Notes:• 7:30p.m.–8:30p.m. — Formal workshop;
• 8:30p.m.–9:00p.m. — Featured reader — That’s me!;
• 9:05p.m.–10:00p.m. — Open mic
Admission: $5 Suggested Donation
The Anansi Writers Workshop was founded in 1990 by Kamau Daáood, Akilah Oliver, Nafis Nabawi and Anthony Lyons. In 1993, Michael Datcher initiated the development of a three-part format for the workshop. Our tradition of a community workshop began in the late 1960s at the Watts Writers’ Workshop, where World Stage co-founder Kamau Daáood started his writing career.
I’m in Bar Harbor, enjoying my mom and Acadia National Park! Last week, though, Katie Mitchell interviewed me for the Standing “O” Project’s podcast. Standing “O” is a fair trade music streaming site that you may have heard about from “The Art of the Song” radio show, your music community or me (I was featured last year on “The Art of the Song.” It just went live today!
I haven’t listened to it yet, but I loved talking with Katie in my studio. I was just getting ready for the Harry Nilsson Birthday Concert (which went great — I had a string section, bass and drums accompany me on “The Wailing of the Willow” from Harry’s Aerial Ballet album), and working on some new stuff which you’ll be hearing about over the summer.
I hope you’re having a good summer. I find nature, exercise, and music are the best healers, so I’m grateful to be experiencing them all. Hope you’ll experience some of the same!
Here’s a little preview of the song I’ll be performing at the Nilsson Birthday event on Tuesday. It was a demo for the string arranger. It got me inspired as you may hear on my next music update.
Wailing of the Willow - Jason Luckett
Hope to see you at the show. I’m on in the very beginning. More info here.
So looking forward to this tribute! I’m going sing “The Wailing of the Willow.” But more exciting is that I’ll be reunited with so many old friends to celebrate one of my favorite artists. I’ve actually been pretty obsessed with Nilsson since seeing the great documentary “Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?).” In the gig listing before you’ll see a list of a bunch of the performers that I’ll be joining, some of them go back to the days of doing shows at the Breakaway in Venice way back in the day! Very excited. A big thanks to Milo Binder for putting this all together!
Notes:Performers to include: Anny Celsi, Adam Marsland, Alan Boyd, Carl Sealove, Carolyn Soyars, Chris Price, Curtis Armstrong, Cynthia Carle, Danette Christine, Dave Soyars, Janice Mautner Markham, Jason Luckett, LuAnn Olson, Marc Platt, Michael Tyler, Mike Randle, Milo Binder, Nick Vincent, Paul Zimmelman, Randell Kirsch, The Regal Peaches, Rick Hromadka, Sarah Kramer, Simon Glickman, Stephen Kalinich, Steve Stanley, Teresa Cowles, Triumph of the Egg, The Walker Brigade, Zak Nilsson and more!
The show will be part of a multi-city celebration of Harry Nilsson’s birth spanning 5 US cities, and will be live streamed at https://m.facebook.com/harryinthehall .
I filmed some friends at my studio for NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert contest and decided to submit myself, too! I had a cold, but it turned out okay. I’m loving my new space as its possibilities unfold!
He went out well. Two albums in three years, a broadway play, and a major art retrospective. As I write this, I hear Neil Young: “It’s better to burn out/Than to fade away.” I’m rethinking what it means to burn out. To burn with passion is good. When we create, the fire illuminates. Bowie burned on his way out. Neil wrote of “burning out” as the story of Johnny Rotten (who actually lives well today), Elvis, Janis, Jimi, Morrison even. But Bowie burned, perhaps edging up against self-destruction at certain points, but largely like a sun, a life-giving force to the “freaks” on society’s fringe, those who may have needed to be reminded that they were pretty, but less often needed reminders that they were driving their mothers and fathers insane.
https://youtu.be/XCSl3Hq2nTM
My sister Josslyn wrote today that Bowie was a bridge between my father’s love of jazz and Nina Simone and the music we loved growing up. My recollection is totally different. I remember listening over and over to “Wild is the Wind” in my bedroom. I don’t know what it was about it. I was probably twelve wanting to love, be loved and leave the oppression of sticking out in a very white city where I was betrayed by my shade and kink, then completely outed by my dad’s extravagance. And I’d definitely internalized some of the messages I was a wild creature. It’s somewhere in the vulnerability in Bowie’s voice when he says, “Don’t you know you’re life itself.” The “itself” lands alone, over an implied change to the V dominant seventh chord, the chord that begs to resolve back to the root, yet the previous minor IV chord has stopped ringing. The emptiness in which he holds that awkward word kills me. He does bring us back to the tonic, a minor ninth — that ninth hinting at hope by surpassing the octave by just a step. It’s that aloneness that Bowie allowed us to understand wasn’t so unique, that others share your longing, your estrangement from community norms. And in that understanding, you could step ahead.
I remember my father coming into my room and asking, “Why are you listening to that white boy sing that song?” He fought back with Nina Simone’s version, to which I must now say I’ve listened at least as many times as Bowie’s. But then it was a dismissal of my interests and probably a reaction based on his insecurity around my rejecting his “blackness” by my embrace of my white rockstars — save Jimi. Ultimately, I must agree with my sister that the cross-cultural elements of Bowie’s music did create a bridge between my father and I. I remember him apologizing fairly soon after his initial diss. He later loved that Bowie and Iman were a couple. But it was uncomfortable. Bowie started a fight. But we both learned and gained something in the end.
Then again, that uncomfortable feeling was part of Bowie’s genius. Over and over he pushed boundaries — remember the “man skirt?” — then world caught up, at least sort of. And maybe that was it, too. He created space for acceptance or alternative culture (beyond that icky word “tolerance”) even if the elements of it weren’t embraced or adopted by mainstream culture. That ability to create space for acceptance of “difference” however is probably why he ultimately was so embraced and beloved by the mainstream. Of course it was all helped by a clearly sweet core that you could see in so many of his activities that had little to do with the Avant-garde (Bing Crosby, Jim Henson, “The Snowman…”).
The songs that grabbed me this morning were “Five Years” and “Lazarus.” Impending death at the beginning of his career and transcending at the end. All the while, Bowie radiates as a powerful sun, burning beauty into us, illuminating wondrous ways to look at the world, its inhabitants and its transcendentals.
The sweet people over at Studio City Sound and Adrianne Duncan invited me to join their Christmas show again this year. You can stream it on YouTube! You’ll hear versions of the two Christmas songs I wrote quite a while back — one even played on ukulele. The studio is a family run place, and it couldn’t be warmer or friendlier. You’ll see the whole family — who were a band à la the Partridge family, that I actually saw when I was a kid growing up in Irvine at Fashion Island in Newport Beach. The youngest of the bunch, Michael Damien, went on to be a TV star and had a hit single with a remake of “Rock On.” But, Mama Weir is the real star of the show!
I hope you enjoy it! (You can find me 42 minutes in, at an hour and eight minutes in, and an hour and 25 minutes. And if you tried to click the link from my email blast, they updated it right after I sent it!)
Looking forward to being close to home! Didn’t I used to play near here at a place called the Concert Factory that rose from the ruins of the Cuckoo’s Nest way back in the day? Who were those guys? Barley Forge was founded by three friends from high school. I hope this will be a mini-reunion for a lot of us!
