Nehedar

In 1986 I was a kindergartner in North Miami Beach. 

I dreamt that my mom was late picking me up from school and I was left alone on the playground. Noticing some movement in the tall grass at the edge of the playground, I saw a lion weaving in and out and decided to explore that area.

I wandered in the grass, and soon heard two voices screaming for help. I followed the voices until I got to a clearing. In the middle of the clearing was a fountain, like a large cement birdbath. The screaming was coming from inside the fountain. As I approached it, I saw with horror that inside the fountain was my teacher’s head and my mom’s head, decapitated, each cut in half and sewn back together forming one. They both looked at me with one eye and screamed at me to separate them. I felt such pity and horror but I knew that if I separated them, they’d both die.

I woke up crying and upset, naturally and went into my parents room, at which time my dad told me that I could learn how to control my dreams. He gave me the instructions to “find my hands.” He gave me a rudimentary lesson in lucid dreaming that I would develop throughout my life, first lucidly dreaming around 7 and developing from there. 

In the meantime, I pondered the meaning of the dream, always mystified by the lion and fountain which seem like such strong, symbolic images. I loosely translated it as being torn between my mother and the outside world, represented by Mrs. Cohen, my schoolteacher.

In October 2001 I was 20. I was living in a dorm room at Stern College in NYC and my mom had also moved back from Zion, Illinois to her native NYC very recently, leaving most of her kids there. Only my youngest sister was living with her at the time.

My mom and sister weren’t getting along. My 12 year old sister called me frequently, telling me the problems they were having that mostly stemmed from my mom’s inability to find a job and sleeping all the time. My sister had little confidence in my mom’s abilities to care for her.

I had found them a therapist and was doing all I could, assuming it was normal stuff: relational, emotional, and economic problems, until one night while my sister was complaining, I heard my mom in the background clearly slurring with an odd tone in her voice.

I told my sister to put her on the phone and when I heard her voice, I intuited that my mom had a brain tumor and was going to die. I smoked a cigarette out of my dorm room window, realizing that my next step was getting her to the hospital.

When I got to my mom’s apartment, the door was open, and there were papers strewn on the floor. I walked in and sat on her futon, fending off the cat’s attacks, anxiously wondering where my mom was.

She stumbled in the door soon missing a shoe. I called a car service and took her to the emergency room. She had no insurance at the time but would be set up with Medicaid.

She was very dazed in the ER. The clearest memory I have is of her reading French hospital signs and slipping into French. She had studied French in college.

By the time she was seen, they didn’t want to keep her. I think they thought she was “just” on drugs, or “just” mentally ill, but my friend Izzy was able to convince them to keep her. They left her in what I can only call a cell, sleeping on the cold floor with no furniture.

Despite my initial intuitive blast, I was left with the assumption that my mom was having some kind of serious mental breakdown for a day or two. Then one day at work I got a message to call a doctor at the hospital. 

A doctor there had ordered a CT scan that found a large tumor in her brain requiring immediate surgery. The extraction biopsy would tell us the nature of the cancer. 

It was Chanukah when I came to visit my mom in the hospital post-op. When I first saw her, I gasped because the dramatic scar on her shaved head looked so familiar, the way the stitching had appeared years ago in the dream. 

The doctor broke the news to me that she had an aggressive stage 4 glioblastoma multiforme that would likely kill her soon. It could be as early as a couple months away. 

One day while my mom was in the hospital, I had a dream where the chime of an email arriving sounded from the basement of the house where I was living in Queens.

I went down to the basement where I found a Rainbow Gathering!  A lucid dreamer, I figured that since life was so stressful, I had created something to give me a sense of peace and calm, and I enjoyed the dream.

When I woke up, I figured that I might as well check my email.

In my inbox there was an invitation to a Rainbow Gathering in Emilia, Italy, which happens to be my name.  I felt shaken by such a personal invitation given the dream I’d just had.

I went to the Rainbow Gathering, which made my mother really proud. I had taken her to her first Rainbow Gathering the previous summer where she’d had the best time of her life; so good that she’d suggested to me that her brain tumor may have been caused by the shocking difference between the depression she’d lived with in her home life, back in Zion, Illinois, and the bliss she’d experienced at the rainbow gathering.

She stayed alive through the summer but not much longer.  On June 20th, my 21st birthday, I was approached about signing a DNR by the hospital. I happened to have just turned the exact age required to legally sign the form.

She died on September 8th 2002, more importantly on the second day of Rosh Hashana.

I got married in August 2012 and was pregnant within two years, at which time I experienced grief about my mother not being there for my pregnancy.

My mother had birthed 6 kids, the last 2 at home, and always said she loved being pregnant and giving birth. I on the other hand, hated being pregnant, hated being poked and prodded. I wished I could talk to my mom about it all.

I wrote a song about it called “Come in to the Light” which was a call for my mother’s presence to surface and watch and guide me through the pregnancy.

I enlisted a brilliant artist to make a video to accompany the song and I talked to her about my dream imagery. She asked me for a photo of my mother, and she surprised me by flashing my mother’s bright smile at the end of it.

In the last trimester of my pregnancy I was looking for work and a friend of a friend (on social media) put out a call for a temp worker, signing synagogue members up for their high holiday tickets. The synagogue happened to be my mom’s favorite synagogue B’nai Jeshurun in the Upper West Side.  When I went for work, I discovered that on the same block as the synagogue were 2 carvings on either side of an apartment building with actual fountains where the water came out of a lion’s mouth into fountain below.

I stared at this, utterly disbelieving what I was seeing. I wondered if I had ever visited NYC with my mom when I was very young, been to the synagogue with her and seen the lion and fountain which might have explained their presence in my dream. My dad told me that I had never been to New York with my mom.  I felt as if the present was affecting the past. I took this picture on my last day of work.

I left that job the day before my due date, (Labor Day!) but didn’t give birth until 10 days after that, which happened to be the anniversary (yartzeit) of my mother’s death (the 2nd day of Rosh Hashana). I had a hard time in labor, mostly due to the bullying and dehumanization of the mechanized, medicalized birth industry, and the particular hospital and practice that I gave birth at.

I didn’t want to use pain medicine, as my mom hadn’t used it.  But the hospital wasn’t accustomed to non medicated women, and my request to not be hooked up to a monitor the whole time resulted in combative standoffs that reduced my ability to handle the pain and I finally asked for the epidural.

But when the anesthesiologist began her monologue about the procedure and risks, I politely as possible asked her to stop talking immediately, I had no tolerance for any voices. She left the room and didn’t come back. I was able to get through the transition phase of labor because at one point my husband whispered in my ear Your mom would be so proud of you. That triggered the image from the end of my video that the artist had snuck in, of my mom’s radiant face to pop into my mind and remain there, fixed, as a focal point. 

The video for Come Into the Light: https://youtu.be/WN_ITpDmJKE?t=263

UPDATE: In 2020, (my son, now almost 6 years old) I learned my doula has the same birthday as my mom (8/28). That same doula, super “randomly” had worked in the same position as me at the synagogue the year before.

Update 2:  As a note, I put the wrong date on my mom’s tombstone, I put 8/19.

My son went to a school called Beit Rabban from the age of 4. When he was 6 (shortly after my last update) his dad and I started on a pretty unbelievably ugly divorce that took over 3 years. In a particularly difficult moment, I asked my mom for help. Shortly after that, my son’s school notified us that they are moving to Benei Jeshurun!

That year my son’s dad decided he wanted to move him to another school, farther away from me. I didn’t agree that the move was appropriate and hoped that the fact that the connection to my mom  (through my son’s school being in the process of moving to Benei Jeshurun) would provide some help. Fortunately my son stayed an extra year and was able to go to a year of school in my mom’s favorite synagogue where I had worked until my due date.

The next year it was decided by the school that he needed to move, and there was a lot of conflict about that, especially since we were still in the middle of the contentious divorce. We had an especially difficult summer, arguing about what should happen, that culminated in our son getting accepted into what I believed to be the best school for him which happened on August 19, the date that I had mistakenly put on my mom’s tombstone. By messing up the birth date from August 28 (the birthday of my doula) to Aug 19, I had transitioned my mom from Virgo to Leo.

I felt the need to write something out for you all because  I'm not seeing others expressing anything resembling my viewpoint, so I hope this can be helpful.

Unfortunately, I wrote this without reading Nylah’s new article, because it’s behind a paywall, and I learned about it after I had already written and submitted this. Please consider that context when you read this. 

As an aside, I just realized you blocked me on Twitter! (oops?) 

My story: I grew up half Puerto Rican and half "Jewish."  I don't know if my family was originally Ashkenazi or Sefardi, but judging from my mother's look, it could be a mix. Born in Massachusetts, we moved to Miami, to a Cuban neighborhood where I started elementary school, and then moved to Zion Illinois, for junior high, a working-class far suburb of Chicago that is approximately 50% white and 50% Black. I grew up very poor, my musician parents had 6 kids and my dad worked in a factory as a perfume compounder. I grew up in neighborhoods with no other Jews. I enjoyed enough of the "what are you" variety of conversation that I came to positively associate myself with the descriptive category "other."  I embrace my mix, and the diversity of my social experiences.

There are drawbacks and there are benefits to not having a larger group like me anywhere. I think that amorphous identity might have led me to orthodox Judaism in a search for self definition. But after I became religious, the contradictions were all still there. After I became religious, I found that in the retelling of my crazy BT story, the "what are you" part of the conversation became the least interesting section.

Now having been in the orthodox world for almost 20 years (when did that happen?) I can attest that I've seen my fair share of racism (and classism). Since I pass for sefardi, I see it as a spy. I can try to dismantle it while still being accepted. Honestly, I'm at a point where - when the orthodox community (at large, not activist spaces) isn't blatantly racist, I'm pleasantly surprised. It's very disappointing, but very true.

I've come to realize lately that because of my name, Jewish folks who don't know me, but see me online have no idea I'm Jewish and can often treat me like a know-nothing although I do have a degree from YU and was a full time student and arts fellow at Drisha Institute among other full time Jewish studies pursuits.  

In the wake of the abandonment of Puerto Ricans by the incompetent narcissist running the country, and the brutality enacted on my fellow Latin folks at the border, this dynamic (my identity) has become no less than a disorienting nightmare.  I keep kosher, but I avoid kosher restaurants because I feel uncomfortable being around mainstream orthodox Jews knowing what percentage of them likely support the administration. I feel my identity stretching and changing. I don’t know who I will be the end of this process, but obviously I feel more drawn to my Latin side, and Latin causes as a result of our political situation.

I've been sick to see Jews I was once friends with defending this torture and the administration and a few weeks ago, I sought out a safe space, a space where I could talk with other Jews of Color about our experiences torn between at least two vulnerable populations, one of which is currently enjoying a privilege so great, that it is in fact, siding with oppression of the other side.

I didn't find that space, I still don't know if it exists. But I've found a conversation spearheaded by Jews of Color online, and I've been really dismayed by the non-productive, and rather insensitive nature of this debate. The quest to out the racism that JOC face in Jewish spaces is a righteous one, and I'm grateful to Nylah for being brave enough to start this dialogue, but the pivot onto an mandate to call light skinned Jews white was a mistake, fortunately one that can easily be corrected with a retraction. I will make my case for why this is fair, and hope that you’re able to see it, and read it in good faith.

After a lifetime of constant questioning and misidentification of my identity in the many different spaces I've inhabited,  I'm not upset anymore when people eventually ask me what I am, because I'm usually allowed to answer that question. I am shocked that my fellow Jews of Color think it's appropriate to dictate to other people easily disputable - or at least debatable facts about their identity and that this is being encouraged by other light skinned Jews who appreciate the white identity assignment.

I left my favorite secret anti trump group yesterday. Conversation was being shut down (by self avowed white women) without much helpful explanation, even though the conversation did not by any bounds get out of hand. I bristle at the authoritarian (and ironic) handling of otherwise reasonable conversations. I keep waiting to hear from other JOC folks about the complexity of their identity, a subject we do tend to specialize in, I ultimately realized this morning that I guess I should be the one to do it.

The calls for careful handling of the identities of others that I’m making, and that others are making are being silenced. Please let’s clarify that if these are being misunderstood as anti-Nyla, anti-JOC, anti-Black - they’re not. This is not about knocking you, it’s about trying to help move this on to the productive stage. All of our efforts would be better served registering voters, protecting immigrants, helping incarcerated folks, standing up for each other against real enemies who want to hurt us. While we’re all focused on this, let’s make it worth it by refusing to engage unless we do so in good faith so that we get through this as a stronger and smarter group.

I've been told this is also about white Jews centering their experience (again) - but those folks were centered by virtue of being told how they must identify to satisfy Nylah's perspective. In this context, they absolutely deserve to talk about their identity.  If you don't like the resulting (good faith) conversation about their identity, you should at least be willing to consider the possibility that the initial premise was flawed. 

There can be no excusing the racism that JOC face. In no way am I making that argument so please don’t read it that way. I honestly object to the intentional mislabeling of folks, and don’t see any reason why this battle should result in better allies at the end. I see a lot of negative consequence in fact.

This feels like a negative version of the JOC centric space I was searching for in the wake of the fear I'm living with.  The community must listen to JOC and other minorities when talking about our own experiences, and shouldn't talk over us, but please don’t coddle us by giving us veto power over your identity.

I’ve seen people submitting their identity in the Conversations group for approval and I do not approve!

Nylah's telling of her experience of feeling unsafe doesn't hinge on the "realization" that her friend is white. Her conclusion might feel true to her and to a lot of you, but it's not objective truth. My experience as a Sefardi passing Latina Jew genderqueer orthodox woman singer has taught me to listen when anyone talks about their own experience. I’ve had people tell me I can’t be who I am, and I just laugh because they don’t know any better. It’s sad that the original essay that started off with great potential to help light skinned Jews understand what life is like for Nylah - turned into a knock down drag out battle to define identity of those light skinned Jews.

Both sides that I’ve seen debating this want to talk about the privilege that lighter skin and other white features affords those Jews that have it.   My assertion is that by taking that unnecessary step to assign "white" to other Jews as mandatory for admission to the conversation, what should be a healthy conversation became quite toxic.  Please don’t misunderstand - I am not at all holding you responsible for any racist backlash. But in my ensuing attempts to communicate my perspective on this, why am I being treated like I’m one of them?

 This conversation is important and scary, and folks are working hard to define safe boundaries to work on it, which gives me hope, although as I said, these particular tactics alienate me. I am hopeful that you are workshopping the elevation of our voices and that is definitely a winning strategy. 

 I propose a universal boundary for all of us, well meaning coreligionists, to never assign an identity marker to another person against their will. No one is silencing your opinion on this, my only ask is that you don’t demand that someone accept their prescribed identity as an avowed one - which is the distinction between white passing and white or functionally white.  This isn’t about the details of any one person’s life, or denying reality. I’m not asking you to change what you perceive, just accept that you can’t paint such a large group with such a broad stroke.

I am trying to be confident that since this conversation is finally happening, it can be elevated. I saw a lot of hopeful, honest conversation being shut down by people who want to be allies to you, but in their zeal, silenced me at a time when honestly, I need support. When I joined that anti-Trump group I just left, one of my first posts was asking if anyone knew about support group spaces for JOC.

I got division when I desperately needed unity. 

Lots of folks who aren’t willing to call themselves white -  are actually eager to change and own their behavior when necessary to be inclusive, and absolutely don’t want to abandon JOC in a time of frightening vulnerability.  The mods in my group were shutting down the conversation because people were exclaiming “JOC are leaving!” but they didn’t mean me.

I hope you’re able to recognize the immense support (most of) the community wants to show in response to your sharing. I’m not sure why you blocked me, I can imagine with social media virality, why you’d be defensive, but I promise you, I am not your enemy.

Millennials are besieged by accusations from the vocal older generations that they are indulgent, impatient tech obsessed wannabes who want a trophy for showing up. The saying “there is nothing new under the sun” is old as dirt, but for millennials, not only has it all been done, but there’s video evidence. Lady Gaga represents to them a symbol of showing the world that it’s OK to not be the pioneer. She pioneered exactly none of what she does. But she is theirs. She synthesizes and pulls it off even if it makes your heart race with anxiety. *Maybe* growing up in this new world, their hearts are always racing with anxiety and she performs at their level.

My first album came out in 2007, the same year as Lady Gaga’s debut. Although hers featured a great pop song that I still think is a hit “Just Dance” it also had the same album format that had persisted through most of the ‘90s, with a bunch of stinky filler songs that no one knows. I mention that my first album came out on the same year not to beg comparisons but to explain why I care. She appeared and pulled culture in a direction that was in direct opposition to where I wanted it to go. Lady Gaga, the persona seemed to be defined by constant begging for attention. This superficial style over substance that gave us the Kardashians and finally, (gulp) Trump. Between the meat dress, egg entrance, etc and insistence that this really is who she is, it was too much. But for years I simply said that I wished that with all of her focus on “art” she put some artistry into her music.

So she grated on me. Her videos were painful to watch, overstuffed with literal advertisements, and shocking imagery for its own sake. I don’t want to spend much time explaining why I didn’t like Lady Gaga because it’s not worth it. But let’s just say she grated on me. It was all the more frustrating because for years, her artistry was socially unassailable, even in creative circles. She was considered a savior of pop/music and I was a whiny naysayer with a personal bone to pick.

On Monday, Feb 6th, I watched her Superbowl performance and had a revelation. While other Superbowl performances that I loved (Beyonce, Prince) were exhilarating, Gaga’s was simply exhausting, with a few moments of genuine artistry mixed in.  She performed aerial stunts and danced, her body jerking around, going through the motions but looking more like a rag doll than a dancer.  Her fake vocals while performing the stunts, became real (good), but panting vocals when she stopped at the piano represent this desire to appear simultaneously real and superhuman.

Ruminating about her frenetic pace, and ability to carry the performance although it stressed me out to watch made me consider my age. I’m 35. I’m usually calculated in the first year of millennials, born in 1981, the same year MTV premiered, class of ‘99 baby. I had no one to look up to in the millennial generation, so I looked up to Gen X, who lived in a different world. At the same time, I was able to fit in in Myspace and other millennial focused endeavors because they were literally made for me, being one of the first who had email and internet in high school. I end up being in generational limbo, neither one nor the other and I think her ascent may have confounded me for just that reason.

I realized that Lady Gaga's defiant (and unconvincing) mantra that this is “who she is” (covered in meat) while consistently working on overly ambitious performance routines - although it looks rough, is something that younger millennials appreciate for its imperfection. She is similarly accepted on her journey to find out who she really is with her subsequent (less successful) albums culminating in her recent (pseudo real) Joanne. In this light, to me, her “Born This Way” mantra takes on real depth. I suspect that she was born trying that hard to find a way to stand out, and I think they understand that.

They appreciate the fact that she’s not the best dancer because she shows them that she can do the moves anyway. She isn’t the best songwriter or piano player (as I’ve seen yet) but gets credit for actually doing it. I should insert here that she is a good singer. But I also have to remind the reader that for a professional singer, that shouldn’t be considered an endorsement.

If you’re producing my music or making a video or art, or are in a video or are guesting on my track or at a show, I’d love to pay you whatever I can! I’ll probably pay you more than we agreed on if I can just because I know you’re worth it, and you agreed on a very modest price, let’s be honest, if you’re working with me.  When it comes to P.R. same thing. If you’re good, and you want to represent me. Take my money.

I fully believe that independent artists should be a part of the economy, paying artists and being paid in return whenever possible.  

Music is driven by passion by everyone who is connected to it. I know for me and my little artistic tribe, we’re not doing it for the money. But what about the independent blogs i come across? I know it’s a tough business to run a blog. But there’s a weird phenomenon right now where we, the independent musicians are supposed to be giving out payola for the chance to be seen in an unknown blog. And of course, we’re desperate so we’ll go for it, right?

It used to be, you’d find a cool music blog, and correspond with them and they’d either ignore you or write about you. They often had a “donate” button, so you could discreetly chip in to their operation if you could, but it wasn’t a requirement. 

With my current round of attempted self-promotion for my new video, in the place of online forms or public email addresses, I’ve seen on most blogs a requirement to use a new website Submit Hub. I gave it a try, and quickly found that I was only allowed to freely submit to two blogs (per day? Not sure how often free submissions recharge) Daunting enough, but then a specific blog I was searching for would be unreachable. Although I could see the profile page for the blog, I couldn’t submit on that page. Even blogs that have covered me in the past, the site required me to select a genre before filtering out the blogs I could submit to. The blogs I wanted never made the cut after I put in the filter, even if I was trying to aim for genres they professed to like.  (Submit Hub’s tagline? The easiest way to share songs with music bloggers)  This is my experience in not paying for premium credits, I can’t tell you what would happen if I did pay. 

So it’s pay-to-be-considered, to borrow the phrase from The Jack Plug. But then these same blogs are often selling adspace on their pages.  This is all supposed to be better for the bands because they are guaranteeing “responses.” (oh yay, guaranteed declines)

I actually caught the attention of Submit Hub founder, Jason Grishkoff when I asked publicly if “it’s a scam, or what?” that individual blogs are actually taking in our money when we submit through Submit Hub (the paid version). The Jack Plug article has more details about that.  He explained that it’s good for blogs to use Submit Hub because they need to get paid for their work. (You realize you’re talking to a musician, right?) I agree that they should get paid for their work (shouldn’t everyone? Musicians included? Ha), is it wise to actively put up, not only a paywall for music submissions, but a tech wall? This site (Submit Hub) is, in its current state, so tough to use (unless you’re pumping cash into it? Maybe?) that it’s not even worth it.  But hey, blogs are getting less emails!?? I didn’t even realize I was talking to Submit Hub’s founder in this exchange, but he got pretty pissy at any suggestions that his website is a pain in an indie’s ass. (see below)

His solution to bloggers’ problem is to have the musicians that supposedly inspire their work pay the tab for their writing. What about those pay per click ads on the Indie Shuffle blog and most music blogs? Do they not bring in enough money?  We love to pay people for work, like I said, but do you really deserve to get paid by me for clicking play on my track? Or are you getting paid to write about it? Is that why you got into music journalism? Payola? 

 To be clear, working with reputable PR is the best way of all to get press, when you can afford it. I don’t mind paying a professional to represent me, if the whole game changes to paid indie reviews, bad, very bad, no good idea. 

They want us to pay (blogs + Submit Hub itself) money to be “heard” and possibly (probably not) reviewed by these small indie blogs that are then really really hoping that we’ll use our social networks to drive them the traffic to pay their clicks. Are my fellow musicians into this?

Seemingly flustered, Grishkoff seemed to expect me to thank him for creating this submission process that I am telling him does not work for me, as a musician, and be appreciative that now they are getting paid! (by me?) Again, I didn’t know who I was talking to on Twitter at the time, and I don’t know if he assumed I did or if he thought I was talking directly to him, but I have to wonder if he’s getting tons of bad feedback from musicians because I can tell you, there doesn’t seem to be any positive here on my end. And he was pretty quick to get snotty.

I’ll probably just ignore all blogs that require Submit Hub for the time being so I don’t have to deal with it. It’s possible that makes me a luddite, but the website would have to take musicians’ needs into consideration for me to consider using it. For that they’re going to have to listen to us.  For the record, I just submitted to the excellent site WordKrapht that didn’t require Submit Hub, I haven’t found many but I will keep searching. 

I’m passionate about my music, so much so, that I still do it (after 7 albums and a decade performing) at a loss.  Indie music blog, please tell me, would you say the same? If you can’t,  if this is about commerce over art, please leave indie music journalism to those that really care. Go commercial, I mean, you are commercial at that point already.  If you are in it for the love, don’t go for a Submit Hub only submission process. That’s just a paywall and you know what paywalls keep out? I’ll let you answer that one yourself.

I am sensitive to Grishkoff’s crankiness at my comments considering it’s his baby. Conversely, his defenses/comments are all sales pitch, without listening to an actual real user’s bad experience. I am open to being proven wrong, I’d love this to be fixed or to be positive, but for now I’ll stand by how it seems. This site solved a problem that blogs had, while making the process which was already hard, even harder for indies like me. 

I assume that most entities submitting music aren’t musicians like me, but rather employees at a PR company or record label, I could imagine the process being favorable to those people with their budgets and their paychecks and disinterest in sending a bunch of personalized emails. I’m not saying Submit Hub’s problems are incurable. It probably has a place, and I hope it has the potential to help artists too. But fix it. And don’t make it mandatory. And if you do, don’t kid yourself, it’s a paywall. 

You’re beautiful when you fall apart. Shattering into a million pieces, radiating light everywhere.  

There is beauty in admitting we are deeply imperfect.

Our flaws and paradoxes contain our deepest truths.

Local life is becoming trendy. Shop locally, eat locally. This appeals to the tribal history of our species when we lived surrounded by our family and in deep interdependence with everyone and everything around us. 

We are currently struggling to reconcile globalist trends and dependencies, with the understanding that reinforcing local life is the source of true community and global health. As a bonus, people often find that local things taste better, and are made better. They are fresher, more reminiscent of our environment, more immediate to everyday existence. 

What we have is local fetishism though, in service of saving barrels of oil or having some locally made soap that makes us feel like conscious consumers, and not yet a real allegiance to building up our communities from the ground up.

I say this because while we obsess about locally sourced produce, we actively dismiss our local musicians.

Our first music was in the womb, the most local it could be. We developed surrounded by the whooshing of our mother’s blood flowing, rocked by her heart beating, and we loved it - and most of us continue to find the deepest connection, or at least appreciation in our mother’s heartbeat, knowing deep down at least, that its beat holds the secrets to our life’s fundamental existence. 

But when it’s time to find something to listen to, it’s not local messages that we trust, but big global messages. Why is that?

We wait to be told authoritatively what is worthy of our attention.

We wait for record companies to select our musical heroes for us and then mold them into whatever shape the target market seems to want, then proceeding to play their songs at us until we submit. Money determines musical popularity, full stop.

This mind control is good for the music industry, but it’s not good for music, for musicians and it’s definitely not good for music listeners.

When does the world start to think about local music?

If there were one quality that I wish I could cultivate in people, it would be the belief that you can be your own arbiter of taste. The confidence that you can like something just because YOU heard it, and don’t have to wait for someone more trustworthy than yourself to approve it.

Musical brainwashing says, life is hard, this BPM and chord progression is proven to give you a sense of calm. We can transform your worries in these beats and hooks.  Don’t seek out music, it’s everywhere already and has been cherry picked to fill the hole in your soul. Don’t seek out music that speaks to your troubles because you want to forget them, right?

What we have already lost is the ability to accept and even love a mistake. We lose the sense that art is dangerous and hard and takes time to develop. We lose patience with the artist as they forge their path through trial and error and even mimicry. Immersed in brainwashing music, we’re convinced that if it doesn’t come easy, it’s not meant to be. 

This isn’t going to make the musicians stop though. It’s only going to disconnect them from their communities.

I’m so tired of living in a world that only respects the art that appears magically, perfect, fully formed Athena-style out of Zeus’s head. 

But after I hustled in the underground NYC music world for almost 15 years, I thought I was going to leave it all behind.  Pregnant, so soon to be unemployed, I finally crowdfunded the last $2500 needed to finish my 7th album, The Warming House, and looked forward to having my child as something to distract me from the impossibility of musical dreams. What an incredible and fulfilling experience to reach out to my community, asking for help and have them come through!  I was going out on a high note.

The album worked out, I was really happy with it, but It turns out that what all my friends and husband said in 2014 was true. I wouldn’t be stopping. In fact, it was a terrible, terrible idea for me to try to stop. 

The paradoxical truth that I grapple with is, that although my wonderful friends came through with the funds to make my 7th album, after I gave out the download codes to contributors, I was surprised to see the large percentage that weren’t even claimed.  So here I am, eternally grateful to my community for having supported me, seemingly for who I am, not what I can do. 

You could stream the album here.

My new song You’re Beautiful When You Fall Apart is about all of us, living, dying, and shattering under the weight of our failures. I guess this was my roundabout way of trying to say that I wrote this for some friends, and I hope those friends can hear it.

Anyway, now I’m attempting to crowdfund an ambitious comeback album after having not performed or released an album for 2 years. 

I’m back.