people were fans of the great Paul Brill and other artists some of them were actual legitimate fans of mine. And that was a special feeling to move past the point where my draw is completely dependent on my friends because it means you are doing something that is starting to catch on. Maybe this is obvious to other people but it felt like a transitional moment. One where it doesn’t matter if we went to school together, or got drunk together sometime back somewhen, but really it’s about the fact that you dig the music we’re making and there is no other pretense and no other expectation save for that we won’t suck when we perform.
I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got
I know I’ve always loved this record but I sort of rediscovered it recently. I have become reobsessed with it, especially my favorite sequence which is “You Cause As Much Sorrow”, which has this really sweet lilting groove, into “Last Day of Our Acquaintance” which I think is one of those crucial songs. There’s the climax at the end when the drums come in and Sinead is singing these half-yodels in between the phrases almost as if she can’t contain her pain and her anguish.
I believe that what separates this record from the traditional female singer-songwriter records that don’t speak to me in the same way is the anger and the wrenching honesty she displays throughout the record. But really it’s the anger. That’s what makes it so ferocious and that’s what adds that special something that takes it from good and into the masterpiece territory.
I haven’t heard many other female vocalists do something like Sinead does on “I Am Stretched On Your Grave”. One of the better uses of that famous ‘Funky Drummer’ sample that I’ve heard although the beat is so infectious it works pretty much anywhere it’s used.
I lived in El Salvador when this record came out and I’d listen to it over and over and I remember swimming in the pool at the place where we belonged and they had a high rise diving board. As always, there’s a sleeping volcano in the background. It was the summer before we left. I remember my mom’s grey Honda accord sitting in the driveway with the dogs.
I finger-picked a cover to ‘Last Day of Our Acquaintance’ recently but I doubt it’s good enough to widely distribute but email me if you want to hear it.
