I was surfing the internet last night for a couple of hours, a bit aimless I guess, but with an intent to find new music that touches me. I did find lots and lots of music: bands that I've never heard of (which means nothing; I live in a bubble), their photos and songs displayed prominently on the front pages of ultra-chic and hip online-magazines. I listen to these artists, and wow, they're all so fucking cool! So many artists with the latest production, everyone pushing boundaries and sounding and looking more artsy and individual and weird and unique than the other...
It all makes me feel insecure, until I realize this: hardly any of this music touches me. I admire their fashionable stylings, I can listen to this sort of music and enjoy the trendy vibe it creates, but in all honesty, I find it relatively rare to find artists that really speak to me on a deep level, in any genre.

It's like that feeling that one sometimes gets when reading a spectacular book: when you find yourself inhabiting the world the author created; swimming in the surroundings, feeling like you know every character personally; feeling like you never want to leave this alternate reality and yet you're compelled to devour every word, and thus the end inevitably and mercilessly approaches...  This is how I feel with artists when they really touch me, regardless of their genre. With music it's ceaseless listening: hearing the same song over and over and over and over.......... It's like falling in love...but with a song. When that happens, a relationship is created with the artist too--I forever feel a warmth and intimacy toward them, regardless of whether they end up producing more art that I like. 

I think that the reason why deep connection with art is rare is this: even though an artist has skill, it does not mean that they have the uncommon combination of authenticity and intimacy. To really touch someone, you have to be willing to be vulnerable, and that can be scary to most people. Most artists never allow that intimacy, and I can understand why. It allows people to get to know you in a way, to really see you--flaws and all, and most of us would rather wear a mask.

It requires a specific kind of bravery to write lines like Bjork's "I suck my tongue in remembrance of you." The bravery to be who you are and express it freely. I admire that immensely. Trendiness has its place of course, but I am compelled to strive for something else: authenticity and intimacy. Who I am will never please everybody, but it is enough. To end, I'd like to quote Tom Waits, as he makes my point so clearly:

"I would rather be a failure on my own terms than a success on someone else's. That's a difficult statement to live up to, but then I've always believed that the way you affect your audience is more important than how many of them there are."

“Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future.” 

--Lewis B. Smedes

This has been a challenging thing for me to come to terms with: the fact that my memories of my life are now so vastly different from what they were before, even just five short years ago. It seems like some sort of a trick, a lie even, as it was only in sobriety that I began to understand what had happened to me in my life. . . .  For a long time I questioned what was true, as the reality being presented to me by my sober mind looked so remote from the life I had thought I'd been living. I had not realized the full extent of, or the reasons for my pain.. But they are dawning on me, gradually clearer in my mind. The trick and the lie is what came before. What is now is truth. No more fog, no more deceit.

I am still re-framing many of my memories, as this sort of task is not completed overnight. It takes a long time to make sense of a past wrapped up in dishonesty and fear. What I love about the quote above, is the notion of a healed memory. I'm not in the act of forgiving anyone just now, instead I am in the process of draining out a bitter ocean of anger within me. But there are other ways to heal a memory, and that is what I am doing: being brave enough to listen to that little voice inside of me--the one who knew what was going on all along. Going against the past perceptions of everyone else and remembering that little voice, that always told me what was true. I didn't honor or listen to her then, but I honor and listen to her now. She was right all along. I will see it her way from now on. My memories, thus transformed.  
In writing this I discover that perhaps I am forgiving someone after all. . . myself.

I had a wonderful opportunity this week to attend the Women's Media Awards-event organized by the Women's Media Center (WMC) founded by my close friend and mentor Robin Morgan, Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda. This is what their website has to say about the event: "The Women’s Media Awards recognizes individuals who have made outstanding contributions to advancing women’s and girls’ visibility and power in media."

It wouldn't have occurred to me how important organizations like this are for women, until I saw the statistics, which are staggering. And there is a enormous array of statistics to choose from, that make the same point. Here is one: "We live in a racially and ethnically diverse nation that is 51% female, but the news media itself remains staggeringly limited to a single demographic. According to the Global Media Monitoring Project 2010, 24% of the people interviewed, heard, seen, or read about in mainstream broadcast and print news were female.  Only 13% of stories focused specifically on women and 6% on issues of gender equality or inequality."
 
I didn't expect to be moved the way I was by the event. What affected me most was being in a room full of powerful women. When does that ever happen? Women are bred to be submissive, to please men, to be more concerned with the latest trends than, for example, who's going to lead this country for the next four years. Women are 51% of the electorate, which means we have some serious power in this world. But...we are bred not to seize it.

Like I said, it was inspiring to see a room full of strong women, most of whom had indeed harnessed their power. From Anne Hathaway, who hosted the event, to Barbara Walters, who gave out the lifetime-award to Pat Mitchell, to Laura and Lisa Ling, two hosts and journalists who've been through hell and back doing what they love...I was just drinking it all in, feeling a real sense of belonging among these people. I still have a ways to go to unlearn my programming, but being a part of events like this makes me as motivated as ever to go after my dreams and become who I want to be.

These last two weeks have been challenging, I have to admit it now. When hurricane Sandy hit New York, I thought I dealt with the whole thing really well--I felt like a trooper. I kept living my life as normally as possible, and fulfilling my duties as much as I could. Yet now as the dust settles, I find that the ordeal affected me much more deeply than I realized at first.

I think that for a lot of New Yorkers, Sandy was reminiscent of 9/11/2001. Even if we aren't aware of it on the surface, there is an unconscious film-roll that started running with the shocking nature of what the city went through last week. It's an entirely different circumstance of course, but the halting, traumatized feeling of the past is renewed. I would have disagreed with this assessment last week in the midst of my "brush-it-aside-and-keep-going"-attitude, but now as I relax a bit and let my body work through and finally heal itself from what is possibly my third cold in two weeks (!), I have to say, it's true.

I'm sure I've said this before, and I know I've even said it in a lyric of mine, but often the body knows better than the mind what is really going on within us. Right now, I'm telling myself that it's ok to be unsettled, that it's ok to feel the plethora of emotions that a huge event like this brings about. The rest of the world is already moving on, but this destruction has left a mark on all of us in this city, whether we realize it or not. Just like 9/11 did.

Yes, we can choose to brush these things aside and pretend like they don't touch us, but what's the point in that? They manifest themselves in other ways if we refuse to feel them. Either way, we can't run away from ourselves. Whatever you leave behind now, you will have to face in the future. I have learned that through my own experience many times. I am learning that I can't skip over feelings that seem inconvenient, I must feel them. Only in doing so can I heal myself and be whole.

"Stop masking your pain for it will bleed through somewhere else in your life.”
― Sherna Benjamin

What a week here in New York. What a fucking week.
I'm overwhelmed with emotions, some of which I don't even recognize. It's quite a tangle... One thing is for sure: it's hard to be thrown off most if not all of one's routines. In the midst of making my record in Greenwich Village in Manhattan, it is inconvenient to not be able to get there via subway as usual. Secondly, even if I was to get all the way there from my home in Brooklyn, I would be met with the fact that there is no power in the studio. Yup, that's life in New York right now. Thus, I wait.

Don't get me wrong, I know how good I have it. I know that hurricane Sandy destroyed the lives and properties of so many people in the city. To not have lost anything of value or anyone close to me, I am extremely lucky. I just have a feeling that this is not the last we've seen of storms of Sandy's ilk. I have a feeling that this is merely the beginning, and this alternately saddens and angers me. We the people are not innocent in all of this. Sandy is a symptom of climate change. 

This, unfortunately, is fact.

I went for a walk in Prospect Park on Thursday (illegal right now, in storm's aftermath....) and what was supposed to be a refreshing outing turned into a saddening, maddening, horrifying one. I saw hundreds of trees uprooted or sliced in half; beautiful, magnificent trees lying helplessly on the ground, dying. For me, nature has always provided solace--especially when it seemed like I wasn't able to get love and consolation from people around me. To then see these broken trees in what seemed like a skeletal Prospect Park...well, it was heart-breaking.

I know that I am anthropomorphizing trees somewhat, in that I see them as fallen friends. But I doubt that I'm truly out of line in thinking this way. We are dependent on trees and plants for our oxygen and they also soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. We need them desperately, and yet everywhere in the world trees are being destroyed by deforestation, fires and storms, among other calamities. 

Storm coverage is currently concentrating on more pressing issues like flooding and power outages. I hope these will finally create an urgency to do what we can do to preserve our atmosphere and our environment. It will take a while before fallen trees will create such a reaction in the powers that be, but in the meantime I leave you with a couple of photographs of my beautiful, leafy friends. Rest in peace. 

 

I've been thinking a lot about publicity this week. With the release of my album next year, publicizing it is naturally a key component in the process. Plus, I've done a couple of interviews recently, and thus the issue is relevant to me right now.

In the last couple of years I have come to express myself quite freely in the context of my blog, and I've come to trust that saying how I feel publicly is safe. I'm doing it on my own terms and can stand by every line. I have also been very open on stage about who I am and what I think, and that has felt empowering. Yet I am noticing that the situation is quite different in an interview, which is always written through the point of view of the journalist (unless it's via email). Many more things come into play, not the least of which being my personal shit and the journalist's personal shit when it comes to people and social situations. There's something quite unnatural about it, come to think of it: speaking about personal stuff with a complete stranger, who then writes about it into a magazine. In hindsight, it makes one want to take the word "personal" out of the earlier sentence. 

My point is this: doing an interview is not the same thing as me writing a blog or speaking to an audience. I enjoy interviews, I enjoy speaking to people in that capacity, but it's also daunting as hell, because you give up all control after the fact. It leaves you very vulnerable. I also find it challenging to draw the line about what is healthy to share and what is not--what feels good to talk about and what is excessive. But I trust that it is a matter of getting back in the groove of things and learning in the process, through trial and error. Despite having done a lot of publicity in my life, I am still trying to find a healthy balance with it.

What I really want is for my work to speak for itself. Being that publicity is part of my work too, I have to have a vision for it as well. That, among other things, is what I've learned this week.

“Just a reminder, what other people think of you is none of your business.” 
- Ze Frank

This is the eighth and last week of me studying a university course on Sustainability, that I found online on an ingenious website called Coursera. It's been a wonderful opportunity for me to learn more about an issue that interests me a great deal, and what's best of all--it's for free! I've also been taking a course in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, which has also expanded my horizons quite a bit.

These courses are a first step for me as I'm planning on going back to school to finally get my GED. Back when I was 16 going on 17, I moved to New York, dropping out of high school to do so. At the time I didn't fully comprehend what was happening to my life, and it seemed like the right choice to pursue an international career in music then. At least I was made to believe so. In hindsight, my opinion is that I was too young and too insecure, and that the choice of discontinuing my education was not a wise choice. I don't know that it was even My choice to begin with. A lot of the things in my life at that time seemed to be happening to me, with me not being a conscious participant.

It was only a few years back when a friend of mine acknowledged my intelligence for what to me seemed like the first time. Up until then, I suppose it was in the best interest of people around me to encourage me to think I wasn't all that bright. Since then though, I have used up much of my time learning about a plethora of different subjects and I find myself already to be a different woman because of it. But this is not the end, this is merely the beginning of it. See what a little bit of encouragement can do to a human being..?!

Education and knowledge is empowering, and I've been delighted to see that a lot of information is available for free for anyone who wants it. As is the case of my GED. It is not an investment of money for me, instead it is an investment of time. I am now ready to claim what in some ways was taken from me a long time ago: my sense of being educated, knowledgeable...an adult! And for those of you who would also like to learn more and expand your minds, no hassle and for free, here is a link to the aforementioned ingenious website: https://www.coursera.org/
Enjoy!

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."
- William Butler Yeats