Author: falala

On Tuesday night, June 28th I was sitting on my couch decompressing from a busy day at work, contemplating what to eat for dinner. My wife was going to have the macaroni salad I’d made the night before. She loves the way I make it, but strangely it’s not my favorite dish. As I ran through food options in my mind, I began to shiver uncontrollably. And just like that, I had a high fever that I couldn’t kick for four days.

A home test the next day confirmed what I already knew. Covid. After over 2 years of miraculously avoiding it, it turns out I’m not invincible after all.

What changed? Maybe I can blame my recent public outings, having attended the mermaid and NYC pride parades, as well as a late night pride party at the Standard Hotel. I suspect I could have gotten it from a friend. In the height of my illness, he sent me a bizarre unsolicited email explaining that Covid was nothing more than a season flu, and the term was used by the media to stoke fear. Was there something more to this random anti covid rant? Was he trying to deflect that perhaps he and his family had this “seasonal flu” and he didn’t take care to protect his friends? It was useless to figure out. I could have contracted it from anywhere.

What changed was me. Four days before, the Supreme Court overturned Roe V. Wade and left me vulnerable and attenuated. I no longer mattered. I had no voice. And these people, these really religious people, had supreme power over me. This event became all consuming over my thoughts and emotions. I was at a loss over what to do ( I mean, really, what the fuck can I do?) and my now powerless being left my body defenseless. I got sick for the first time since 2019 when training for the NYC Marathon gave me a little head cold.

Covid got me very sick, fever spiking to 103.9 and dropping 5 lbs in 4 days fighting extreme, unrelenting nausea. It is not lost on me that some people wind up in the hospital on ventilators, and I’m beyond thankful that wasn’t my fate. Though the first four days I focused on simply not trying to vomit, by Saturday I felt enough respite that I could meditate on the very subject that got me so fucking sick in the first place. Women’s rights.

So many of us feel a loss for what to do. The establishment that should have protected us failed. It seemed useless to align myself with this party, or this organization, or donate here, or there. With NO disrespect to their efforts, I decided to continue as a lone wolf. Not that I want to be a lone wolf. Contacting organizations that exclude women seems like the most accessible and direct way that I personally can try to make a change. I feel alone because any social media posts summarizing my activities go unnoticed. Pictures of my kitty cat or the beef and broccoli I made in the instant pot garner 10 or 20 likes, while my feminist posts usually garner none.

These are some examples of how I try to illuminate the exclusion of women in media, music, sports and art. When I drive to work and notice a radio station only plays two women in the course of an hour, I call, email and post on their social media. I’m driven to act when I hear music pumping in a restaurant while eating dinner and not ONE artist is female. Pearl Jam followed by Aerosmith followed by Ed Sheehan followed by Van Halen. I mean these folks are reaching wayyyyy back into crappy fucking rock and roll history to avoid women, intentionally or not…where was I? Oh, i call the restaurant, and i find out who’s responsible for pumping the “modern muzak” through the sound system, then I call that company. Then there’s “Songwriter Magazine” who takes $30 from women and men to enter their “song lyric” contest, then only picks female winners 20% of the time. I went back and documented all their winners in a spread sheet. I’m not making it up. Some of the dude lyrics are horrible. Getting laid on the 50 yard line on a weeknight on the high school football field. Then they have the nerve to feature women songwriters in their ads soliciting for you to enter this trap. Ladies, save your money. It’s a female dead end.

Women’s RIGHTS need to be addressed, brought to light, as a SOLE focus. Yes, all lives matter, yes it also falls under an umbrella of human rights. But it is so pervasive, so swept under the rug, so under the radar for even the most progressive minded people. Not to mention that 50.5% of the population is female, so it effects the majority. We need to stop “bundling” it with other human issues, because in and of itself it deserves a LOT of time, energy, thought. And it’s actually REALLY EASY to pinpoint. Just notice what’s NOT there. Every time you hear your favorite news rattle off the male team wins in their sports segment, listen how they don’t report on women. What? women don’t play sports? I just saw a great wnba game, then soccer game on TV today.

And women, you have to stop excluding other women because their other agendas don’t match. Don’t disregard a woman because she loves Sanders, or Clinton, or she’s a democrat, or a communist or independent. The important thing is UNITY under the mission of FEMALE rights and voices. Whether you are a capitalist or a socialist, you need to unite. These ideals may seem at odds, but if YOU as a WOMAN don’t HAVE A VOICE, then it makes NO DIFFERENCE what you stand for. If you think otherwise, then your party and affiliation is USING YOU. They are USING YOUR commitment to YOUR rights and bundling it with their whole agenda.

Again women, I can’t stress this enough, don’t forget UNITY. I remember when I BEGGED the founder of the Michigan Womyn’s fest for my band to play back in the day. She grilled me on “what we did for feminism”. I explained that we had our own record label called 28 Days Records (named after the most feminine entity there is, the menstrual cycle). We endured the most unfair local press coverage, rock writers who compared us unfavorably to Steve Van Zandt, because we didn’t play our instruments as well. We wrote pretty decent songs encapsulating a uniquely female perspective. But this woman had had no intention of inviting us to play. She was toying with me. She already decided we weren’t feminist enough. She could have said the musical acts were already booked but instead went out of her way to make us feel unwelcome to HER feminist mission.

UNITY is something the Republicans have learned all too well. I am not idealistically aligned with any particular party, and as such, have friends of all affiliations. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m a Democrat but more as a strategic alignment, we’re not a perfect match) I am sometimes in awe with how many views I share with my Republican friends. Many of these women are 100% pro choice. I even know some sad circumstances where they themselves and/or their daughters have gotten abortions. If they were given a DIRECT say in the matter, they would NEVER support the overturning of Roe Vs. Wade. I’m sure they are horrified that their vote ultimately led to the overturn. But give them credit, the Republican party is great at UNITING people for political gain. Ultimately the extremists muted their moderate counterparts and weighed disproportionately on all smaller decisions leading to this major decision.

WOMEN, MOVING FORWARD, MAKE YOU A PRIORITY. If you are forced to put some other view aside for the sake of moving women’s rights forward, do it. It will all work out in the end, the other issues will come around. But DON’T say to yourself, “if i put these progressive issues first and fore most, it will work out in the end for women.” It won’t. The ONLY way to move our free will forward is to UNITE and FOCUS and PRIORITIZE WOMEN over all else.

As for me, I will continue to document and call out the blatant omission of women by radio station, sports newscasts, muzak, and on and on and on and on. Because this HUGE issue of Pro Choice is an issue of No Voice at the most granular level. And though I myself can’t overturn a supreme court decision, there IS something I can do, boiled down to little tasks. Document, call, email, post on social media when women are omitted. There is nothing that empowers me more than getting my own hands dirty in the soil of administrative duties. Even in the face of the most eviscerating public policy change, I feel a tinge of power.

If you look back on this blog, I usually meet creepy resistance. However, I once got the ear of John Montone at NYC’s premier 1010 news radio. And he called a meeting and the staff agreed to include more reporting on women’s sports! I will continue to write and produce songs on the subject. I know this is all falling on deaf ears. But if I could reach but ONE person, just ONE person, just ONE ONE ONE ONE ONE person and they make ONE observation of unfair representation of women, and just make ONE call, Just ONE call or email to that organization calling them out, just ONE social media post…..

Because women, we can no longer hide behind an organization, a party, an entity. We have to raise our voices as individuals and fight one battle at a time. You may ask yourself, who am I to say? I’m nobody really. One aging feminist songwriter who writes a blog that nobody reads and so has the smallest chance of making a change. As opposed to huge collectives and organizations like NOW & major political parties who have millions of dollars and resources and proved that they can’t make a change, either. The playing field has just been leveled and no time is better than now for all of us to fight collectively as individuals.

I’ve resisted joining Patreon.com until now, but have more creative financial needs than I can provide. Although we ran a successful kickstarter campaign the finish the Moxie Starpark album, I would love to maximize it’s reach. That includes upping the final “mastering” sheen to be radio and TV ready. I’d also like to market it. As a CMO, I’m confident a little budget will go a long way. I’d also like to “up” my game on my current solo album, and not worry about administrative costs such as copyrights.

Git hub, prototype
Summer crops are ripe
Pull roots, pick vines
Harvest thoughts, spark minds
Data, python, script, array
Rails, API, display
Small screen
Sprawling farm
Cold, damp, hot, warm
 
The light of what we know
Mixed with what we don’t
Sets the darkest sky aglow
 
In a life nouveau
In a life nouveau
In a life nouveau
In a life nouveau
 
Bit coin, crypto
Join a life nouveau
To joys of ole’
Purring cats, piano
Bike rides really high
To and fro
 
A life nouveau
A life nouveau
A life nouveau
A life nouveau
 
 
 

I’m too busy figuring out the last few stanzas on my latest song to care about how Spotify isn’t paying enough to be an artist.

This isn’t exactly a reactionary post to some of the “boycott Spotify” articles, as I haven’t read any. I’ve only seen Instagram posts referencing said articles. Though I want to read them all, so I can offer a thorough counterpoint, I’m too busy working right now to make money to pay bills for my family, then use the surplus to be my own patreon. Ugh. I hate that word. Matreon feels better.

I used to not work so hard. Then Amazon gained in popularity and became crippling competition to my family’s 25 year old internet business. It earned a reputation that supersedes its ability, at least in my line of work. Many people believe Amazon’s owes its success solely to an efficient business model. I can attest from experience that Amazon stole our data then used it to compete against us. They probably did the same to hundreds of thousands of other small business. I’m not going to bore you with the details.

The posts I’ve seen which plea for the public to boycott Spotify are about as far fetched as me asking people to boycott Amazon.

In the old days, someone bought your album. Once. You didn’t get paid after that. If someone played your songs one time, or a millions times, your cut was static, a profit stuck in time.

Spotify seems to invest more money in their platform than anyone else. Their playlists, algorithms, the way you can connect to others, the vastness of their libraries, ease of searching, the user end friendliness.

Spotify changed my life. I remember on the twilight of cd’s and ipods I put some mp3 songs up on my website so people could “stream” them directly from my webpage. Crickets. That old “hit counter” registering visitor traffic didn’t budge. With Spotify, this month alone, my old band reached 28 listeners who streamed 40 times from as far as Ireland and Gernany. And my more current tracks as a solo song writer garnered 65 streams this month. ALL of this cost a paltry $20 per year for me to digitally distribute. I didn’t have to press cd’s, get a record label distributor. To a celebrity songwriter these stats are anemic, but I had close to zero streams on my own 2007 website. Spotify has reached critical mass. With all those millions of music seekers, it’s effortless to cruise on that inertia.

Sure, there’s room for improvement, in terms of sonic quality and artist profit share. There is room for that in all areas of the industry.

For me, this industry’s clear subjugation of women is my main concern. How that lame ass Songwriter Magazine bashed Spotify, then the next day post its own curated Spotify Playlist, only ONE of which was a female artist. How Rolling Stone declared only about TEN female songwriters as the 100 best of all time. How I went out to eat several times and the rock music pumping into the restaurant didn’t include female artists. Not one.

Spotify recognized this disparity and launched their Equal section. This earned my respect exponentially. Neil Young’s gripes of sound quality and questionable pod cast content can’t erode my feminist respect.

I have little sympathy for artists calling for a Spotify boycott because they’re not making enough money. Musicians who have amassed houses and cars from their art. I’m even more perplexed by my fellow indie artists who jumped on that bandwagon. Some I would never have heard, if not for a friend’s Spotify playlist. Increased streaming revenue won’t make a difference to us. Only big time musicians and they mostly don’t care about us, insomuch as they care that we care about them.

Nobody will stop buying from Amazon 100% so I can make more money at my job. Likewise, I can’t conceive of cancelling my Spotify membership so professional musicians will get more streaming revenue . Until then, I have to get back to work, then get home so I can play and write more songs. I will continue to benefit from all that Spotify has to offer me, as an artist and a fan, none of which is money.

Over 35k youtube views. Burps the breakout hit of 2021. #highArr

Almost almost, ty for your patience L.G. May my spouse be my witness, I don’t want you to think I’ve been slacking, this song took awhile to write and produce.

The other day I was laying a rhythm guitar track on Life Nouveau, and having soooo much trouble sticking it to the hi hat. My strum hand was unusually stiff. It was not listening to my will, lagging and numb. I’m not usually a hypochondriac, but I was convinced this was an early sign of Parkinsons Disease or some other drastic health issue. Somehow I managed to get through the passage before I noticed that the pick I was using was broken. Half the tip, the side that brushes the strings, was gone. Guess that would explain my “diseased” performance.

I have a crush on an instrument.  The banjo.  Such a characteristically cheery, happy sound but I crave from it an ethereal darkness. Minor chords with creepy progressions, those thin plunky strings swelling in the distance under a sinister distortion reverb. A song emerges. It’s about a cemetery. I need to get my hands on a banjo. Immediately. I’ve needed to get my fingers around the neck of a banjo immediately for three days now. 

This sound that I want, it’s messing with my senses. I can’t quite hear it.  The closest analogy I can think of is a decadent smell that I don’t get to taste.  I’m walking to my apartment as the hallway fills with the scent of cinnamon and vanilla coming from some neighbor’s oven. 

I don’t think I can quantify the time I’ve put in to making this happen.  The Brooklyn Folk Festival had a banjo giveaway this week. I downloaded an app and played a banjo throwing game for hours, trying to get the high score.  I went in person today to the Gowanas Canal and literally threw a banjo into the water in a weak attempt to fling it farther than any of the women I was competing against. Over the weekend, I  researched how to fix up the banjo I recently acquired. I naively thought it only needed strings, but soon realized there was no hardware to even string them through.  It needs tuning pegs, new skins, tailpiece, bridge, bracket hooks, a couple of more metal thingies I don’t even know the name of. Oh, and the tool to tighten everything.  Intimidated, I went online to price out a new banjo. Whoah.  Those things are EXPENSIVE.  MUCH more expensive than guitars. I know that’s arguable, but for my purposes, I’ve always found inexpensive guitars that I absolutely love.  Don’t get me wrong, I like masterpiece guitars as much as the next person.  I’m also not a snob, my standards are as low as they are high.

So all the time I spent trying to win a free banjo + all the time I researched trying to fix up the one I have times how much $ I make an hour = ???? Looking at it mathematically, I should have bought a damn banjo 3 days ago.

And now, as I wrap up my weekend, I am still banjo-less.  And instead of working on the songs I feel I should be trying to finish, I’m writing in you, lamenting about my banjo-less life. Truth be told, once I acquire, learn and actually play a banjo, this “soundscape” I’m craving may never actually materialize. As crushes on instruments sometimes go.  Then again,  scattering my energies so often helps me focus my writing. I have no idea how that works.  However,  I will optimistically conclude that this new obsession will somehow turn out to be fruitful.

I’ve been meditating on my relationship with homophobia, and this phenomena “micro aggression” I first learned about in a book I’m reading “Gothic Queer Culture”. Also, the subject has been coming up in my social media feeds this week, so I’ve been sort of examining my layers of identity. I suspect that I may have more issues with being a creative than gay.

I’m sensitive….I’m not referring to the good kind of empathetic sensitive, but the way my feelings get hurt so easily and deeply by what people say.

“you’re still at it” or the blinks when you tell loved ones you’re writing a song, or the silence of extended family who after countless years of spending holidays together never once ask you about your creative endeavors. How I LOVED the movie The Dressmaker with Kate Winslet. My wife said it best, it’s always the creative people who are demonized. But why? It’s just the way it is. People outcast what they don’t understand.

When I return to my home town, I still feel so awkward, that old weirdo in the led zepellen shirt, bopping her head unconsciously to the barely audible music in the supermarket. I swear, a few neighbors stare when I pull up to my mom’s driveway but don’t so much as nod hello. I’m painfully out of place there. And yet…I attribute it to being a weird writer. If it were because I’m a big dyke, I find it so easy to turn the tables, at least in my head. It’s just ridiculous to outcast people based on gender preference and identity, and when i say ridiculous I mean ridiculous hilarious funny ridiculous. People with homophobias, intentional or not, seem almost clown like to me, if not themselves latent queers. Homophobes are just WAITING to be made fun of.

Enough philosophical! Here’s some examples of me coping.

1.The worst phobia I ever experienced was when my wife and I were performing live in a small bar in Mineola. We were guest performers at my friend’s show. Before we hit the stage, three middle aged & older drunks figured out we were a couple, and started talking louder and louder about “the gays” in the village, and how they should stay in their neighborhoods. Then as we were singing I heard the word dyke and homosexual a few times. It was pretty rattling. You can view the video on facebook & how poorly I performed. I only sang one song, after which I stayed at the far side of the bar and watched my friend finish his set. The woman eventually left, and the men got drunker and drunker. By the time the guys left, they were so annihilated they were leaning on each other. I don’t think either could stand up without the other. Somehow the bar at that moment was dead silent. No glasses clanking, no murmers or converstations. Just the two old guys slurring into each other’s ears “u ok bud? watch your step here”. I know it was the alcohol, but there was also something very gay about the way they were caring for each other, and their physical proximity. Just as they stepped out and the door closed, I yelled after them “don’t forget to wear a rubber” Of course, they didn’t hear, but it got quite a laugh out of the handful of people who remained in the bar.

2. Sometimes a woman’s demeanor suddenly changes when I mention I have a wife. In a nano second, she will go from smiling and kind to stone faced, avoiding eye contact. Maybe she’s religious. Or maybe she assumes I will desire her. Which is the farthest from the truth because as soon as I know a woman is straight, it’s like an immediate psychological castration. Anyway, when this inexplicable rudeness happens, I think of all the d**k she’s gotten in her life and say to myself “her vagina’s so big she gets cameltoe in a skirt” and I feel better.

3.Straight guys who make comments that I’m a little too dude like. Or they’re “cool” with it, but seem to always bring up the word “lesbian”, and make it a point that I’m “other”, that we’re from different tribes. I look at them and wonder “didn’t i fuck your wife?”

4.Ok, classic. I once actually got a chance to SAY this. He said to my wife, in front of me “maybe you never met the right guy”. I asked, “are you straight?” He defensively said yes. So I suggested “maybe YOU never met the right guy.”

How do you cope with queer prejudiced that’s more like slights and rudeness? How do you deal when it’s blatantly aggressive, as was my experience in that Mineola bar?

Every year I get less jaded about my musical tastes. I love listening to music and lyrics that are outside my own experience. I have this physical sensation of my brain and solar plexus twisting in this new way. It’s the reason why I love the monthly playlist of Major Matt, himself a great songwriter. And because it’s always accompanied by a blog post, I happen to know he also appreciates music that’s outside his usual listening comfort zone.

Not sure whether it’s a coincidence, but I’ve started writing like this, too. When a song emerges, and I can’t define the genre or if I even like it, I just go with it. My painter friend Jodi reminds us in her social media posts that creativity has it’s own inertia, and we need to let it flow free from self judgement.

Aside from music that stretches us, there are those songs that hit the nail on the head. They give words to what we already know, sounds to what we already feel, drawing it out, confirming and validating us. They’re the songs that we blast 20 years after we first hear them, the ones we sing at the top of our lungs. Or the ones we lean into,, retreat, zone out. When I’m lucky, like really really lucky, I can write one of those. Maybe only two people in the world will ever hear it. Of those, neither may like it, but it’s there for me. It fossilizes something I once experienced, then like a scent makes me re-live a past scene. Often, a completely new experience has me recall that old song. A soundtrack to my life recirculated.

I started “Rearranged” a couple of decades ago at the tail end of a brief period in my life where I loved mind altering substances. I wish I could say I was on a journey to elevate my consciousness, or expand my being. But nah, i was just drawn to stuff that made the music sound better. And stuff that drew me out of my introverted shyness. It was a short phase, for awhile a super sweet part of my life. Thankfully, as it turned out, I wasn’t prone to getting addicted to anything (other than nicotine!) Still, I could feel my essence morphing slowly until all of the sudden I didn’t recognize myself anymore. It took an uncharacteristically long time to finish Rearranged. So long, in fact, that the person I was when I finished the song was completely different from the person I was when I started it. And it started about change in the first place. On the surface, it’s so cliche. Yeah, inside out. Upside down. I’ve heard it a million times over. But I couldn’t get stuck on cliche phobia, because it was the only way I could describe this kaleidoscope of identities. This was released about three years ago, one of my very first home studio self-productions. A soundtrack to my life recirculated.