projects

I’m fighting more robots than I used to, it seems. And robots fight dirty.

Both my cell phone and my computer insist that I am a cretin. Not a “christine” or a “kirsten”, which I could understand. At least those are names. The robots have taught me to avoid ever writing my name except on pieces of paper, but it does come up every now and then in robot world. “Kristin?” they ask snidely. “Are you sure? We’re thinking ‘cretin.’ Yeah, that’s definitely it. Try cretin.” And they snicker.

The phone robot also has a more insidious weapon it uses against me: predictive text. Like most introverts, I love the idea of texting, as there is no human voice or face attached to the communication and no tension associated with hanging up or not being able to. Texting is like passing notes in class, which is a terribly under-appreciated art form, in my opinion. My phone, however, doesn’t let me use some of the basic words that I have long considered it my right to use.

For instance, the word “back.” Instead of “I will get back to you…love, kristin” it makes me say, “I will get back baby bad balls to you…love cretin”. Once, it made me say, “merry merry meat meat on the phone phone”. I don’t even remember what I was trying to say. The word “television” is always followed by the word “gonads.” If I type the letter “A”, it is followed by “NOW chlorinated!” The letter “I” is followed by “Still SUCK.”

The self-checkout robot at the grocery store only speaks to me in Spanish. Which made me feel sexy at first (I’m rarely mistaken for swarthy), but…I don’t speak Spanish and I’m easily confused even in my own language. I’m working on my Spanish; after all, I live in California. I’m not advancing quickly enough for the self-checkout robot, though, who repeats herself over and over again, calmly but loudly enough for the other (smirking) grocery store patrons to hear. I never know what she wants me to do, so I just stand there, frowning, balancing bags of salad and cartons of eggs, waiting for rescue. I want the self-checkout robot to like me, but I don’t think she ever will.

My TV doesn’t even like me, and really, a TV is an ancient, “Lost in Space” version of a robot. Its thought patterns are still more complex than mine, however. It uses its army of remotes to mock me and my Luddite sensibilities. Together, the television and its remote minions have convinced Tivo to record documentaries on “a man eating animals” rather than “man-eating animals” and instead of “mammal babies,” “mammals making babies.” The latter made for a rather uncomfortable evening gathered around the television with my children, all of us avoiding eye contact with anything but the floor.

I’m seriously thinking about engaging in human contact, of all things, which is traditionally where my Luddite tendencies let me down. I’m an asocial Luddite which is a non-starter. It’s hard to raise a barn without talking to somebody about it first, you know? I really thought the robots could help me out with this problem of mine, but they don’t wanna hang out with me anymore. They’re too cool and they know it.

So the next time I’m at the grocery store, I’ll take a deep breath and then wait in line with the human beings, the walking, talking, meat meat robots and when they ask me a question, I’ll be ready to say something back baby bad balls. If I feel like texting someone, I’m gonna call them on the phone phone and I’ll be ready with a NOW chlorinated! way to end the conversation. I will not watch animal porn with my children unless it is absolutely necessary, because I am the boss of my television gonads. And I’m brushing up on my terrible Spanish, though I Still SUCK.

Love,
Cretin

The following is a Paradoxical Undressing “outtake” about an Art Therapy class. Like the rest of Paradoxical Undressing, it is an excerpt from my diary. It takes place in 1986 when I was trying to finish my college degree before Throwing Muses’ record came out and my baby was born.

I wanna go back to the ocean. The buzzing fluorescents are making me feel sick and the other students don’t look particularly promising.

The first thing the teacher asks us to do is lie on the floor and relax. I’m not me anymore, though, I’m pregnant, so I don’t relax, I just pass out and then wake up as the other students are shuffling around, grabbing art supplies and moving desks into groups. Oh, crap, I think. I slept through the assignment.

I follow a woman with blond pony tails and glasses over to the art supply cabinet and copy everything she does, taking a gigantic piece of paper, some colored pencils, charcoal and a drawing pen from the cabinet, then scoot my desk over to her group. Peeking over some shoulders to see what “art” we’re supposed to do, I see that the other students are all drawing animals. Okay…I can draw an animal.

The paper is enormous and difficult to manage. I try spreading it out on the desk, but it spills over the side, so I put it down on the carpeted floor. Then the pen I’m using tears a hole in it. Goddamn it. I grab a small book off a nearby shelf, place it underneath the paper and, stretching my arms out past my protruding stomach, draw a tiny blowfish in the middle of the paper. [Read more…] about Art Therapy

The guitar that love built will be in my hands in a few days. It’s the end of the week as we know it and everything’s different now.

Last month, I did a mini-tour of the southwest with Robert Fisher from the Willard Grant Conspiracy, a normal tour: club dates, club promoters, club crowds. Fine, fine and fine again, nothing out of the ordinary, really. The only problem was that I was playing these old Shady Circle songs; songs written in houses for friends, family and interested onlookers. In clubs, hey come off as art pieces: interesting old paintings, but nothing a twenty-first century individual would ever think to crawl into.

Billy and I flew around the country, thinking, talking, then scooped up the kids and shoved ’em back into the truck, still thinking and talking, Shady Circle songs in our ears. We gazed off into the distance, wondering what the New Old World’ll be like, when songs written in houses for friends, family and interested onlookers can be played in houses for friends, family and interested onlookers.

Crackpot Theory meets Wild Hare: Billy books Shady Circle house shows with fan promoters on the drive back to California. Kids, dogs, snakes, guitars, amps, groceries, suitcases and schoolbooks tumbling out of the truck and into the loving embrace of smart people, backyards, laughter and potluck freakin’ dinners! Allow me to repeat: everything’s different now.

Here’s why:

1. All real songs are written in houses (and garages and motels and the back seats of cars) for friends, family and interested onlookers. This is music to crawl into. Music played just for commerce is, in my snooty opinion, not real music. If we have to go back in musical time to before there was a music industry in order to learn this lesson, then that’s what we should do, ’cause it’s an important one.
2. Normal people like music. Not just people who look like the rock bands they listen to; all kinds of people are moved by sound. They don’t need big corporations to tell them what music they like and they also don’t need to jeopardize tomorrow’s work day to drink expensive-cheap beer in the middle of the night in a rock club if that isn’t their thing. They still like music.
3. People are giving. When they aren’t being taken advantage of, they know it. They deserve respect and when they get it, they share: ideas, jokes, opinions, money, food, stories, music and beer.

At Michelle’s house concert, like all the house concerts, I laughed and talked through my set and everyone else in the room laughed and talked with me. We were together in the room, not separated by a wall of performer vs. audience. Afterwards, I watched in envy as bandmates scheduled rehearsals with each other. It seemed like everyone there was in a band with everyone else who was there.

I told them I’d give anything to be able to play with one of my bands on a Tuesday night in a basement (or anywhere, for that matter). “Why can’t you play with your bands?” Michelle’s drummer asked.

“Well…because…of the music business,” I answered, well aware of how stupid that sounds.

I bought into the conventional music business a long time ago. Shame on me. Michelle’s world is the New Old World (bring it on!). Someday soon, there will be such a thing as a musician who does not suck and does not starve. Imagine: local bands again. Playing in one’s own city for friends, family and interested onlookers. No more begging, for tours, radio, publicity, T.V. and movie placement, etc. No more rich rock stars, just passing the hat and working hard to support your music habit. There is no shame in that, but there should be shame associated with playing lousy music just to make money and get famous. That’s failure.

I had given up on ever seeing the guitar I asked Collings to build for me almost 3 years ago, before money got really tight.  Collings builds their beautiful guitars to my specifications. Bill Collings watched me play and chose the wood, while I chose the bodyshape.  It was gonna be perfect. My old Collings C-10, the reason I ever had a solo acoustic career, was beaten to shit, barely playable any longer; I really needed a new guitar. But I simply couldn’t take food out of the kids’ mouths to buy a guitar, even if it was built for me.

The people at Collings sympathized and apologized for having to replace the “KH” headstock with a generic one in order to sell it to someone else. Billy was heartbroken, having spent the last few Christmases and birthdays struggling to find a way to surprise me with the guitar, but ultimately giving up.

Friday morning, out of desperation, we decided to share our frustration with this community. We were overwhelmed by the response we got. Billy received (and answered!) almost 600 emails from people wanting to help me buy the guitar. Hundreds of contributions came into “The Hat”, my online tip-jar, mostly small ones between one and five dollars, sometimes ridiculously generous ones. “The Hat” runneth over. By Friday afternoon, we had enough to buy the guitar. We laughed and cried, awe-struck, and begged people to stop contributing.

When the guys at Collings heard what happened, they shared our shock and glee, blown away that any musician could have such a loving following. “They’re buying it for you?” Today, they’re happily boxing up and shipping off my beautiful New Old Guitar.

You people continue to amaze me.

A special “Thank you” to the first Shady Circle house concert promoters: Echo (Brooklyn, NY), Tine (Franklin, MA), Michele (Buffalo, NY) and Tom (Lee’s Summit, MO)

Me, playing “Deep Wilson”, fireside, in Tom’s Backyard.

My good friend George Howard recently wrote about something I feel is important. For so many years, I begged people in the music business to measure emotional impact rather than units sold. For the most part, my argument fell on deaf ears, as that didn’t appear to be a way to make money. What they didn’t appreciate was the potential revenue stream of an untapped audience. Not just the music connoisseur who rejects trends, but regular people who haven’t been told that they won’t “get” it. People like music. Period.

“listeners have an overarching desire to create connections and narratives, and to place their music into their own taxonomies that have nothing to do with genre or classification, but are instead based on emotional responses to music….the greatest…call them folksonomies…come from users making their own — ostensibly random, but deeply non-random — connections based on nuance and subtlety and things not easily articulated or measured. The sound of love, for example.”

Read the rest of George’s post here.