My life recently can be described in one phrase that I dearly love but rarely have occasion to use: it’s swings and roundabouts.
I had a dream at the end of December where someone I hold close to my heart who has since died told me that this year would be a very busy one for me and so far that seems to be true. I performed as Lady Gaga with the For Your Pleasure Burlesque on the 21st and it went….well, it went fairly alright considering the little time I had to put the major choreography together (thanks to snow the girl that I was dancing to Bad Romance with couldn’t practice with me until two hours before the performance):
Jon Donnell, one-time Aubin boyfriend and more importantly current Aubin friend, took photos of the event (as he usually does. The first time I saw him was at the same venue as he photographed Gin Circus’s first performance). Here are some of my favorite from the set. The rest can be found here (and if you explore the photo stream a bit more you’ll see me from July in black and white): http://www.flickr.com/photos/photos-by-jondonnell/sets/72157600086406884/
I'm a bit too fat to be a truly convincing Lady Gaga, not to mention my outfits lack a zany sort of style, but no matter.
I’ve also just been asked to sing at a benefit for Haiti earthquake relief called Rising Voices Raising Consciousness. It’s April 11, so I’m not thinking about it just yet. But I have to keep it in mind coming up.
My other thing that I’m trying to work on is making note cards out of some of my comics. Here's my favorite one, a portrait of my roommate's cat, Girl Walter, listening to NPR like she does when my roommate is away:
I'm also hopefully doing a photo shoot with my friend Bryan Bruchman sometime soon. He's a busy B so who knows when, but he had me email him a list of things that creatively influence me (which mean me gathering lots of youtube videos and pictures) so hopefully it'll be a great shoot. He took this photo, you may remember:
Alright. Enough of me for now. I shall leave you with what has become one of my favorite pictures lately. It's me playing the Lie Down Game near a Smoot mark on a certain bridge in the Boston area. Look up Smoots, for they are interesting units of measure. This photo is by the lovely Ms. Elisha Clarke:
I was told the other day that someone reads this blog so I’ll update it. While there was no use in updating if I was talking to myself I can’t pass up a chance for conversation. In other words, if you read this, comment somehow and talk with me—I do music/art/videos to say things I can’t say in my speaking voice so it’s important to me to know I’m making a connection even if it’s a tiny one.
Anyway…
Back in 2005 I saw The Dresden Dolls for the first time. I had heard Coin Operated Boy on WCYY’s Top 5 at 5 and nearly had a brain aneurism when I discovered that it wasn’t just a one-off foray into cabaret sound land. As a pretty socially isolated teenager who found solace in Judy Garland movies and Tori Amos and they seemed to be the magical bridge I was looking for between the two. I saw them at the Bullmoose Warehouse in Scarborough and was blown away by their acoustic set and was then moved to tears by their full set at SPACE Gallery. For your “old school” pleasure, here is a poorly lit picture from that day:
At the time I thought I was awesome, but seeing the video it’s almost painful to me how not-awesome I am. I’ve learned a lot about stage performance since and I know I still have a hell of a long way to go but….yeah. Kind of embarrassing.
ANYWAY! My point is that Amanda Palmer, by virtue of being older and more ambitious, tends to do cool things because the idea for similar things is even fully incubated in my mind. For example, I’d been taking dead photographs of myself for about 6 months before she announced what would become the Who Killed Amanda Palmer book. I love that, though—it shows me I’m on the right track and it gives me a challenege to deviate in my own little ways to keep things interesting. Such is the case with what I’m doing right now.
I’m sure you remember I was in a band this past summer, right? Gin Circus? No? Well, here’s a video of us to remind you:
It was a tough summer for me for a lot of reasons. I booked our first show the night that Michael Jackson died and considering Michael Jackson was my first hero I saw that as a good sign for the musical future that my first performance of my adult life was booked as he did the “off this mortal coil” shuffle. I don’t deny I learned a lot about myself between then and now, but I also ended up going through various levels of emotional hell that I’m only now beginning to genuinely get over. However, as I’m getting over things I’m not angry enough any more to go into detail. Suffice to say that a bunch of things led to me writing a handful of songs that for many reasons could never be Gin Circus songs. Months after, though, it’s proving good therapy to polish off recordings of them and put them out there, to be done with them.
So that’s what I’m doing here:
I like that cover as well. I took it outside Alex’s house before practice one day. Apparently it had run into a window pretty fast because it didn’t have a head left, just a disintegrating body. It’s gross now, but I was in a morbid mood at the time and took a bunch of pictures of it. It made sense to make it the cover considering the location and the title, which was from one of our songs, “Clementine.” The line being: “I’d crush your little skull in, girl, to get him out of your head.”
The nice thing about my constantly having my camera with me is that I have an image that corresponds to each song within the timespan of a week. In other words, the album art that’s on my fan page on facebook right now is a picture I took within the same time as when I wrote the song. You can see what I looked like, what I was doing, and, by inference, what influenced the song. This one is my favorite because it encompasses the downfall of everything I thought was stable back then. The post-crash car, the person looking at the car, the house it’s in front of—they all ended up in songs and I think twenty years from now, when people no longer hate each other and these things are simply documents relating to a few months in the lives of a few people, it’ll be a beautiful connection:
But none of that is ready to remotely release yet. Other than a rough draft CD to my friend Mary. But here is the question of the day: If I went to all the effort to release this fabled CD in some form, would you buy it? Would you see me perform it?
While you answer that I’ll go bake some more cupcakes:
Oh, heavens help me. I feel like I’m complaining an awful lot lately. The main topics of complaint are: 1)Money and Job, of which there’s never any of either 2)Friends, who I feel I don’t see enough of despite feeling like I’m not too busy 3)Lack of musical talent, specifically instrumental talent.
The money and job are being vaguely solved by finding money in odd places and my internship at a newspaper (although it’s an unpaid internship). Friends are…well, maintaining friendships is always a bit tough for me. I’m a loner but I crave hanging out with friends. Anyway my loner tendencies come from my feeling socially awkward because I inevitably have at least two unintentional social faux pas moments per hanging out session. Things I think are funny or clever or interesting sometimes strike people as perhaps stupid or embarrassing so it leads to odd situations.
Lack of musical talent is and has been a huge problem for me. I can sing and that’s about it. As far as doing anything manually I am completely useless. I played saxophone for three years and was very good at it, but I can’t do that and sing at the same time. I want to play piano with both hands instead of one at a time, and I want to play bass on more than just the lowest string and left handed. It makes me so angry that I can only do the bare minimum on every thing that I want to do so badly.
I also feel like if I don’t have a creative outlet soon my head will explode. I’m playing Lady Gaga (again) on the 21st with the For Your Pleasure burlesque at Geno’s here in Portland. I’m learning choreography and it’s alright, but a cold has me on some restriction as far as vocals are concerned so recording backing vocals will have to wait. In related news, my video for Paparazzi reached over 400 views recently:
In studying the choreography/video for Bad Romance I’ve thought about a few things. They’re connected thoughts, really—1)It must be nice to be paid to look and be fabulous and 2) I’m glad I’m not as deep into anorexia as I used to be or watching that video would be quite triggering. I figured I couldn’t be the only one who connected the vertebrae-showing video fashion with anorexia so I googled around and found this article which, though I know nothing of the site before this, seems to agree with some of my thoughts about it: http://www.femalefirst.co.uk/music/reviews/Lady+GaGa+Bad+Romance+Video+What+Do+You+Think-9731.html
Choice quote being: “I can’t say I’m overly sold on the whole ‘eating Disorder Gaga’ either I mean, who’s decision was it to put that it there? Surely showing many a girls’ hero looking unhealthily thin is going to send the wrong message to fans?” Case in point:
But then I looked up the ideas behind the video and, if Wikipedia can be trusted, which it occasionally can, the idea is filled with different “monsters” that haunted her during the tour. I’d read an interview a while back with her where she was asked how she stayed thin and said “It’s all about starvation! Pop stars don’t eat.” That leads me to believe the whole exaggerated anorexia in the video is a representation of yet another on-tour monster. Regardless, I’m ashamed to say it does stoke the dying embers of my own disorder and make me want to touch my ribs and collar bones.
Nothing’s real, though, is it? No one’s ever thin enough and no one is ever what they seem. Although Masha Tyelna could give Bad Romance Gaga a run for her money in the eye department:
Even though I feel like I’m 20 pounds too heavy to play Lady Gaga, I’m doing just that this coming 21st, as I said before. I’ll let you know how it goes. I went to a party last night in my Gaga outfit, full wig/make-up/outfit. I stood against a wall with my Gaga glasses on and it's weird how wearing those wig and glasses gave me a boost of confidence. Someone could've insulted me horribly and I would've just shrugged it off as long as I was wearing that outfit. No wonder nothing seems to bother Gaga. Well, there's probably some lost neurons contributing to that too for her, but whatever. It helps and could mean something important for future performance to know the power of a costume.
