Let me put it this way – songwriting and producing is 99% about confidence. To me it is, anyway, When you don’t have confidence you don’t write good stuff. And over the years I’ve begun to feel that, well, I kind of know how to write a song now.
..writer of such hits as “Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)”, “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)”, “I Want It That Way”, “…Baby One More Time”, “Oops!… I Did It Again”, “Since U Been Gone”, “Behind These Hazel Eyes”, “I Kissed a Girl”, “Hot n Cold”, “California Gurls”, “Teenage Dream”, “E.T.”, “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)”, “Part of Me”, “Roar”, “Wide Awake”, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” “F**kin’ Perfect” , “Beauty and a Beat”, “I Knew You Were Trouble” for acts like Britney, Katy Perry, Backstreet Boys, Kelly Clarkson, Pink and more.
The wind chill Sunday night and Monday may reach -10 degrees in Nashville. This is so dangerous for our friends. If you see anyone who is un-housed and cold, PLEASE stop and give them this information: The cold weather emergency # is 615-800-0195 and this will have info about what shelters are open. The Cold Patrol # is 615-255-2475 and they can provide transportation to people needing to come in. Please spread the word… No more deaths!!
Medley medley medley, I ended up getting soaked in Chelsea today, I think people like getting caught in the rain. Or like watching other people getting caught in the rain. But in a really sweet way. I was grinning like a soggy dog. The little old ladies who couldn’t run out smiled at me. The people in their snazzy duds who couldn’t run out smiled at me. We put on our science hats and our poets pens. Everyone was watching for the rainbows.
Hours later it is dusk and I mount a hill at Fort Green Park, the sky is a tumult of cloudless blue and Manhattan is part of a horizon that stretches to the sea, it is the only view where New York seems like it belonged to the world, like the world is a constellation. New York is all a horizon, it is a city about horizons, it’s another north star, but it’s all a constellation.
We saw this film “What’s on Your Plate” at the BAM outdoor film screening, at Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn.
The film is directed by a broadly thinking social justice documentary filmmaker Catherine Gund, and hosted by two New York middle schoolers. It is a movie that will be shown in schools and to people who are dipping their toes in the world of more progressive sustainability reform. There are several particularly brave moments in it, especially for a film that could have wallowed in safe yuppy yoga mat zone. Gund brings it into the realm of environmental justice, as opposed to eco-chic.We hear about food deserts in ghettos, Latino immigrants inclination to farms, and they even pull out the statistic that there are more prisoners than small farmers (for a cursory primer on some of the wonderful world of environmental justice, read Van Jones’ blazing tract, Beyond Eco-Apartheid).
Gund neatly and provocatively takes an issue that is deeply political and algebraic, and makes it tangible and accessible. The girls have just enough experience living in a city all their lives to be equally in awe of the workings of nature, but worldly and Sesame Street enough to think that growing up vegetarian and eating a plethora of ethnic foods is worthy of a “doesn’t everybody?”. So to them, the idea of making the food system local and fair is as obvious and inescapable a challenge as buying a prom dress.
My friend Kelly and I met the girls and director afterwards, and they all have that sort of matter of factness about the issue, the way kids go about getting a drivers license or a prom dress or a job, that is refreshing, and well, duh.
The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions. The little soon forgotten charities of a kiss or a smile, a kind look, a heartfelt compliment, countless infinitesimal of pleasure and genial feelings
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Iced coffee. Waking up to a long lost friend lounging in your living room. Leftovers from home (in Massachusetts), small speakers make for crunchy music, the fan and the street noise and the breeze make up for it. Natural lighting. Good lyrics. Random updates from family and friends via the internets feels as good as is ever has whether through carrier pigeon or pony express or tribal chants. HELLO HELLO say the drum beats. HELLO HELLO says a webcam. Finishing a song. Iced coffee.
This time last week, around 1AM, I was coming back from a truly bizarre gig. on one side of the train over the bridge to Brooklyn, a slouching, smirking, baggy jeaned blonde 20-something guy who could have passed as a drug dealer or a surf bum yells at a tidy, quiet girl wearing a South Africa hoodie. “You from South Africa?” She’s noticeably startled and bristles back “sort of.” He takes her in, and nods in her direction “I studied over there. Ethnofilmmaking.” The tension dissipates, and he leads a chatty conversation. At one point he pats on the seat next to him “come sit here!” She refuses, he continues a schpeel about where he’s from, halfway across the car. When he mentions California, I yell “I’m from San Diego!”. He smiles at me and says “this is why you have loud conversations on the train.” Before I leave he yells “Represent, Diego!”
Tonight, a pile of drunk friends from some outer city, not here, are trying to figure out where the late night 2 and 3 trains are bound. One guy gets off at 42nd st, and another friend commiserates to the ringleader “you better watch after your friend, he doesn’t know where he’s going.” The ringleader points at the girl next to him “she doesn’t know where she is. That’s worse than not knowing where you’re going.” He looks at me for approval. “Poetically speaking, yes.” He looks triumphant.
Halfway through singing “Lord Knows” at the rowdy, rambunctious Sidewalk Cafe, I realized something.
I was being between blinded by lunatic spotlights, trying to figure out where the edge of the stage was, where my friend Curtis was sitting, and if the wildly eccentric nightowls who run it actually work a job in the day that could even possibly compare to the gypsy life they lead after rush hour ends. And suddenly it seemed that the microphone head was surprisingly ergonomic. Considering the motley decor of broken trumpets, busted drums hanging on the wall, old cutouts of kids who’d made the big time and bong jokes, that seemed unlikely. The ancient metal microphone I was singing into had formed to shape lips.
It’s the only geology the East Village has. No stalactites. Just old instruments, young bucks on pianos who explode into superstars, and bathroom graffiti. Old, metal microphone carved by lips like cliffs by the mouths of two generations of troubadours. It makes you emote harder, look sultrier, somehow reverse kiss Regina Spektor and Ani DiFranco. They never got rid of it. Just like they will never get rid of their emcees or the woman who plays banjo there, brilliantly. What would do a better job?
One thought ran through my head, not “swine flu” or “cooties”, just, simply, “New York.”
After I had sufficiently shocked the entire apartment from showing up at UMD, I caught up with recent troop movements of the nation. My friend Ib is gonna change the world. He’s from Sierra Leone and has gone through a hell of things already, but his non-profit he’s starting up (which started as a campus initiative), is wild. Recently he went home to explain to his hometown in S.L. how to avoid contracting malaria; to deliver what might be, in sterilized terms, “tuition packages” to kids to go to school, but what really consisted of him walking the streets finding homeless kids, and coordinating schools, shelters, pen pals, and enough of a care package to keep them in that situation. Then he comes back here and drums up support. I was swelling with so much pride and hope, that I know him, that I was just his friend and we milled around campus and Boston, and he’s gonna change things, and that in the next step of our lives, my networks need to come in handy. The most important thing he said, though, was that the most joy he saw was when those schoolkids got to talk to a penpal in the States, because “it means someone cares.”
And he’s just one of many people I’ve realized this about in the past few days. I wrote a song with one ever-epic friend, talked shop with others, wore wigs. Today I continued a recording session which had been set up as a connection that my voice mentor sent my way. This was held in the old South Dartmouth countryside I grew up going to. Nashville likes his stuff, and apparently likes me as well, which was a little surreal.
Later tonight I was walking onto my soggy alma mater, playing old CDs my sibling haven’t thrown out yet in the mild mist, knowing all the turns and stop signs from driving it hundreds and hundreds of times, sneaking into my friend’s dorm and avoiding RAs, remembering what this weather felt like last year, the year before, the year before, the people who’ve come and gone..about the people I know in New York.
In the end, all I can think of is a Rilke quote, about the “constellation of things” that draw us together, and feel a little like an astronomer. I think of a Dorothy Day quote, ““We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community” and realize we all act so new to this, but it is so deep to our nature.
“this city is for strangers like the sky is for the stars but i think it’s very dangerous if we do not take what’s ours”
My temp job at HSS ended today, I suppose I should have been freaked out, but I wasn’t.
I ended up riding up to St. Marks to meet my friend for dinner at an Afghani restaurant before heading to the Mercury Lounge to support a friend’s sometimes band (Elizabeth & the Catapault). I got to St. Mark’s early so I went to Mudd coffee shop. Milling around the village that is the East Village I was just struck by how beautiful everything was and it was really grey. Everything ordinary seemed heightened and worthy of gratitude, creativity and truth in lyrics and simplicity and democracy of music that people can sing along to, the rain, the promise of green, the motley humanity of the east village, not having enough of a coat, only enough quarters to buy black coffee with sugar, eavesdropping on conversations.
Friends started dropping out of nowhere. I magically had dinner with two dear people I initially met completely randomly in this city doing something I practically respirate (activism and music), eating food from a country I’m just short of obsessed with (Afghanistan), and by the end of the evening ended up seeing far more awesome people from the 4 corners of this city than I had expected to see. I was a little blindsided with gratitude and community and baselines and D chords.
By the way. Ezra & the Harpoons is the best band I’ve seen in a long, long time.
I felt like for the first time I’m free to do what I need to do, in the right place, with the right people, ready to own what my phantom limbs and joys are.
So my cousin Catie convinced me to start this up again.
Let’s start with my Brooklyn Bridge walk yesterday and leave it at that.
i wrote over at flickr:
“still missing a camera (oh phantom limb), so this is from my phone.
but i walked some of the brooklyn bridge after work today, at one point i thought to look back, it was such a BOOM. further realized why i’m here. last time i was on the bridge was in july, i decided to move here. here is to what spring holds.”
mercy bell 