Right Place
Issue no. 14: Liaisons. What happened to them? also titled "Uh Oh."
Hello. It’s been a while.
Past era of life in a nutshell.
Learned a great deal and experienced new places with friends over the SUMMER. (still need to get the film developed)
Found new work for the FALL.
Survived the WINTER (not because of cold but other reasons).
and now I’m back and bum bum bum bum bum bum bumming once more.
What’s Going On
I have been back to teaching since October and start every one of my classes with a recap of what we did the prior week. Recap of my class today involved recounting the events that transpired in a room smothered in magical darkness and the question of whether or not one of the members of the party had succumbed to her injuries - she had rolled a combination that should have left her deceased at the end of the last class after all - and, as I always find great value in review, I thought it would be prudent to get back into this project with a brief recap of what I have been, and currently am, up to.
ATM I am teaching as part of an after-school program during the week, making rubber stamps in the East Village on the weekends, and editing and fact-checking for L‘Officiel (5 years in the running). I am about to turn 25 years old, I live in Alphabet City, and I recently rediscovered that bread and butter is the most beautiful culinary combination. I like my life and am largely as content as I think I can be. I have started drawing more, I live to make theater, I take photos of people’s outfits on the street, and “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” still hits me like a bolt of lightning. I am exploring my voice and falling in love with making sound in a whole new way, am making progress in letting go of life narratives, and feel that I am escaping the wheel of my mind to actively feel and embrace being alive. I have been marveling at how there are so many “first days” of spring. There was the day I first heard birds, the day I first saw a tree blossoming, the first day I didn’t need a coat on the way to work, and - just this past Monday - the first day I was caught in the rain without a jacket and felt the embrace of springing life all over my skin.
I am in a relationship and just visited The Cloisters for the first time, an experience that made me realize that I want to live in a church someday.
I also went to the Neue Museum and it further entrenched my fascination with Egon Schiele.
Here is a playlist I made for the spring.
I FOUND THIS SUPER COOL BAND NO ONE HAS HEARD OF
it’s called Radiohead.
I never really got into Radiohead until recently. Whenever I would listen to any of the albums or songs that were recommended to me they never really stuck. Then I listened to “Optimistic” and had a Danny DeVito crying in It’s Always Sunny moment. I got it. I understand now. I never denied, but now I understand. Kid A was my gateway album. I’m happily sonically kayaking away down the mainstream and riding the crests and dips of Radiohead.
Fun Anecdote: One of my professors in college (my ear training prof whose second of three classes I failed and had to retake) was an absolute musical beast. She is brilliant. And she mostly would extol the virtues of Bach and the lads and lasses of the “classical” tradition, so during the collegiate days it was always to my surprise when she would applaud Radiohead alongside Bach, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and the others.
GOING FORWARD
Having faced the fear of getting back to bumming I have been reflecting on how I want to use this space. I think I will be sharing more of my personal work (be it compositions, drawings, maybe videos?!) and want to think of this more as a digital diary than a newsletter. I am thinking that this will mean more playlists that I make and weekly roundups of what I am practicing and which artists I am focusing on.
Over the past few weeks I have been playing/listening to/rediscovering/discovering the work of Michael John LaChiusa and will be writing up thoughts for issue no. 15.
CONLCUSION
Parting thought: An old friend and I were recently talking about the importance of the American Musical. One of his thoughts that really struck me and has been stuck in my brain is the thought that a people - a collective society - needs to sing. Not necessarily meaning that the people all need to sing together, but that there needs to be some expression of soular music. We agree that Musicals have the potential to do that. Musicals can showcase the unsounded music of our society and bind our shared histories in a celebratory fashion. As he observed, we need to be creating shows where people can find the Music (capital M) in the score and experience the broad range of harmonies between individuals that musicals enable us to engage with.
We are back to our regularly scheduled publicating!
Till next time <3
A river dare chee!
Parting with a gallery of summer highlights.
