Hi you guys. It’s been a long time but I am here thankfully to tell you that I have a show coming up on Friday at 8 at Friends and Lovers in Brooklyn and I hope you will all attend, no matter where you are :)) It’s a half hour of musical comedy called PLEASE and it’s made up of a bunch of songs I have written since I moved to NYC to do open mics in 2019. Some incredible and beautiful hurdles have kept me humble through the process such as pandemic and other disaster, but I’m just glad to be getting my stuff out there again and I think I have something cohesive to say. My beautiful and brilliant friend ((hashtag elena ferrante adapted for HBO (hashtags are back in 2024)) CLAIRE PELLEGRINO is opening for me and her standup is - how do I describe it. It’s ebullient and whip smart. A rich text. You’ll see what I mean. Here are tickets to the show. I hope you can make it! I’ll fly you out!*** If you can’t and you are in fact in NYC, stay tuned for another date very soon :,) If you’re not in NYC and want to fly me out to do the show you can also do that.
Another fun thing coming up soon is I’m doing a little chunk of my long-in-development-hell play DEPRESSION SPECIAL at the Spade Theater’s Aces Wild solo play festival the (second to?) last week of February. Uh oh!!!! I did a bit of it at my dear friends’ BAPHTA’s recent drag brunch at night. It’s about depression and self mythology and Judd Apatow produced HBO specials. FINALLY some used three separate quirky things to describe a play. HBO cut me a check baby!!!
To be true to my word of saying I would write, here are some things I wrote in “text edit” application on my computer. I think these bite sized pieces of prose will really solve the whole “merits of fragmented autotheory” debate. It’s mostly about music and I haven’t read any of it back!!! and I won’t!!!! i read a little of it back
From the week I was listening to American Idiot nonstop and thinking of it as Pathetic Literature: American Idiot upholds the aesthetic paradigm of suffering as an otherness one can adopt, where political pathos can be personal, but then also takes the offramp to the solely personal as soon as possible. The fervor is fixated on the nation until something else activating (sublimating) can take its place. See: She’s A Rebel, where a lover brings liberation from personal numbing rather than a regime (but thats part of it - the endless flow of junk is single stream). This kind of quasi-political hardness that breaks through was a way to cruise through the Bush years and its aesthetic envelopments, like when you would be in Walmart in the dvd aisle in eerie overhead lighting and hear the loud uncensored FUCK in Boulevard of Broken Dreams.
On “Love is Nothing” and more from Liz Phair’s whitechocolatespaceegg: I’ve been listening to whitechocolatespaceegg by liz phair, which I assume is the album about how she got bored of her life and started cheating on her husband. At the end of What Makes You Happy, she sings of the sky clearing and the refrain from Help Me Mary on Guyville comes in. On love is nothing, there’s a cubic and complicated bassline that kind of drones, but reappears as a fuzzier waltz (same architecture, just obscured and easier) on Fantasize. Liz sees one man too closely and keeps another at a sweet but warm distance. A repurposing (with a sort of tongue in cheek knowledge) is what occurs between Love is Nothing and Fantasize, but the return of the guyville refrain is the return of something other. It is kind of like a rawer voice that feels truer to the core of who she is, like yourself coming through a cloudy time you thought was maybe more than a weather trick. It could be something younger, it could be the idea of something you had when you were younger uninitiated into the maze of the world which will get it anyway like a ribbon caught on some gnarly piping.
“Something young & uninitiated” versus “something rawer” - some presume that these are the same, that you should return to whatever is uninitiated as if it never were initiated or interpolated at all. I learned a couple years ago that that is a bit of a waste, to re-teach yourself blankness when you have already gotten yourself into so many twisty allegiances and seeped virile and replenishing juices through whatever hooks and cogs you are stuck on, are rusting, feed the ground. this is your special growth simulation which is now seeping into other ecosystems so don’t stop it here, or at least claim it! If you pull the homunculus out of the torture device, he is just a deflated flaccid beast, like in an uncanny dream. If you leave him in there and let him re-meld his joints, he becomes a story. Which is not to say you don’t sometimes need to leave.
Last of all, I made this if you even care:
Okay that’s going to be it I think. I hope to see you Friday, and I hope you’re doing alright. End of US empire 2024 we got this guys. Seriously!!
love, gabi
***i don’t have money for that!!!!!!
p.s. here’s the post’s namesake