I've been lately interrogating my anti-Auto-Tune stance because, I'm a little embarrassed to admit, I've watched a couple episodes of Glee and actually kind of enjoyed them or I should say found more in them to enjoy than I thought possible. I still find it too conservative for my taste, but it can be sneakily subversive. I'm finding it more interesting, and funnier, than I used to, and I don't know if it has changed or I have. Both, most likely. Anyway, because I was feeling a little warmer toward the show, I began to wonder if Auto-Tune as a tool to create a certain kind of shiny pop performance was possibly not so evil.
And then I remembered this.
And this:
These vocal performances are processed to be sure, but with analog technology that can add to but can't fundamentally alter the voice in the way that Auto-Tune does. These are perfect pop vocal performances, flawless, shiny as glass. Yet they retain the essential emotional quality of human beings singing, a quality that is erased by the overuse of Auto-Tune. Barry and Frida actually sang like that into a microphone and they brought yearning and heartbreak to every perfect note.
Call me an old curmudgeon, but something important is lost when you create that perfect pop vocal in a computer instead of in the human heart and throat. Something you can actually hear and measure. Something good. It's like when people look at you with a forced, sad smile and tell you that Stouffer's frozen lasagna is "actually very tasty." Well, okay. Keep telling yourself that.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Jane Austen't.
I think I just don't get Jane Austen. Whenever I encounter passages from her books quoted in other books or articles, or when writers I love write about her, I think, "Wow, that's so good I need to read some Jane Austen." But then I do and I always end up feeling somehow unsatisfied.
I read Pride and Prejudice, and I think Sense and Sensibility though I'm not sure, and I'm struggling through Persuasion right now. It's not a long book and I only have about 30 pages left but I am finding it such a chore, I don't even think I'll finish it. Seriously it's so boring I can hardly make myself sit down and finish it. The story is dull. None of the characters are sympathetic. They're either silly and vain (and we're supposed to not like them) or they're tedious and judgmental and just annoying.
All the things people say Jane Austin is so amazing at: the social observation, the critique of manners, etc., George Eliot does with as much bite and humor as Austin -- and, I would argue, more subtlety -- and her books have passion and warmth, sorrow and beauty. What is it I'm not getting?
I read Pride and Prejudice, and I think Sense and Sensibility though I'm not sure, and I'm struggling through Persuasion right now. It's not a long book and I only have about 30 pages left but I am finding it such a chore, I don't even think I'll finish it. Seriously it's so boring I can hardly make myself sit down and finish it. The story is dull. None of the characters are sympathetic. They're either silly and vain (and we're supposed to not like them) or they're tedious and judgmental and just annoying.
All the things people say Jane Austin is so amazing at: the social observation, the critique of manners, etc., George Eliot does with as much bite and humor as Austin -- and, I would argue, more subtlety -- and her books have passion and warmth, sorrow and beauty. What is it I'm not getting?
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
I'm Back.
On Sunday I performed for the first time in several years. I could be forgetting something -- I do that -- but I'm pretty sure the last time I sang and played in front of an audience was in 2004 when I was living in San Francisco finishing Life in a Box and a friend invited me to perform in a popular cabaret-type variety show hosted by a drag queen comic. I sang 2 songs, as I remember.
So. Sunday, I took part in a songwriters circle that my old friend Monica Passin hosts at Banjo Jim's in the East Village. It came about because J was going to be here visiting and we were going to sing together in sort of a reunion -- J and I did lots of shows with Monica when we were Y'all and we were all part of the New York alt-country scene in the 90s that was centered around Rodeo Bar. In fact, Monica was instrumental in the development of Y'all in those early years. I happened to take a guitar class at The New School around the time J and I met and started writing songs. Monica taught the class; she was my first teacher -- before that I was self-taught. After the class ended, I took private lessons with her. She was already performing a lot and had a following as Li'L Mo and the Monicats. Through her we discovered that scene and they us.
Anyway, J was coming to New York for a couple weeks and we were going to sing together in this show. Monica asked J and J asked me if I was into it. I've been trying to find ways to get in front of an audience again -- I'm started to write a solo theater piece, with my new songs and stories about my love and sex life since J and I separated -- so this was a perfect, low-pressure situation where I could get my feet wet. As the date got closer, I think J got a little scared. Monica emailed asking for a bio and photo which I think -- it did for me, for sure -- brought back a flood of anxious memories about our old performing career, and J told me he almost wanted to back out but he would be okay just singing harmony with me, not billing ourselves as a duo.
Two days before he was supposed to fly here, J passed out while he was peeing, tore open the back of his head, and spent 3 days in the hospital. He has a congenital heart defect which was causing his blood pressure to fluctuate wildly. He had to cancel his trip. So I was on my own.
I have a batch of what I call my new songs though some of them were written several years ago and the newest of them is 4 or 5 years old. I haven't performed them much if at all, so they feel fresh to me. They are not shaped, the performance of them is not shaped, by interaction with an audience. Not yet.
I'd never been so nervous about performing as I was on Sunday. To be honest, I was feeling a little out of control. I can count on one hand the number of times I've sung and played completely by myself. In the end, I like it best. I love the freedom, the control over everything, the simplicity of the relationship with the audience. But I was nervous as holy fuck all day. I broke out in a sweat before the show, kept telling myself to keep breathing. The venue is a little dive bar on 9th and C, and there were only a couple dozen people there at most. It was most definitely not a big deal.
After the first song I was calmer. The audience was quiet, attentive, and my voice felt strong. They liked the song, the applause was reassuring. The second song I did has a fast finger-picking part that sometimes trips me up, and I stumbled a few times but never fell apart. (It's the song in the video clip which is an excerpt from Life in a Box.) After that I was cool and confident.
I'm energized and inspired to get moving on this new solo work. I sort of have all the material already, I just have to wrangle it. I may write a new song or two, but maybe not. And the stories are not written down but they're in my head and in some cases they're here in this blog and only need to be reconfigured. I thought that I would work with an accompanist or co-writer to create piano arrangements of the songs so I wouldn't have to play. But after Sunday I'm sort of thinking maybe I can do it. My guitar playing is rudimentary, remedial, but it might be fine in this context. The simplicity is seductive, not just in terms of the performance but rehearsals, booking, sound, everything is easier if it's just me and my guitar. I'll give it some more thought.
My left arm was sore all last week. I assume it's from my job. A lot of my work is data entry that involves a lot of scrolling with the mouse, and I can feel the stiff soreness in my forearm after a few hours of it. Sunday it was really sore which pissed me off because I needed all the strength I could muster in that hand after not playing guitar for so many years. But I noticed Sunday night after the show that the soreness had completely disappeared, and it hasn't come back all week. I guess it was psychosomatic.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
A Change of Seasons.
On Thursdays, T and I have dinner together. It’s so easy to fall out of touch with friends here, and I didn’t want that to happen when I moved out of T’s place, so we decided to have a standing weekly date.
Regardless of how much I look forward to seeing T, I was feeling anxious last Thursday. I hadn’t slept much the night before. C and I had gone to a fundraiser called New York Loves Japan, a huge, crowded, hectic, loud sushi and sake event, and then for pizza afterwards with friends, all of which I enjoyed but it wore me the fuck out. I have always had to summon a special kind of energy to deal with crowds, and now that when I am in noisy rooms I only hear about 20 percent of what people are saying, even when they’re only a couple feet away, well, I know I complain about it relentlessly but whatever, it’s exhausting.
After a long cab ride in heavy traffic on FDR Drive, we got home near midnight, wound up, not ready to sleep. We watched American Idol and went to bed at about 1:30. I slept fitfully and got up at 6:30 for work. That afternoon, as I struggled to keep my eyes open, I nearly emailed T to cancel our date. But we had some Lizzie Borden business to discuss.
C decided to get Chinese takeout since he was alone for dinner, and the Chinese place is next to Nueva Espana, the Dominican restaurant where I was meeting T, so we left the house together. On our way out the door, C noticed the big plastic bag full of plastic bags that I had left in the hallway.
When I found that our neighborhood grocery store accepts plastic bags for recycling, I started saving them. I try to use reusable grocery bags, but it’s nearly impossible in New York not to end up with piles of plastic grocery bags. We keep our recyclables in the office which is small to begin with and it bums me out when my writing space looks like a utility room so I moved the bag of bags to the hallway where, because it’s one of those errands that never seem convenient when I’m thinking of it, it sat for 2 or 3 weeks. I should have known that it was trying C’s patience. But I didn’t.
On our way out, C suggested I take the bags to the store because it was only about half a block out of the way. I said, sharply, though I don’t remember this at all and C only mentioned it later when we were back home, “I’m not doing that now.” I was preoccupied, feeling anxious because so little of my evening was left for the ration of idleness I seem to need. T was already waiting for me at the restaurant, and I didn’t want to take the extra 3 minutes to drop the bags off. When we got out to the sidewalk, C stopped and said, “I’m going to get the bags,” and he went back inside while I waited. When he returned with the bags, I asked him if he was mad at me and he said, “I had a flash of anger, but it’s okay.”
In some ways we are such different people. I’m a recycling Nazi and I make fun of the size of his TV. He is less selfish than I and makes more time for his family and friends. He won’t call the landlord to fix a leaky kitchen sink, whereas I wouldn’t hesitate to demand it be repaired. I don’t feel any particular urgency about paying my credit card debts, whereas he considers it an ethical obligation. He looks forward all year to a summer house share on Fire Island, whereas I have trouble imagining why anyone would want to be on a beach in the mid-day sun, let alone with a bunch of fashion-obsessed gay men. I consider the Mary Tyler Moore Show to be the most important cultural touchstone of my life, whereas he says, “I think maybe I’ve seen a couple episodes, but I don’t really remember them.”
On the other hand, in some more essential, fundamental way I think we have known and seen and understood each other from the moment we met. I have trouble articulating exactly what I mean by this. Maybe it’s because it started with the raw, specific solicitation of a Craigslist ad, which made our sexual compatibility undeniable from the get-go. I will not underestimate how powerful a bond it is to be able to know that we turn each other on, and, more than that, to know that we give each other what we most want. The confidence of that is a tonic. It’s a moment -- and good god they are rare, aren’t they? -- of feeling like I have exactly what is needed.
But it must be more than that. I know my heart was flayed and raw from my breakup with M in Austin. I hadn’t had time to recover my defenses, so C could walk right in. And I know that he was looking for someone to commit to. I know he had a specific idea of what kind of commitment he wanted to make (lifelong, monogamous) but hadn’t yet found someone he was willing to make it with.
After dinner, at home, I told him how vulnerable his anger made me feel, how this new experience of anger in our relationship had made me fearful and insecure. I thought it was a natural response, considering that this was the first time anger had surfaced between us. He said it wasn’t the first time.
I haven’t had any flashes of anger yet. No flashes, no flickers nor slow burns. I haven’t been mad. I don’t think I’ve even been slightly irritated. I don’t say this to paint myself as more virtuous in some way, more tolerant, loving, more serene. If anything, I want to say that I’m less. Less self-aware, less emotionally open. But I think I’m just more afraid. C is straightforward. The idea of anger doesn’t, with him, spin out into a wild paranoid fantasy, a terrible apprehension that everything is rotten, corrupt, wrong, false, over. I avoid anger because it terrifies me. He seems to understand that it’s just something people feel from time to time.
He said that if we're going to save plastic bags he wants to keep them in the office, not the hallway. And he told me, “This is not fragile. My love for you is not fragile. You don’t have to worry about it. For this to work, you have to know that.”
The temperature has been in the 60s and 70s the last week and our neighborhood is thick and smelly with flowering trees. It is spring and this is the first change of seasons since C and I met in December. (How could it be true that we have only known each other 5 months?) We joke about the weather. I say it’s hot, he says it’s chilly. I dread the summer, C lives for it. He can’t wait till it’s 95 and sticky. I love winter and particularly enjoyed this past winter, and I feel sadness and regret to see it end, because I spent the last few years in San Francisco and Texas where there is no winter. We both worry a little that our incompatible weather affinities will be difficult to manage, one of us always relieved while the other is irritable. All winter C half-jokingly complained about how miserable and cold he was, and I fell in rapturous love with each new ridiculous snowfall. As the tables turn, I wonder if I will play the role of the miserable one with such charm and humor.
Friday at work, C texted me, “I love you. And I don’t get mad and stay mad. Stupid bags are stupid. You are beautiful.”
I texted back, “I love you, too. I love our life together. And stop making me cry at work.”
Regardless of how much I look forward to seeing T, I was feeling anxious last Thursday. I hadn’t slept much the night before. C and I had gone to a fundraiser called New York Loves Japan, a huge, crowded, hectic, loud sushi and sake event, and then for pizza afterwards with friends, all of which I enjoyed but it wore me the fuck out. I have always had to summon a special kind of energy to deal with crowds, and now that when I am in noisy rooms I only hear about 20 percent of what people are saying, even when they’re only a couple feet away, well, I know I complain about it relentlessly but whatever, it’s exhausting.
After a long cab ride in heavy traffic on FDR Drive, we got home near midnight, wound up, not ready to sleep. We watched American Idol and went to bed at about 1:30. I slept fitfully and got up at 6:30 for work. That afternoon, as I struggled to keep my eyes open, I nearly emailed T to cancel our date. But we had some Lizzie Borden business to discuss.
C decided to get Chinese takeout since he was alone for dinner, and the Chinese place is next to Nueva Espana, the Dominican restaurant where I was meeting T, so we left the house together. On our way out the door, C noticed the big plastic bag full of plastic bags that I had left in the hallway.
When I found that our neighborhood grocery store accepts plastic bags for recycling, I started saving them. I try to use reusable grocery bags, but it’s nearly impossible in New York not to end up with piles of plastic grocery bags. We keep our recyclables in the office which is small to begin with and it bums me out when my writing space looks like a utility room so I moved the bag of bags to the hallway where, because it’s one of those errands that never seem convenient when I’m thinking of it, it sat for 2 or 3 weeks. I should have known that it was trying C’s patience. But I didn’t.
On our way out, C suggested I take the bags to the store because it was only about half a block out of the way. I said, sharply, though I don’t remember this at all and C only mentioned it later when we were back home, “I’m not doing that now.” I was preoccupied, feeling anxious because so little of my evening was left for the ration of idleness I seem to need. T was already waiting for me at the restaurant, and I didn’t want to take the extra 3 minutes to drop the bags off. When we got out to the sidewalk, C stopped and said, “I’m going to get the bags,” and he went back inside while I waited. When he returned with the bags, I asked him if he was mad at me and he said, “I had a flash of anger, but it’s okay.”
In some ways we are such different people. I’m a recycling Nazi and I make fun of the size of his TV. He is less selfish than I and makes more time for his family and friends. He won’t call the landlord to fix a leaky kitchen sink, whereas I wouldn’t hesitate to demand it be repaired. I don’t feel any particular urgency about paying my credit card debts, whereas he considers it an ethical obligation. He looks forward all year to a summer house share on Fire Island, whereas I have trouble imagining why anyone would want to be on a beach in the mid-day sun, let alone with a bunch of fashion-obsessed gay men. I consider the Mary Tyler Moore Show to be the most important cultural touchstone of my life, whereas he says, “I think maybe I’ve seen a couple episodes, but I don’t really remember them.”
On the other hand, in some more essential, fundamental way I think we have known and seen and understood each other from the moment we met. I have trouble articulating exactly what I mean by this. Maybe it’s because it started with the raw, specific solicitation of a Craigslist ad, which made our sexual compatibility undeniable from the get-go. I will not underestimate how powerful a bond it is to be able to know that we turn each other on, and, more than that, to know that we give each other what we most want. The confidence of that is a tonic. It’s a moment -- and good god they are rare, aren’t they? -- of feeling like I have exactly what is needed.
But it must be more than that. I know my heart was flayed and raw from my breakup with M in Austin. I hadn’t had time to recover my defenses, so C could walk right in. And I know that he was looking for someone to commit to. I know he had a specific idea of what kind of commitment he wanted to make (lifelong, monogamous) but hadn’t yet found someone he was willing to make it with.
After dinner, at home, I told him how vulnerable his anger made me feel, how this new experience of anger in our relationship had made me fearful and insecure. I thought it was a natural response, considering that this was the first time anger had surfaced between us. He said it wasn’t the first time.
I haven’t had any flashes of anger yet. No flashes, no flickers nor slow burns. I haven’t been mad. I don’t think I’ve even been slightly irritated. I don’t say this to paint myself as more virtuous in some way, more tolerant, loving, more serene. If anything, I want to say that I’m less. Less self-aware, less emotionally open. But I think I’m just more afraid. C is straightforward. The idea of anger doesn’t, with him, spin out into a wild paranoid fantasy, a terrible apprehension that everything is rotten, corrupt, wrong, false, over. I avoid anger because it terrifies me. He seems to understand that it’s just something people feel from time to time.
He said that if we're going to save plastic bags he wants to keep them in the office, not the hallway. And he told me, “This is not fragile. My love for you is not fragile. You don’t have to worry about it. For this to work, you have to know that.”
The temperature has been in the 60s and 70s the last week and our neighborhood is thick and smelly with flowering trees. It is spring and this is the first change of seasons since C and I met in December. (How could it be true that we have only known each other 5 months?) We joke about the weather. I say it’s hot, he says it’s chilly. I dread the summer, C lives for it. He can’t wait till it’s 95 and sticky. I love winter and particularly enjoyed this past winter, and I feel sadness and regret to see it end, because I spent the last few years in San Francisco and Texas where there is no winter. We both worry a little that our incompatible weather affinities will be difficult to manage, one of us always relieved while the other is irritable. All winter C half-jokingly complained about how miserable and cold he was, and I fell in rapturous love with each new ridiculous snowfall. As the tables turn, I wonder if I will play the role of the miserable one with such charm and humor.
Friday at work, C texted me, “I love you. And I don’t get mad and stay mad. Stupid bags are stupid. You are beautiful.”
I texted back, “I love you, too. I love our life together. And stop making me cry at work.”
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Control Freaks.
C, having been, before we met, a bachelor with a good income, has a guy come in once a week and clean the apartment, change the sheets, do a little laundry. Nothing serious -- for instance, I think he mops the bathroom floor, but he doesn't really get into the corners. Whatever. He cleans way more often than, if not as thoroughly as, I would, and I am deeply appreciative.
If we remember to run the dishwasher before he comes (and I won't even get into how little I understand the usefulness of the dishwasher, which, as far as I can tell is just a place to put dirty dishes to get them out of the way until you need something in there and have to pull it out and wash it and god forbid you put anything in there that hasn't been pretty much washed already -- it won't get clean) ANYway, if we remember to run the dishwasher, he'll empty it out and put stuff away. I wish he wouldn't. Over the course of the last couple months since I moved in, I've rearranged the kitchen to make it serviceable. C didn't cook much, so I have had free reign to make it over, to make it work for me. And I have accomplished that: I love cooking in my new kitchen. But our cleaning guy hasn't adjusted well to the changes. He puts stuff away where it used to go. Why would you put plastic bags in the towel drawer when it's obviously full of towels now and not plastic bags? And I want my good tongs hanging with the pots, not buried somewhere in the utensil drawer. Obviously I have some control issues.
C and I sometimes watch The Fabulous Beekman Boys, a documentary series on Planet Green about a gay couple who move from New York City to a farm somewhere upstate to raise goats and chickens and sell soap, etc. One of them is, at least as portrayed on the show, a total control freak micro-manager who drives his boyfriend and everyone else crazy, and as we were watching it the other night, C asked me (because our relationship was somewhat analogous in that we were domestic partners who also created and ran a business together) if J and I had a similar dynamic when we were together. I guess were were similar in some ways, but I think J and I were both control freaks, just in very different ways. He wore his freak on the outside, and I was the passive-aggressive one.
If you've seen Life in a Box, remember the argument in the trailer during a rehearsal? I was so glad to find that footage because it showed something essential about J and me and Y'all and that time in our lives, and because it showed how obstinate and controlling I could be, which is an aspect of my personality I don't think most people saw because I was the shy one, the yielding one, in the face of J's outsize personality, in the act and in our life together. If making that documentary was, among other things, an exercise in self-mortification, that scene is the one I find most difficult to watch -- because it shows an ugly side of me. The storyteller (and the narcissist) in me knows that that is what makes it good for the film.
If we remember to run the dishwasher before he comes (and I won't even get into how little I understand the usefulness of the dishwasher, which, as far as I can tell is just a place to put dirty dishes to get them out of the way until you need something in there and have to pull it out and wash it and god forbid you put anything in there that hasn't been pretty much washed already -- it won't get clean) ANYway, if we remember to run the dishwasher, he'll empty it out and put stuff away. I wish he wouldn't. Over the course of the last couple months since I moved in, I've rearranged the kitchen to make it serviceable. C didn't cook much, so I have had free reign to make it over, to make it work for me. And I have accomplished that: I love cooking in my new kitchen. But our cleaning guy hasn't adjusted well to the changes. He puts stuff away where it used to go. Why would you put plastic bags in the towel drawer when it's obviously full of towels now and not plastic bags? And I want my good tongs hanging with the pots, not buried somewhere in the utensil drawer. Obviously I have some control issues.
C and I sometimes watch The Fabulous Beekman Boys, a documentary series on Planet Green about a gay couple who move from New York City to a farm somewhere upstate to raise goats and chickens and sell soap, etc. One of them is, at least as portrayed on the show, a total control freak micro-manager who drives his boyfriend and everyone else crazy, and as we were watching it the other night, C asked me (because our relationship was somewhat analogous in that we were domestic partners who also created and ran a business together) if J and I had a similar dynamic when we were together. I guess were were similar in some ways, but I think J and I were both control freaks, just in very different ways. He wore his freak on the outside, and I was the passive-aggressive one.
If you've seen Life in a Box, remember the argument in the trailer during a rehearsal? I was so glad to find that footage because it showed something essential about J and me and Y'all and that time in our lives, and because it showed how obstinate and controlling I could be, which is an aspect of my personality I don't think most people saw because I was the shy one, the yielding one, in the face of J's outsize personality, in the act and in our life together. If making that documentary was, among other things, an exercise in self-mortification, that scene is the one I find most difficult to watch -- because it shows an ugly side of me. The storyteller (and the narcissist) in me knows that that is what makes it good for the film.
No.
The reason I'm so exercised about Raja winning this season of RuPaul's Drag Race (besides the fact that she came off like a shallow bitch with the totally repulsive Heathers vs. Boogers thing because, let's be clear, drag queens make catty comments about each other, it's part of the job, and it's not hard in the editing room to exaggerate or even create little backstage rivalries and to make anyone look evil or sweet depending on what's required to put drama on the screen) what makes me really sad and disappointed, not just about the show or about RuPaul but about the state of drag and by extension gay culture (and doubly, triply, disappointed because Drag Race was my bulwark, my beacon, my raft in the storm of conservatism that threatens lately to obliterate all that is campy and sick and delightfully wrong about being queer and loving a little entertainment and comfort at 2 a.m.) what has me, again, again, despairing that much of what I came of age loving and feeling welcomed and nurtured and inspired by, is that Raja is, in the end, just dull. Dull. This is what RuPaul thinks represents the future of this venerable art form? I watch Raja and yes her clothes are creative sometimes even brilliant and she can walk with her hips like nobody's business -- but there's no love, no generosity, no light, no sex appeal, no fun. And she has the comic timing of a turtle.
Alexis Mateo shoulda won this thing. Please.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Teddy Thompson Morning.
I downloaded the new Teddy Thompson record this morning (it's really, really good) and I'm listening and feeling a little rapturous about love and art and music. I couldn't find a good youtube clip from the new record, so I offer this great live clip of two of my favorite T.T. songs. In this pared-down version you really get the heartbreak of "I Wish It Was Over." The shiny production on the CD version buries the irony, making it a more complex, disorienting experience. Which I love. But seeing him sing it with the sadness right on the surface is nice, too. Anyway, I just think he's luminous.
Terrible sound on this concert clip with Dad, but I still love it.
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