MC5,000,000

Some nights I lie awake and wonder when it it was that everything seemed to change... was it post 9/11? At some point around the millennium the culture shifted. The cult of mediocrity took hold of what was edgy and original.  Jagged corners began to be filed and rounded.  People's faces began to be cosmetically genericized. And while fashion continued to push boundaries of sexuality, it, too, lost a bit of its iconic style and elegance. 

Popularity trumps quality.  Celebrity and social media far outweigh what is original and good.  One can no longer even trust criticism because a good review could be an arrangement-- payment for a favor, an advertising contract.  The old tried-and-true publications are suddenly rife with errors and less-than-stellar writing. As the concept of pronouns expanded, their usage in journalism and language is sadly battered and incorrect. Does no one learn grammar these days?  Is not the Manual of Style part of an AI editing app? 

I read today that the average radiologist cannot distinguish between a clinical X-ray and one generated by AI.  What does this do to the science and credibility of diagnostics? The fact that  artificially generated music sounds passable is not as much a credit to the technology as an alarming critique of what is being actually humanly released. It's depressing.. .like a large muddy pond with few sparkles and waves and dull slow fish swimming close to the bottom.

Three AM last night-- a variety of musical programs on various PBS stations.. one after another.. I could not name a single artist today-- nothing seemed compelling or passionate... the live audience was startlingly receptive and happy and the sound systems were excellent.. but the material? Forgettable.  Boring. Much ado.

We old souls send each other video footage and YouTube clips of exciting bands from our teenage years-- the MC5, early James Brown.. .today it was the 1966 Blues Magoos. The visuals are rough and generally black and white... the audio is flawed... but what is perfectly clear is the originality-- the break-through sense that these bands were doing something new and exciting.  Even now this comes shining through.

In 2001, I was super fortunate to attend the annual R & B award ceremony with John Lee Hooker's manager who was accepting a posthumous honor on his behalf.  On the heels of 9/11, it was a modest under-attended event hosted by the legendary Ossie Davis and Dionne Warwick.  Neither performed but got down to the business at hand. Today, I barely recognize half the names called at the recent Grammy awards-- music and songs less so; regrettably it's a chore to watch even a few minutes of the show.  I feel silly.  But back in the day, every single artist was someone I knew well... someone for whom I had massive reverence. Icons. Winners.

After the program we all sat for a meal at a few simple tables upstairs at the Beacon Theatre, I think we were. I was at a table with Sly and the Family Stone.  Sly himself was not able to attend, but his mother was there accepting the award on his behalf, and I sat next to the amazing Larry Graham who was polite and a little more subdued than I would have thought.  Prince was alone-- shockingly tiny even in heels-- impeccable, with a true aura as one imagines.  Anyway, all of these people had at some point shaken my world, caused a minor musical earthquake, came onstage with a presence and a concept and a solid performance the likes of which had not been seen or heard before. But the ceremony?  It was simple, unassuming, inexpensive.  No one performed or put on a huge spectacle. The stars were the award recipients.  It was enough... we could sing their songs in our heads.

Today-- we have spectacle... masses and masses of product... choices in galactic numbers that garnish billions of live-streams and instagram looks.  Overwhelming choices. A virtual ocean of brands. Everyone clamoring to create a brand but really less mattering product than ever. And the ones among us who remember... we share a certain nostalgia for what once mattered. The recent extraordinary prices at Christie's for Jim Irsay's collected guitars and things is monetary proof of this nostalgia.  But one thing I am sure of-- whoever paid $14 million  for Dave Gilmour's guitar is not going to be making the kind of music that made it covetable in the first place.

In the current urban Trump-world I find myself disqualified for the health plan I relied on.  As a musican/writer I have slightly more money than a welfare recipient but less than an average teacher.  So what do I do?  I go online to find literally hundreds of choices---all of which are similar but indistinctly different and obviously profiting anyone besides the patient and doctor.  I also learned that one MUST have a prescription drug plan which covers very little until one has paid in close to a fortune to purchase medicines that cost a tiny fraction of what we are charged.  It's a kind of medical blackmail here... and hidden costs and the freedom to change these figures at any time while we the poor subscribers have our banks and social security checks auto-deducted for the privilege of this false security.

I keep reading the phrase 'Original Medicare'. There is nothing original about these plans which dance around the core concept which most of us suckers paid in for our entire lifetime to find we are utterly out in some medical winter.  What is affordable for the likes of me who walks everywhere and has yet to buy a plastic bottle of water?  Am I untreatable? 

So I listened yesterday to the Morphine album Cure for Pain.  May Mark Sandman rest in peace... at least he belonged to a time when music genuinely made us less or more morose, as we chose... when the choices were not overwhelming and the pickings were fewer and fatter. Now every expensive vapid television segment comes with boutique drug marketing of emotional stability in a bottle and unfortunately we Americans are sicker and less happy than ever. The morphing of medicine is beginning to parallel the streaming platforms for music... the thinning quality, the lack of originality and analogue diagnosis.  Even the healthplan names and the insurance companies are designed to entice and deceive the end user. And back I must go diving into this quagmire or I may lose my home if God forbid I should need a prescription. Excuse me while I mutter an 'Ah, humanity'.

Under Cover

More than 30 years ago, I made my first demo-tape.  A keyboard player who worked with some rockstar really liked it-- took a copy, gave it to his boss.  A year later, my song was on the radio.  A little changed, rearranged, but it was definitely the song.  Funny--- no one had contacted me; I hadn't signed any papers.  I called a friend; he recognized it-- then we called the keyboard player.  He stammered and stuttered, apologized… apparently it had been 'adopted' or folded into some recipe which someone else seemed to think he'd invented.  But the hook-- even the lyric, the theme--- it was there…

My friend consulted a lawyer.  You are going to be a rich girl, the lawyer said to me.  But what was the meaning of this?  That I would sue some huge record company-- me, a small-time new artist with a 4-track demo?  We had meetings, we had papers… and I pulled out.  It wasn't about the money, it was the shameless version of apology I received from the producer--- about how maybe you hear something, and it stays in your subconscious, or it re-emerges with an idea-- it may or may not be mine.  What-ever.   It was the first music-business lesson.

Later, I was asked to co-write with a pop-star.  This meant she would cover my song and we would split royalties.  When I protested, they said they'd rewrite the song and I'd get zero.  Second lesson.
Besides, if my music was so eminently adaptable, maybe it was generic and not good enough.  Back to the drawing room.

So the Pharrell/Marvin Gaye thing registered as something of a 'Huh?' moment for me. I mean, there is little I hear these days that is not traceable to something else.  The production may be updated or changed--- the beats, the sounds-- but the melodies are so non-memorable.  I'll bet after the Grammies this year, the only person who really saw a spike in sales was whoever manufactured John Mayer's glasses.  The visual seems to have eclipsed the song.  The spectacle, not the soundtrack.  I'll bet Stevie Wonder has noticed this.  And then there is Angus Young--- in the same clothes he was in the first time I saw him, almost 40 years ago.

I'm about to publish a small book of poetry and have been obsessing about the cover.  The Bo Diddley song has been going over and over in my head.  It's odd-- in old times, books looked pretty much the same-- leather bindings--- occasional hand-tooling and gilt trim for the very rich.  But what was important and valued--- was the text.  A book was its contents.  Now?  So many are so under-read.  The classics are recycled, reprinted-- covers evolve, books are 'styled' to sell as objects.  Sometimes, in 'new' books,  good writing is hidden beneath the plot; like a metal guitar shredder, the 'notes' obscure the absence of core melody.

When I was younger I did a Sunday afternoon solo gig on Bleecker St.  Don't you know any covers, the owner used to complain? No, I answered, priding myself on my principles.  I actually wrote a song called 'Cover' so I could finally answer 'yes'.  And one called 'Undercover'.  That one felt right.   I am neither a borrower or a lender.

So now it is the first day of spring, and we in New York City are about to get a dusting of snow.  Our sidewalks and streets have just been stripped of the last of the winter 'cover' which revealed underneath a vast layer of soaked and pressed litter-- like fossils of Christmas and Valentine's Day and thousands of candy wrappers and flattened Starbucks cups everywhere.  Walking down Madison Ave… to my right were the clean shop windows filled with all the bling a rockstar's wallet can buy… and to the left, is the gutter spread of trash, of objects covered with the grey-black film of melted dirty snow.  Jewelry, garbage, leather bags, garbage, porcelain, garbage… art galleries…garbage… until I began to reverse the order and really everything lost its meaning, its 'cover'.  Later today this will change… like a new coat of paint, the sweat and spit and dog-shit and the papers-- everything will be magical again for a few hours.

There is another author with the same name as mine.  Her book is about incest--- about her father raping her, her childhood trauma.  I don't know what the cover looks like.  My own father thinks I wrote this book.  He hasn't spoken to me for years, but he really hadn't spoken to me before, so the mistaken identity thing was a kind of icing on his paternal bitter cake.  It's useless for me to explain that this is another person, because having a reason to excommunicate me-- it suits him.  As I was contemplating my cover today-- maybe a moment where I'd hand my finished book over to my father and receive exoneration-- I began to think.. .well, this never happened to me… but other things happened.  The fact is there is shame in my family history and cause for shame.  Cover-ups and substance abuse… and my own father never harmed me, not physically-- but his absence and lack of sobriety caused childhood trauma that shouldn't have happened.   The irony is, I am the one that spent years trying to apologize--- trying to atone for his sins, trying to appease his anger.  So maybe, in a way, that other girl is me, has uncovered things that are not so far from the ones that should not have happened in our house, even thought the 'cast' is different.

Making up my bed this morning, I thought of all the things that happened, inside these covers, and other covers--- the intimacies, the passion, the nights of refusing intimacies, the hours of sickness, of feverish children who feel entitled to pass nights of illness in their mother's sheets, of nights of grief and desolation, of nightmares and beautiful dreams of our missing loves that cruelly disintegrate as we wake. The way my son and his girlfriend spent hours picking the quilt that dresses the bed in their new apartment.  Because so much of their life will take place there, and it is important.

In truth, my father, like most people,  will never read my book.  He won't listen to the songs I've recorded, and that is fine.  But he just may see the cover.  Or not.

Ship Song, 2013

Message 3 on my voicemail today informed me that an email was sent without the anticipated 'attachment'.  Sometimes I imagine if I had a business card, it would say ‘Ironist’.  But on Sundays I try to live my life spontaneously, to unravel each moment without a pre-conceived agenda.  So the ‘lack of attachment’ comment had extra resonance.  The thing is, I am over-attached.  I have too many friends—not the facebook kind-- the kind that call you first to say  I-just-fucked-my ex-husband or my-biopsy-came-back abnormal.   Or some nights it’s I’m really down, or I took too many vicodin and I’m drinking, or I’m losing my hearing.  Seriously.  I can’t hear out of my left ear.  

And I listen.  Sometimes it requires humor, a philosophical discussion of whether we’d prefer blindness or deafness, ad absurdum.  Sometimes it’s exchanging heartwreck, disarming the potential emotional murderer, elaborating the downside of suicide, alternating between Plato’s wisdom and Rihanna’s.  The thing is, I love my friends.  Most of them.  I love the ladies who confess things to me at the gym (some of them) and my upstairs neighbor’s old photographs.  I look, I listen, I deliberate, I care.  I feel sad and I miss people. It hurts when they move away, when they are miserable, when they smash their guitar or their car, when their daughters are using, when their Moms die, when they say things that no one else says. 

I have learned to let them come and go--- not to hold them in a room or expect them to remember my birthday (well…. most of them).  When I feel love is not passionate and exclusive I leave.  I try to time-defuse my own emotional emergencies and besides, no one leaves their phone on at night except my crazy love-obsessed kids.  I can pour my aching bloody heart into an email and know it will be read with a Starbucks on an iphone, not unfolded and handled by candlelight in a dark room, in solitude.  The soundtrack could be that annoying ‘Fun’ or some soppy Josh Groban or whiny Rufus Wainwright or Call me Mr. Flintstone I can make your bed rock  with a Nicki-Minaj-sized butt in front of him on line. Out of my control.  Like all my ‘attachments’.

The fact is, I seemed always to be the person in the room who got selected, the one psychos stopped in the street for directions, for money, for solace or company… for an ear, a hotdog…  It is genetic, this thing.  My Mom had all kinds of annoying ‘friends’ in the supermarket, on the block, at the gas station.  But she seemed to be able to turn and shrug pretty consistently.  Her bills were paid, she had no clue how to qualify for a mortgage or what social security really was.  I, on the other hand, feel a sort of hole whenever one of my friends hangs up or walks away.  It’s a hole that eventually fills in, but it’s a hole.  I miss things.  I miss things I did, nights I laughed and nights I cried.  I miss feeling like I wouldn’t trade anything with anyone, I miss really loud guitars and Marshall stacks without worrying about my poor distressed ears, I miss throwing off my clothes and jumping into a fountain at night, standing up in a convertible at 70 mph, running barefoot, the feeling of zipless sex in an elevator. 

My friend who was a bona-fide rockstar was robbed in December.  Some cheap thugs broke in and took her stuff.  Of course there’s insurance, but they took her maybe worthless old non-vintage 1990’s synthesizer and she misses it.  Her whole song catalogue belonged to this thing, and it hurts like a lost dog.  Why can’t people understand these things?  When I tell my kids to ‘let it go’ I know how much I miss that first kick of the baby inside you, and my own ultra-internalized drama-queen teenage sickness.  So is it the insecurity of the lifestyle I’ve chosen? The fact that I never know for certain whether we’ll make the monthly insurance payment, the maintenance… that things can disappear so easily, they seem not transient and cheap but more valuable?

My son is texting, listening to Nas, ordering a slice, checking his calendar--- connecting, literally… but I am the one standing still with ten thousand strings and wires.  Worrying, missing. 

And on the other hand, I wander unstirred by art galleries, thumb unmoved through new novels, yawn at the fashion-week runway shows, and find the only nudity really upsetting is that of the Emperor.  The Grammies were musical Girl Scout cookies.  Even the shenanigans and spectacles feel silly, overdressed.  Jack White looked stupid and pasty and I wonder if he is missing the first White Stripes gig when his wife or sister or ex-girlfriend or whatever she was looked fat and awkward and nervous. 

Adele is not even fat, Justin Timberlake looked like a dumb Ken-doll version of himself, and maybe it is my shitty TV or my tinnitus, but everyone sounds shrill and thin and pageanty.  There is television-- -the shows, the news, the new generation Law and Orders-- scripted reality, and unscripted unreality.    Everything has a soundtrack; every song has a video, a visual, a red-carpet-worthy costume….isn’t the music alone ever enough?

Maybe I am just old.  I remember my Mom, my guest onstage at some massive 1970’s rockstar concert, asking one of the band members ‘Don’t you boys know any songs?’

Still, I go to the gym and I listen to stories; I tell my own and sometimes I scarcely recognize these people who have told me intimate things they haven’t even told their shrink.  Or other times, I go home and cry for them and write a song they will never hear.  My catalogue--- the endless unalphabetized people who have touched me, and still touch me, and wreck me, and make my life nearly unmanageable like a hoarder.  Rich men amass money… and they spend it; we emotional harvesters absorb moments and spend them carelessly.  I’ve always had this fascination/fear of the sea.  Not like a surfer, but like a stranded Robert Louis Stevenson character.  Since the hurricane, I’ve listened with great interest to the victims that cannot tear themselves from their ruined houses, from future peril, because their attachment to the sea is ironically related to the threat.  After all, we are chronically attached, terminally connected, some of us standing alone on some familiar shore feeling all the ships of our lives recede into some emotional horizon where our past and future endlessly flirt but never meet.  Few of their passengers ever think to turn around to wave, and if they do, we’re much too far to see.

Oh Say Can You Sing

I’ve just been to the gym and concluded there are 2 kinds of people in the world: those that come upon a disabled piece of exercise equipment and move calmly on, and those that whine and complain and feel somehow not just deprived but personally attacked because of the small snag in their daily routine. I generally wonder if these people have children, these self-absorbed, micro-universed ego-damaged creatures, or whether there is a higher concentration of them in Manhattan.

Actually there is maybe a sub-group, here: those that try to fix the broken pulley—not for themselves, but for someone else whose life seems somehow ruined by this equipment failure, whose entire routine and night has been irreparably altered and skewed and derailed. We guiltier-than-thou would-be samaritans who empty our pockets of small bills and change at the slightest sidewalk appeal, when our own kids have found only half-stuffed stockings on the homemade Christmas hearth.

I went up to the Bronx today on the subway--- spring in the air and I found the population laid back and kind; stores happy to see you, none of the competitive shopping bags once you get past Grand Concourse. Teenage mothers with oversized strollers everywhere, young hip-hop couples sharing ipod earphones, 3 and 4 toddlers in tow, parents looking barely legal. Don't these people have jobs? Go to school? They seemed carefree, festive.

At 125th Street on the way back a West Indian drummer--- singing and playing traps which must have been a haul getting the kit downstairs and set up--- but with this golden voice—smooth and authoritatively ‘professional’—talking to the MTA workmen who were grooving away to this guy... not missing a beat, better than any performer at this year’s sad Grammy show which I nominate for a Writerless Much Ado About Nothing Award. Two young dancers doing that robotic thing but in this subtle, graceful incredibly original way —it was breathtaking —amazing... an edgy minimal 22nd century break-dance thing, kissing the filthy floor, defying gravity and their own joints...I was literally mesmerized. The best $1 show I’ve seen in years. And that voice. Where are Jay Zee and Clive Davis? Not on subway platforms. And these guys were free. They didn’t care. They ruled their stage.

So did anyone else notice the unprecedented number of Grammy performers who sang off-key? I mean, we’re all flawed, but with the ear-sets and personal monitors... okay, granted they may have had audio issues, but what happened to ‘singing’? Personally I was disappointed in Katy Perry, felt Otis rolling in his grave during Bruno Mars’ appalling performance, and yes, I used to like Arcade Fire, but they came off like a pretentious bunch of over-enthusiastic high-school geeks in 30-something bodies. Okay...Eminem and Rihanna got a thumbs-up-- that song's been in my head for 6 months. Aretha stayed home. Besides, her footage at the beginning--- the cameo soundbytes---put them all to shame. God, make her well. I hope she didn't watch too much of the show.

I missed Pink. I missed Prince. I liked the Lady Gaga egg better than the performance. I miss James Brown and Michael Jackson. I guess Bob Dylan has poetic license but I wasn't sure if I was supposed to laugh. Mick, you were the only bright spot. Barbara--- nice to see you in that Scarlett O'Hara used-to-be-a-stage-curtain dress thing, but I would have preferred to just imagine your voice. And I'll defend Christina. She's just this year's Britney Spears. Britney has class compared to most of the MTV girls now...and she had talent.

So maybe I’m a cranky old woman now but I don’t want to see Spiderman and humans in silly costumes flying around in a theatre. Wasn’t the film enough for these people? Don’t they get enough cinematographic pyrotechnics with Disney and those crazy warrior movies? What happened to 'the play', acting? Or maybe the possibility of witnessing a fatal accident attracts the New York audience? Can't they buy tickets to the circus? Superman masqueraded as a human. It was amusing. He kissed an actual woman in a reverse-superhero feat. Humans don’t do well trying to play superheroes. We don’t have these talents and all those wires and computers can’t really bring it on. I miss Peter Pan, with the visible wires on Mary Martin. It was conceptual. Broadway is all mixed up--- plays about rock bands, Cirques doing Beatlemania, musicals about music, movies about ballet, musicals about movies....

Give me the singing drummer in the subway— grassroots multitasking. You can get right up there and hear him sing on key without a monitor or a microphone. Sweet and smooth and rhythmic and melodic. Making it up as he went along. And he was nice. Took requests. Asked me if I wanted change when I put my bill in.

I do want change. Or maybe I don’t. I’m still trying to peel off pieces of 2010 that are stuck to me like old wallpaper. 2011 could be the year of democracy. It is also the year of the rabbit, the year of Oprah. All bets are off.

A black suede glove was lying on the north end of the platform like a dying animal. My son asked for North Face gloves for Christmas. He didn’t get them--- he loses a pair a week. But here... one left one... I flipped it over with my foot to see the logo. If you wait long enough, you do get what you wish for... maybe if I picked it up, the mate will be waiting on some sidewalk somewhere, underneath the melted snow, in April when gloves are useless. But as I flipped it over, it seemed to gesture—‘Help’. Gave me the chills. ‘Help’. I watched it now from the wall a few steps away... it was clearly asking me to put some money in it. I watched as one of the hiphop dancers picked it up and turned it into a kind of puppet. Wished I had the other one to put in the red ‘A’s’ cap as he passed it around.

At Last

Beyonce. The name grates. Excess. Nostalgia. Fake class...…all the elements of the tuxedoed and Harry Winston-ed aristo-hypocrisy of the current music scene. The Grammy Awards? Don’t get me started.

It’s all mixed up. Gwyneth Paltrow gets a music award, Jennifer Hudson gets an Oscar, American Idol contestants get Grammies. When I need real medical care, I don’t go to George Clooney, although some of the young clinic doctors I’ve seen recently seem to have less credibility than the ER staff.

But Etta James… well, you go, girl. That’s right. Not only did Beyonce not gain any weight for that role… you had more integrity in your little finger. I actually opened for Etta James one night…okay, maybe she was at her peak weight… but they had to rent a golf cart to ride her up a specially-constructed ramp to the stage where she leaned her awesome behind on a double-seater stool for the show. And she sang her ass off. I didn’t see that scene in the movie. Actually I didn’t see the movie at all, because although I think Beyonce is a pretty girl who can carry a tune, she needs a racial identity check. She’s trans-racial. Whatever.

So yes… the Inaugural Ball… We all realize Obama might not have had the success he did without Oprah and JayZee and the rap world using their large influence on media-hypnotized America. But to ‘do’ Etta at the ball? The President didn’t ask you to sing the National Anthem, Beyonce; he got Aretha. You should have thought over your song choice. Just because you played the role in the film, doesn’t mean you have the right to usurp Etta's identity in front of all those people. Not to mention the string arrangement. And did anyone ask Etta?

We’re so confused by film-roles, ‘reality’ shows, remakes… no one knows what the deal is. Copyrights? Copycats? If you complain to the wrong person, you’ll get a bullet. Ask TI. Ask Biggy. Oops..he’s dead. I nearly forgot.

Now we get to A-Rod, or A-Hole, as the Post had the balls to call him yesterday. Why? In this world of 300 trillion dollar Ponzi schemes which is our own economy… the fact that A-Rod used performance-enhancing drugs should be a shock? In 2003 before the Yankees got him in a trade? Was anyone else suspicious of 300 home runs in a world where apples and oranges are shot with steroids so people will buy them? Where sports betting is a major economy of its own and everything else in America is so surgically altered, whitewashed, media-spun and non-authentic… are we really shocked that Baseball isn’t exactly the home-made apple-pie all-American clean and wholesome sport it was? Was it ever? Maybe before guys got paid to play.

In the 21st century, heroes like the pilot Sully are few and far between. Besides, A-Rod isn’t even American. And Madonna… his pal…what is she but a well-groomed corporation? Is there a single Madonna performance that hasn’t been tweeked and backing-tracked into what Americans see as perfection? Perfection is some plastic surgery-enhanced, personal trained, air-brushed, botoxed, re-edited version of whatever we expect.

And on the subject of performance-enhancement...Wall Street wasn’t happy with ‘real’ profit margins…so they cranked up the volume. As did A-Rod. How would you do under that kind of pressure? And it's not as if he beat his wife or raped anyone. The media crucified him for kicking back at a bar with Chuck Knoblauch in the face of what is 6-year-old news. Joe Torre's book sales have had some performance-enhancement these last weeks. Besides, A-Rod might even have been doing what he was told. But don't go there--- you might get a bullet, too.

So does America really feel betrayed? Is America the innocent 'boy' it was in the 1950's? Madonna dumped him weeks ago. Bad for her image which takes a staff of hundreds to maintain. Give me a break. And no-one complained about Beyonce the blonde bombshell at the ball. No one except Etta. As I said, you go, girl. The gastric-bypass version of Etta who is still pissed off.

What can I say? It was my birthday yesterday. I went into Crumbs to buy myself a cupcake. $4. I thought about it. Better to spend the money on something with protein like 4 cans of tuna which is all the nourishment I can afford these days. As a little joke, I asked ‘So how much for a crumb?’ ‘We don’t sell crumbs’, the girl answered me, without humor.

At last. I personally pledge allegiance, Etta.