lettersfromleslie

[lettersfromleslie]

Yodelin over the years.

#1: Trevor Forrest / #2: Emmanuel Rosario / #3: Sebastian Z. @jsb2612 / #4 + 5 Photog. Unknown / #6 Trevor Forrest

[lettersfromleslie]

THE MUSK OF THE BUSK / L'ART ET L'ARTISTE / THE BOSS IN THE TROLLEYLOT

Heyo! How's life?

The seasons continue their dizzy pinwhirl. Summer is slowly swellin & the spring was an outrageous bloom here in the Pacific Northwest, especially in Magnolia, our incongruously bougie neighborhood in Seattle. Here the good Magnolians cultivate cascading symphonies of daffodils, bluebells, cherryblossoms, rhodondendrons, magnolias naturally, fragrant bushes of rosemary & lavender, great tufts of wild fennel, and many other sprinkles of delite amongst their finely sculpted blobs of topiary. Many days the only people you see on foot are the landscapers tending this grand spectacle - blessed fortunate fancy neighborhood.

Little do these good people know that amongst them, in their very zip code - in that scary ole house, one of the last rentals remaining in this corner of the neighborhood - lives a busker. What horrors they might shiver if they knew. Tis true, and for over a decade now I've been grubbing at this life, bottomfeeding the rivers of commerce, muskily busking wherever that rare beast the American on Foot can be found. When I say hidy to my neighbors it may well be that only hours before I was yodeling in train stations for pennies n bux like any bum. Imagine!

I've had many questions about it over the years, and for years now I've been meaning to write something about The Lifestyle, but I never got around to it somehow. As it happens I'll be playing at two busker-themed events this summer - June 15th at Buskarama in Seattle and July 14th at the annual New York City Buskerball - so if there was ever a time, eh?

Let's start with the Q&A.

Can you really make a living at it? Aye. Do you?? I have at many points. Currently it's a mix of busking, album sales, venue shows, streaming, Patreon, etc. Sure you don't have a trust fund? O ye of little faith. Do you need a permit? Depends, usually helps, but anyway, it tends to be easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. What's it like to Be a Busker? I don't think I've ever met anyone who thinks of themselves as purely a Busker. Aside from out & out bums, most people you'll see playing in public have other avenues of performing & creating outside of busking. Isn't it scary? Not once you realize how completely you'll be ignored if you aren't connecting. Hey, you're not bad, why aren't you playing clubs instead of on the street?

This is the one I wanna dig into. First, & hopefully this goes without saying, both are on the menu. But what you get out of this, you don't get in any club. Busking is public art in its most ancient, elemental form, a type of performance that has existed since before recorded music, pop culture, mass media, or social media. It's the most direct route your art can take: you go to the public square and trade feelins for cash. It's taking part in a tradition that's barely changed over thousands of years. Show me any living culture and I'll show you the buskers. Pity the ignorant bastard who thinks there's anything wrong with it. There are plenty of terrible buskers, tis true, because of the simple fact that there's no barrier for entry. The good and the terrible share the same stage, and the crowd has to actually decide for themselves what is worth supporting. For someone to be performing in public says nothing about them or their work other than that they've decided to give it a go.

What's more - and this is really the relevant point for our moment in time: up to a certain level it pays better than the clubs. It allows you skip the day job. I'm convinced that busking is the last, best way for non-famous musicians to make a living with live performances in this most strange & dissociative of centuries. And I mean without fishing for grants, without money from daddy, without royalties from a TV thing you did years ago, without a sugar partner, without a day job, without an OnlyFans. Some romantic souls might still carry the image of the Passionate Misunderstood Artiste scraping rent for their garret apartment with weekend gigs in lowlit clubs & cocktails on the piano lid… or the band of roving roadsouls keeping the lights on by dragging their hearts & their van thru cactus deserts playing beerjoints and college campuses (granted, this can still work if they're living in the van & have friends' floors to crash on)… But realistically, these artists need to have day jobs now, or at least their housing covered. Occasional gigs don't pay the bills in big cities and tours don't make enough money to sustain both the tours and the home expenses for those on the road unless a certain threshold of fame has been broken… The squeeze is on, we all kno it… But as I say, there's a way: Go Busk. If you're able to achieve communion, the universe will provide you with your living expenses. Go out five or six days a week, play two or three hours a day, get what gigs you can… Take it from this ole wreck, it can be done.

This secret is known only to a select few. It's really a humdinger. What's more, if you manage to get into a good flow - well, you may not be the moneyrealm of a dentist, or a law clerk, but you can beat your local barista for pay & perks, and on certain big days you may do as well as a reasonably good-looking stripper. You'll have absolutely no security, tis true, but on the other hand your potential for serendipity is thru the roof. Gig offers. Strange gifts & talismans, drawings, poems. Old people telling you about their bad young days on the road. Rich kid mega-tips. It's a gambler's rush. You hit a bad streak and you question everything, your appearance, your chops, kids these days, the economy, the zeitgeist. You hit a good streak and it's cloud nine, seamlessness, pure flow. Amazing things can happen. Scarlet Rivera played violin on my last album, for God's sake. The proof is in the lacquer. All of it thru busking. Inserting yourself into a place where people congregate and seeing what happens when you do so loudly & with feelins.

The catch is that it does tend to take an openhearted soul to receive what happens to them by accident with the same sprit as what they seek out deliberately. When someone chooses to go to a concert, especially a big one, it's the high point of a longer relationship with that performer's work: discovering it, likely happening across it a few times, slowly starting to choose to listen to it, learning the lyrics, forming a bond… 20 years after you heard him in college Bruce Springsteen announces a tour date in your town, you spring for tickets, whew, got em, figure out time - take off work, call a babysitter fer god's sake - find parking - stand in line - by the time the curtain goes up, there is a profound anticipation hanging: Was it Worth It? Are We Gonna Get It? Will the Art Give Me Feelins?

This communal longing and openness is the perfect blank canvas for any performer worth their salt. An audience that's focused, invested, with nowhere to go, with a set intention to stay for the duration of the performance.

Now take that all away. It's a busy street. The people are distracted, engaged, going in different directions, with no intention of stopping. There's Bruce Springsteen, but you've never heard of him, no one has. He's banging on his guitar outside the supermarket singing Born in the USA. Sounds good, but your little ones need their potatoes and mustard greens, your phone is ringing, your hair is exploding, no one's stopping, nothing is planned, and this whole vibe is making the guy seem kinda needy, a lil imposing in fact. But no, he does sound pretty good, so he gets a dollar as you pass thru the sliding doors and start to scan for the turnip aisle.

There's yer two extremes. I don't play outside of supermarkets, on the whole I try and catch people where they're at least likely to be relaxed and receptive. Parks, latenight train stations in nightlife areas, outdoor markets, tourist attractions (altho tourists often tend to be so overwhelmed with things that they're as hard to get thru to as any worker on the clock). But even so, it's a fishing expedition. Most people who pass will be elsewhere in their minds, and you'll miss hundreds who might have connected in different circumstances. It's normal. I don't often change course myself. I've passed by many things that looked enormously engaging. You gotta.

Which makes me feel all the more grateful for every person who stopped for even a moment, dropped a dollar or two. To them (you, most likely) I say bless you, you rare beast, you had your antennae out, you let the world speak to you. Those that changed plans, missed trains, brought out picnic blankets, reached out and wrote - you are a miracle, you were really listening.

This is one of the things that makes busking interesting. It's all so very ephemeral. You can play the best set of your life and be completely ignored. You can also be a hungover mess making a bleary fool of yourself because rent's due, and for whatever strange flukey reason the dollars may rain. Signals between strangers tend to be very garbled. But when it clicks - when what is sent out is received perfectly - when communion is achieved - when someone gets it - that's really something. And I think that might be about as rare in Tompkins Square Park as it is in Madison Square Garden, when you look beyond the notion of spectacle to the notion of meaning being transferred.

Which, granted, is only touching on parts of what gives art its power. Performances depend on their context as much or more as they do on the message itself. What a Wonderful World played over Vietnam war footage. I Did It My Way sung by Sid Vicious. It's all a weird miasma, a complicated and extremely social blend of communion and communication… the creator's skill is what we tend to focus on, aye, but more than that it's the place & time, the cultural context, the memories & associations the performer draws on, the flavor & intent it's drawn with, their social standing & authority (or lack thereof), the moment they were there for and spoke for, and also who was there to hear it spoken, and who said it was Great. All subjective. All extremely emotional. All tied in with stories. Who is Van Gogh or Nick Drake without early death & lack of recognition in life? And who is Taylor Swift without fame, without her cult? We have to concede that the song by itself is only a vessel, as is the singer. Vessels for us to pour our feelins in. Beauty isn't objective, thank God, & art communion is a societal ritual- would we have it elsewise?

(Which is why the idea that AI could replace artists is about as meaningless as the idea that AI could replace love.)

When you busk, you can't count as much on context. You know that every day what you give is what you get. The people who stop and listen didn't do it beacuse of the production value of your album or because they heard you on the radio in high school or because someone they're in love with was wearing your band tshirt. They're just there, and so were you, yodelin. Every day you gotta manage that! And then maybe as time goes on you can make yourself part of a context. Your songs become people's memories. You presence starts to thread itself into the great spiderweb. Parts of you go walking off on their own.

To live in this way means existing in a state of communion with the place you live in. Every day you send out energy and the stuff of sustenance flows back. Life sustains itself on thin air. And that's a beautiful thing. Here I am in this creaky wooden house by the sea, cat, gal, piano, guitars, living at the end of the land… Lucky me!

And I was mostly kidding about the Magnolians earlier. This is about the most busker-friendly town I've ever been in, and I'm sure my neighbors would be glad to have me even if they knew of my buskin ways, especially if they could see certain snapshots, if they could peep thru the curtains … even moreso if they heard the nice things Important People have said about me over the years, all the lil milestones along this janky & ephemeral trip … But at the train station, would they listen? Would they stop? Rare souls, those who do! Bless you!!!

[lettersfromleslie]

JP Patches Lives (B&W portrait by Kyle Latham)

[lettersfromleslie]

EMERALD CITY / EVERGREEN STATE / FOGHORN NITES & THE SNOWS OF TAHOMA

Hey again! Here we are in the new year, 2024, how time has gone ticking… The 4th anniversary of the great plague is on us, disorientingly, and life has hobbled on, with fresh catastrophes of the zeitgeist gathering on the year's horizon like so many sloppy thunderclouds. On the other hand, the year looks pretty harmonious from a numerological point of view, doesn't it? Strap in kiddies, we're bout to find out.

As for me, I'm entering month four of living on the West Coast, bout time I shared a bit about what that's been like. Grand! Feeling quite good about things. Not the most interesting time storywise - a blend of introverted busywork and vulnerable newness, I reckon - well, but let's keep this structured. First off, why Seattle?

If you want to understand it at a glance, open up Google Maps, search for "Seattle", click on the Layers button, and set it to "terrain". Then zoom out a little. Water first, jagged water and islands and passes, the jigsaw logic of the Puget Sound - or the Salish Sea, if you'd like the name to encompass a bit more water as well as its rightful human heirs. There's whales in that water, orcas, dolphins, seals, all manner of fish and scuttling things, and down in the depths of the sound - frighteningly deep, 450 feet on average, a fjord estuary carved by glaciers - down in the deep there are giant pacific octopus, the biggest ones there are, them big red 'uns. Zoom out a little further and you see how the mountains lay. To the west the Olympics, a vast protected area with alpine landscapes up top and temperate rainforests further below in the mountainshadows that catch the wet sea air. These forests are of the fluorescent-green, moss-matted, soggy, mushroomy, enchanted variety, with a damp mossy smell that soothes instantaneously. Head further west to the Pacific coast and you get to the wild shoreline with huge craggy rock formations that meet the forest in a thin driftwoody strip swarmed with seals and albatross. If you travel east out of Seattle you'll run into the Cascade Mountains, more wild & spread-out still, with snowy peaks and misty passes and good ol burly redneck America within an hour's drive of the soft prosperity of the big city, allowing for both cuddlin' and cussin' types of mood within close proximity, as well as winter sports and mountain hikes, and beyond those mountains you'll find the desert, oddly enough. To the south you have a goddam snow-covered volcano, Mt Rainier, or old Tahoma we'll call her, the vastness of which will stop you in your tracks on any day clear enough to bring her out.

And then there's Seattle itself, an introvertedly wacky revolutionary western boomtown obsessed with fish, filled with naturelovers, and recently becrusted with a lot of dinky glass skyscrapers and a two-decade spigot of digital tech money. Moving here feels similar to moving to New York in the way that the locals will unanimously report that it used to be a lot better, and also in the way you're quietly thinking damn - even better? as they tell you. The city has been transformed by tech money, tis true, the rents are frightful, the weird ones are struggling, and soulless commerce is tightening its cords and rising up glassy & alien … sure … But at the same time her personality is still very distinct, and all that new prosperity seems to express itself quite gently, it's like the Norway of the USA, with a sane feeling to the infrastructure and investment and a good deal of compassion in the social policies. The bus drivers will wave you on for free while you're rummaging for money. Your bills come with information on subsidies and plans if you can't pay them. The tenant protection laws are a distant dream for New Yorkers. Much of this thanks to the socialists and anarchists and union organizers and eco-warriors protesting and picketing and recruiting on streetcorners with a seriousness that'd be hard to imagine in wacky individualist NYC. It's a town in suspense between many energies. Out in the open the political tone is heavily left - it's almost comically inclusive of whatever type of individual weirdness you'd like to express - but structurally speaking the money rules, and always wins, and like in all of the USA's great cash engines, life gets harder every day that you're not making enough of it.

But in fairness, coming from NYC it feels downright cuddly with what a warm welcome I've had. The busking has been just grand. No interference from the law whatsoever, a few gentle nudges from businessowners to turn it down or point the other way, and mostly a huge wave of enthusiasm and generosity from whoever happens by. It's good vibes! The music scene - the art scene in general - has had some knocks, esp the covid period hit hard & long out here, the place still feels in recovery - but that has given me the gratifying feeling that for a change I'm in a place where demand for music is larger than supply.

Delightful circles out here, too. I made my first set of friends busking at Pike Place Market, a surprisingly big complex & wonderfully situated by the water, a tourist trap in some ways but also a geniune place of congress & free expression chock full of artists & freethinkers & a century of ghosts. Shoutout to Alex Rasmussen, who introduced me to a number of circles, venues, and open mics. Shoutout as well to the Conor Byrne open mic and its host, Sheldon, who has been going out of his way to plug me into the local folk scene. I just had my first proper Seattle indoor show there last Wednesday and it was lovely. Huge grin to everyone who came out. Scary to start a city fresh wondering if you're gonna draw. It went good! There'll be more shows! It's looking sustainable!

Which is a relief, because I was worried about sustaining the house we landed in, a weird miracle… We didn't exactly save on rent compared with Bed-Stuy, but still… Two floors! And a basement! Bats living in the attic, praise be! A quiet self-enclosed feeling, but close to the center … Incredible ! We'll see if it lasts - knock on wood - plenty of wood to knock on - hope it doesn't come loose. But it's just grand. Ten minutes on foot and you're swimming with the seals. The great fogs & drizzles come pattering down around us over the eaves. Two enormous overgrown douglas firs, hated by the landlord, grow out of the neighbor's yard and sort of envelop the house in a big green dusk. The shingles and the gutters hang loose. It's lovely! I've always wanted to live in a creaky wooden house by the sea. As I mentioned in my earlier post, we spent much of our first few months here just getting it shipshape - painting, repairing, finding furniture. I've been decking out my studio room. A separate studio room! Bless, bless!

So for the rest of the winter the idea is to let the dust settle a lil, get smart, get fit, study the banana slug, learn more medieval frog songs, and hopefully write a couple tunes meanwhile … For songwriting updates, you might like to follow along on Patreon!

Over & out, big grin, R.

[lettersfromleslie]

The Land Is Large

[lettersfromleslie]

GIVING THANX / TAKING TO THE ROAD / SHIFTIN GEAR TO EVERGREEN

Long time no write! I'm reporting from the great Northwest, from Seattle WA, where Ariel and I have a fresh lease going on a big creaky 100-yr-old house high up on a hill with the Cascades loomin on clear days as well as old Mt Rainier, ol snowy Tahoma, off in the distance peekable from the bus I take into town for my daily yodeling. That's right… Not in New York anymore, for the time being. We're over in the other gutter of the great American pinball machine.

America, America… In the spirit of Thanksgiving -- thanky for being here, by the way -- let's write about America, or what's left of her, that great land my luv and I have been pinballing thru all year. Bout time I put in a personal note on the new shape of me life. It's been over a year since I last wrote - there's no need to fill in all blanks… My finger healed over the winter of '22-'23, which I survived thanx to a goofy gig selling Christmas trees in a freezing hut in Long Island City, and the springtime was a hectic whirl of almost daily park busking and running around.

The summer, though…! We had us a long, crazy summer this year driving a great big loop around the whole of the USA in search of, ya know, the land, the story, what goes on. The reason for it was really just a desire on both our parts for change & motion after over 10yrs stuck in the meat marathon of NYC. With the lifeclock ticking, our housing situation held together with bits of string, and a fairly empty calendar (a rare phenomenon in NYC, the always-something-coming vortex calendar being really a sneaky causer of inertia somehow), we figured the time was right to find out what the rest of the land was like, do the classic American road trip, and maybe post up somewhere new for a while at the end of it. So we gave it all up - left our tallboy Molson with friends, sold & gave away most of our belongings, and gave up our timewarp shithole of an apartment in Bed-Stuy, our old 1890s screaming rustpipe waterheater brick roach cigsmoke bar noise timewarp shithole - quintessential shithole - bye bye to 742 Myrtle Ave!

We dumped what was left of our belongings with Ariel's folks in Tupper Lake NY and from there we hit the road: Pennsylvania, West Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, greatly speeding up by this point for the last rip thru Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and old New York.

Picturesque description I gave ya there, eh? Alright, what can I say… We camped all the way in our wee tent, with occasional motel stops when weather, personal hygiene, or exhuastion demanded, and I tried my damnedest to yodel for as much gas money as possible along the way. I had all my busking kit on me… Picture Ariel dumping me in some downtown and me trying to figure out where I was most likely to encounter that rare beast, the Mainland American on Foot. Oh, I don't know - listen, I'm not gonna give you the Jack Kerouac routine right now, maybe someday - a few months ago I tried writing a big long rambling rant about the whole thing and what I thought of it and what it was all like and I couldn't do it. I think maybe that's because it was a personal sort of trip, really a trip between me and the lil lady and the world that we were trying to say hello to in the moment. And now we're somewhere new and really that's what I want to think about, not the hallucinatory effects of watching the land unscroll thru a windshield for 10.000 miles. There's all this other stuff to talk about!

The land is large - let's leave at that. Nature abounds yet, and room to spread out. We saw the moose, the bunny, the eagle, the whale. The very large tree. The tumbleweed, the roadrunner. The Mystery Hole, the Hole N' the Rock. We hung out with all kinds of different people in diners and parkinglots, redneck Trump bars and lefty bookshops, libertarian coffee wagons, Walmarts and farmers markets and sketchy casino pyramid hotels - etc etc - and found everyone a lot easier to get along with than you'd ever know if you receive your worldview from the internet.

I found that busking is a tricky art in most of the USA. Spots are limited and attitudes are ambivalent. Either it's great or it's terrible. Farmers markets are good. Tourist areas are hit and miss. Special shout to Asheville NC tho for the most receptive and generous crowds I've ever found anywhere. Wild Jul 4th weekend it was.

I'll save the details for my novel or whatever. After a good long rest in Tupper Lake NY at the end of the road - and a brief stint in NYC in September - we put our heads together to plan the next move. It can be a downright diabolical thing to be put in a position where you have no real ties - no apartment in Brooklyn anymore, our stuff pared down to the bare minimum, no fixed work - and are called on to make one choice out of millions. We could go back to New York and find a new apartment, of course, but we both had this idea that it was time to try something new. Weeks of fretting led us to reluctantly admit that the Northwest had an incredible pull. Reluctantly on account of the outrageous distance we'd have to drive yet again to get there , this time with whatever worldly possessions we could fit into our car - our trusty lil Atilla the Hyundai - as well as our poor cat, Molson, who would be subjected to five days of driving and cheap motels smelling of the ghosts of a million dogs. And it'd also put us pretty well out of touch with our circles, our friends, our family, our constellations of Guitar Boys (an all-gender and all-instrument category, by the way). But all can be done…

(By the way: I'll still be yodeling in New York! I left my busking rig with a buddy and I'm making plans to travel back and forth!)

The Northwest won out for its artistic history, the seafaring vibes - ( whales !!! giant octopus !!! ) - the poltics & prosperity, and above all the absolutely outrageous nature surrounding it ( mountains !!! ) - we'd spent a downright spiritual five days camping in the Hoh Rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula during our travels, were amazed again driving thru Twin-Peaks-land on our way back eastwards thru the Cascades passes, misty surly mysterious mountains and o so mossy. We didn't expect to be able to afford anything really in Seattle Seattle but figured we'd wind up somewhere in its orbit - maybe Tacoma, Everett, Olympia, Snohomish, Bainbridge Isle. We gave ourselves ten days to find a spot. We were lucky enough to have a trusting relative on deck to help co-sign, on account of our joblessness & general jankiness.

Ten frantic days zooming around town and back to our teeny AirBnB and by now fairly pissed-off cat. Against all odds, and in the nick of time, a sketchy, photo-less Craigslist ad turned out to be the real thing - a big old creaky wooden house right in the middle of the good part of Seattle at a price we could afford. The only catch was its condition - it'd been left vacant for three years and was in many ways crumblin.

Which I enjoy! Cleaning, painting, ripping up old carpets, fixing fridges, replacing faucets, clearing out brambles & blackberries … bringing a wheezy ol house back to life. Be even better if we actually owned the place, but whatever. Big joys in having tangible work to do. The kind where you do it and you can see that what you've done has improved things. Nothing like fixing a stovetop hood extractor fan to get you feelin like a bigboyman.

With the hectic part now more or less behind us, we've been starting on regular life again, for lack of a better phrase… Working at what we do. Ariel's been oscillating somewhat frantically between pottery and sewing and drawing, and I've been at large in old Seattle yodeling hither and thither and seeing what can be made of the music scene out here. That'll be the story next time… What It's Like. Won't be as long of a wait on that one.

In the meantime … in spite of this country's frequent insanity, inanity, and downright insidiousness, in full knowledge of her appalling past and in the pain and destruction she finances, endorses, and covers for in the present … her sheer toxic dickishness, if we're being honest … I find myself thankful for this bloody pinball wreckingball machine USA, and especially the people in it, who have hearts the size of monster trucks. Americans - for what you have, for what hasn't yet been taken away, give thanks, give thanks! Everyone - well, god help us!! Give thanks anyway!!

[lettersfromleslie]

Oozing & Snoozing Thru Life (Concert Photo by Sandra Braverman)

[lettersfromleslie]

TOUR FADES / FINGER DAYS / & THE TWISTY PATH UNSCROLLIN AHEAD

Welly well, much has happened since I last wrote ya, as ever. The new album, "Halfway Home" went live on August 5th. There was a slammed release show at the Sultan Room. Vinyl records, CDs, and cassettes started tip-toeing their way out into the world. A hectic and sweaty phase of nightly park busking. And then off on my first tour since 2014, an 11-date meander around Central Europe.

What a lot of ground to cover! Especially looking back at it from the start of this next phase of lassitude and healing. I reckon I'll just not cover most of it, for now. It's out of sight, out of mind. I'm back in my place in Brooklyn, with a garbled head and a bandaged finger, all of it behind me, and little idea of what comes next. I always knew the old lost feeling of having-put-something-out would find me once I got home, but it's been stepped up some because of my damn finger.

The finger phase, that's how I'll remember this time. Here's what happened: Two thirds of the way through the tour, in Slovakia, on my way from Bratislava to a concert Nitra, I caught my left index finger in an especially slicey metal door. One minute I was whistling away, thinking bout my set, looking forward to diving into some Raymond Chandler on the train ride over, and the next I'm looking in complete disbelief at my finger, half the damn tip hanging off and the blood starting to flow. A lot of paper towels, a panicked ride to the hospital, a very sheepish phone call with my Slovakian booking agent from the E.R. waiting room, asking her to cancel the night's performance. And then a big, serene Slovakian surgeon preparing the needle and thread. "Do you think you could give this finger a bit of extra love?" I mumble, lying down on the operating table, hot on top of everything else because I'm still wearing my coat (too much blood and paper towels to take off). "I mean, not doubting you, but I really need that finger to be okay. I'm a guitar player. I'm here on tour." "You play the guitar? For work?" "Yeah." "You should take better care of your hands, then!" "Well, yeah." "How long before you go home?" "About two weeks." He looks at me laconically. "I think you will not be playing guitar in two weeks." My finger was anasthetized, disinfected, stitched up, bandaged. I was worried about the bill because I have no health insurance. As it turned out, the out-of-pocket cost of stitching up a finger in Slovakia comes to $37.10. So that was something.

Depressing conversations followed, of course. Everyone around me took it as a given that the remaining four dates would be cancelled. I refused to consider it... I figured that as much as I love noodling around on the guitar, I'm a yodeler first. Shit, even if the crowd showed up and I was just standing there in a hospital gown with me finger in the air, mumbling apocalyptic verses, that sounded like less of a bummer than if I cancelled. Besides, I had other acts to consider - the lovely Andrea Bucko, a local celeb in Bratislava, was opening the following night, and after that two shows with my old friend Karl who would open with his act Interbellum. Even if I bombed I wanted to give them a chance to play. So, what can you play without a left index finger? Started looking around for autoharps. I found out that Bratislava is not a great place to search for autoharps. I started looking around for keyboards. As luck would have it one of our contacts in Bratislava was able to loan us a small Yamaha keyboard - one of those slightly cheesy-sounding jobs with the built-in speakers, drum patterns, and an unnecessary amount of functions. I stayed up half the nite trying to re-arrange my songs for keys while taking breaks to ice me throbbing fingey. As good a way as any to keep yer mind off the catastrophes...

I was thinking about David Byrne the whole time. Last January Ariel and I had snagged tickets to see his American Utopia show on Broadway, and days before the concert half his band had tested positive for COVID. Rather than cancel the show, he'd written all ticket holders a breathless email in which he wrote that he would be happy to refund or change our tickets, but that we should know he and the remaining band members were creating an "Exciting new show, a show you'll never, ever see again, a 'Once in a Lifetime' experience, that will only be seen for a few performances!" What was striking was how badly he still seemed to want us to come. Every seat was filled in that theater that nite. And all through the chaotic, stripped-down performance, Byrne and his band did everything they could to make the crowd feel like they really were getting something special, something that attendees of the regular show wouldn't experience. For the crew it must've been a nightmare, but for us in the crowd it was inspiring.

So I'd like to thank D.B. for that one, as well as his music. That's the attitude I took to putting together a new set... And the show went on, eh? I stumbled and gaffed plenty, but I made sure everyone was in on it. "We'll always have this, me darlings" - said jokingly, but I meant it - "Up to the days of our deaths we'll always have Stubby Bob's Fingerless Roadshow - for your eyes and ears only. Enjoy!"

Hell, I'm proud for seeing it thru. And I hope everyone does remember it. Aside from Nitra, the day of the slice, not a show was cancelled.

That was that. Ariel joined for the last part of the tour and we flew back to NYC via Romania, a country we'd both always wanted to visit. Took a night train from Budapest to Sibiu, going thru the grotesque learning process of changing a finger bandage in our rattling sleeping compartment. Spent a week slinking about Transylvania, dragging me mummyfinger around the vampire-kitsch of the local tourist industry. Spooky season. Just right. Blew some tour money. Pushed off the reckoning.

Anyway, here it is, that reckoning. Out of work I be for a while, sitting on my arse in Brooklyn watching the weather turn from gold to grey, signing bills for suture removal and hand specialists. No workers comp for DIY busker bum tours, chappies. You just pay the dang bill. As part of my ongoing effort to never have a real job, I'm planning to go out into the parks all the same to tell fortunes and improvise poems for finger money. Can I predict the future..? Guess we'll see.

And you - have you listened to the new record yet then, eh? If you're here reading this, I reckon so. I'm doing two long-form bits here back to back - keep scrolling for my post-partum thoughts on the new baby. What a lot of luv I have for those songs. Every one I send out into the world feels like a form of life insurance.

[lettersfromleslie]

Presenting “HALFWAY HOME”!

Chappies: "Halfway Home" been out for two months now! The release concert and the European tour are behind us, and before the dust has settled completely I wanna take a last look at the album with you here, add in a few last pieces. I've talked plenty bout how the project got started, how it got fleshed out, the people who helped, and how it all felt, but I haven't really gone into the meat of it, the songs! And now Bobby shall bear all!!!

Maybe not... I'm aware that explaining things isn't always helpful. A song written right becomes a transferable thing, an incantation to be used by anyone. It's good to have a haze of ambiguity about the wee things. You can see hidden things in that haze, spontaneous images that a stark explanation cuts away. When "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" was written in 1806 - bear with me - when that banger came out bout two hundred years ago, "How I wonder what you are" was a sincere wonder. As it had been for all of history. No one had any real idea. Holes in the firmament, ancestral spirits, cryptic clues to past and future events, all bets were on the table. Over the years a number of people put forward the idea that the Sun is a star, and stars are other suns, but it wasn't proved till the mid-1800s. And it was only a fair chunk into the 20th century - within living memory - that we were able to show that a star is a very hot ball of fusing gases, mostly hydrogen and helium. There you are. So now we don't have to wonder anymore. Which from a poetic point of view is honestly a bit of a drag, is what I'm driving at. Good science demystifies; a good poem does the opposite.

All the same, I reckon there's still a few things I wanna tell you bout this new  album of mine.

The first thing I wanna get across is that I put together Halfway Home as a whole, really as a story to be listened to in full. It's divided up into two halves - an inward-looking side on tracks 1 thru 6 and an outward-looking side from 7-11 (or 12, if we count ol Molson snoozing us out). "Chasing the Changes" is the pivot that starts the outside sliding in. There's a before-Covid and after-Covid divide: I began writing in November 2019 and finished around April 2020, and the writing followed what I was preoccupied with at the time. The project started out as almost a concept album, exploring the idea of "terrain vague" and the sorta phantasmagorical, outside-the-machine feeling of life on the outskirts of NYC, but because of how the outside world went all batty and barged in on us, some of the tunes ended up exploring more tangible problems.

You try to conjure pictures when you make music. Dragging out an inner world benefits from mixed media. So you package things. You hide clues in your artwork and videos. And so while you listen to these songs I want you to picture empty lots, weeds, rusted elevated subway tracks and the carved designs on old tombstones, as well as medieval block prints, the films of Georg Meliès, belle epoque theater sets, and Galileo's moon studies. If you're listening indoors, picture the people who lived in your room before you. If you're listening outdoors, find your nearest thin place, as the Celts called the places where you can sense that the distance between earth and the Otherworld is shorter, 'where the walls are weak'. Get good and mystical with me, eh? There's still room for it in this world. Let yer thoughts shimmer and waft about. Even the songs that are specific were meant to be indistinct.

They lead into one another: "Years Away" - conversation with past selves, stuck in the present with no turning back. "In the Rows" - present, adult world of love & building life. "Empty is the Colour" - dreams, fantasies of escape following those pressures, & waking again. "Halfway Home" - fear of the dark, headlong, thick, black vertigo love, a pit among the weeds, too deep to fall. "And It's Fine" - back to life, day-to-day, cleareyed sadness. "Chasing the Changes" - interruption! - crisis! - change!

Flip the record and the first thing you hear is the sound of a thunderstorm recorded in the first week of the Rona lockdown. "My Bananamoon" - goofy woozy drunken meandering across the empty streets, Pierrot's lipstick. "In Another Light" - the emptiness again but sober, & finding hope in the idea that things won't be the same. "Bye Bye Finchy Dave" - manic, chaotic riff on the end of a weird summer. "Cold Moon" - false peace of winter broken by dissonance, transference of pain. "The World" - to break open prior thoughts & float off free.

(And sending us back to our lives is Molson, the cat with the red sticker, snoring on our couch the night we rescued him from the shelter and the night before NYC's first Covid lockdown went into effect. Never caught him doing it since, as it happens. Poor lil fucker must've been beat!)

I love all my tunes, but I love these ones an unusual amount. They came out of nowhere, when I was worried I didn't have anything left to say. They sprung up after I decided that the confused jumble of my life was worth looking at after all, even if only for the sake of its own confusion. Realizing you can say something complete about a life that's incomplete. Halfway Home - dig?

I need to think of these songs as walking off by themselves, and that means they'll walk through you. I hope you take them to faraway places. I hope they show you pictures that no one's seen before. Plenty of mysteries still waiting out there! Flapping about like weird bats!!! Over & out, big grin, RL.

[lettersfromleslie]

tinsel days, mooning-crooning, swirlin-whirlin over the void

[lettersfromleslie]

SHOWTIME / SHOWBIZ / STRANGE MOONS & CONSTELLATIONS

Roll up, roll up, step right this way... Album release season is here! I can hardly believe it. "HALFWAY HOME" is finally coming out this summer, nearly two years after I announced it. So I reckon it's high time we dusted the cobwebs off the ol holy blog! Get verbose again. Try on a new mask. Ditch the bite-size Instagram grin. Enough grinning! Throw in a scowl, a cackle, a crunchy frown - drag it out, get long-winded - cook up a nice convoluted stew for all the book clubbers out there, the false poets, compulsive readers of labels and signage - the lovers of the long form - my people, my people!

I last wrote ya in late 2020, bringing unsure tidings and a bunch of vaguely optimistic muddle about changes and opportunities and so on. The truth is that I didn't really like to admit what a low I'd arrived at; I mean, I felt terrible! I'd been driven out of the city I loved - forced to live back with me bloody PARENTS! - feeling a frantic urgency to fix everything immediately when we were all supposed to be sitting quietly indoors to preserve our health & save the grannies. It wasn't a time to think about breaking loose. The variant of the moment was old Delta, and the world was hunkered down. Strange, indistinct times to think back on, eh?

Aye, and we were going pretty batty out there. Sitting inside in our NYC apartment had been bad enough, but at least it was our own life... But we'd lost our spot, and now we were left to wander at nite around a sort of hollowed-out ghost town version of my childhood, rapidly coming undone. Finally we cracked and decided to leave early rather than wait out the entire winter with my folks as planned. Completely impractical, not particularly intelligent, but we cut the stay short after about a month and headed head back for another round in ol NYC.

We got back a few days before New Year's Eve, in the middle of the most extreme peak of covid cases the city saw at any point in the pandemic. Which did, at least, allow us to snag a cheap deal on a new apartment. (That all went away again quickly, eh?! Christ, in those days I was happily predicting an artistic renaissance in NYC, cheap rent, yuppies running scared, work remote, the city would be a place normal people could exist again! Hah!!!) Before long, against all better judgment, I was forced to get busking again. In the bloody subway. Wearing all manner of face masks and shields. What an absurd time! But at the same time, what a weird privilege to be the only live music in town, along with what other buskers were feeling desperate enough to keep going. We kept those vibrations in the air, eh?

And then the virus abated and the year went on flowing. And a new artistic scene did emerge in those liminal spring months when the city was still shut but the people were no longer afraid. My friend group seemed to balloon suddenly, all of a sudden there were all these rooftop shows, DIY gigs, the parks became fully lively again... Too lively in Washington Square, as a matter of fact: The rich folk had by this point returned in force, and after weeks of complaints from residents the NYPD launched a full-scale crackdown on all forms of anarchy in the park, gentle or otherwise (the election of ex-cop Eric Adams as mayor conveniently heralding the change). I was swept out of there along with everything else and wound up making Tompkins Square Park my regular venue. Tompkins took me right in, along with other amazing acts - shoutout to Pinc Louds - and I was able to get thru the warm season in grand style... Making money again, playing for new crowds, shaking hands and fantasizing about the road to music-industry respectability - picturing tours, label deals, cash... starry eyes!

Because many promising things were happening at that time. A lot of music industry people seemed to be taking an interest in me, oldtimers as well as youngbloods. I had my friend & producer Perry Margouleff advocating for me, and I also had a number of other contacts in the business that I'd met over the years who were following our progress very closely. All enticed by the idea of breaking an artist the old-fashioned way: from the ground up, on the force of the music. In it for the love. There seemed to be an idealistic mood in the world, a desire for a fresh start. After the great reshuffle there seemed to be all kinds of space for things that hadn't been possible in the linear grind of the before times. These cats spent their own money on me without bothering about contracts or caveats - spent valuable time on me, too. Listened closely to the music, asked about the lyrics. We were talking to hi-powered managers, agents, agencies, the works... Alas, and it fizzled! As the summer wore on it started becoming clear that the pieces didn't fit, the numbers didn't stack up, and finally the chaos of life & covid prevented key players from joining in. Typical! The process taught me that making it in the music business is a lot like organizing a party in high school - the cool kids only show up if they're sure the other cool kids are going.

So it goes! Once the dust settled it looked like it was back to the DIY route for a while, in hopes of building momentum for another industry push further down the line. With vinyl production snarled it'd take at least till the summer to have a physical product in hand, but in the meantime we could start putting out singles. A cold, slow winter it turned out to be. Poor Molson, our cat, nearly died of a broken willy and we had to blow a huge chunk of our savings on vet bills. Ariel got a lucrative but demanding job, 50 hours a week and a two-hour commute. And I spent a lot of time alone in the house, frittering away the time that I'd blocked out for writing on pointless worries. Knowing what needed doing and not having the means to do so. A single at a time: put out In the Rows in December 2021, Years Away in January, My Bananamoon in March, Halfway Home in May, and The World in June.

Putting together the concerts for those songs was an amazing thing. Getting the razzle-dazzle going at Theater 80 was one of the most memorable things I've ever done... What a mad and convoluted undertaking that was, and how lovely my friends were in the way they helped to build everything up from the bottom, rehearsing with the band, building stage sets, putting together our own backline, handling our own ticketing, liability insurance... Ariel building the moon out of cardboard, toilet paper, Elmer's glue, and drywall joint compound... Pale wee pierrot, seated on a bananamoon of her making... It all fit together so perfectly!

Was it enough, eh? Am I giving the songs the start in life they deserve? Will it all lead to anything? Who knows! Off me babies go, walking by themselves!

I'm writing you on the midsummer solstice. We've got the rest of June, all of July and August and September to look forward to. The fireflies have started; next come the crickets, and then the fireflies dim, and the crickets keep going, and the hot hazy NYC nights that everyone complains and that I love more than any time of the year... It's a terrible crush in the heat of the day, but by night there's nothing better, the hot humid screaming neon feel of New York in the summer. It's lazy and sluggish and frantic all at once. And I'll be out there yodeling away. Into the muggy soup we'll send these songs. I'm proud of them. They got made just right. Perry knew exactly what he was doing, found exactly the right people for these tunes, and they sound better than I could've ever hoped for. The songs are true, and I believe in them. I hope you'll take them with you while you're going thru your world! I hope they travel far and wide with you as you go around doing and thinking.

If you read this far you're one of the gang. Sending big blessings yer way. On we yodel! Laughing and crying and all the rest of it! Big grin, much luv!

[lettersfromleslie]

NOT A DAMN RONA IN SIGHT IN THESE PARTS

[lettersfromleslie]

HUNKERED DOWN / RONIED OUT / BALSAM, BEER & THE ROOFTOPS OF OLD AMSTERDAM

Hello! Writing you from the old nest, my erstwhile hometown of Amsterdam. Ariel and I have been hiding out at my dad’s the past ten days like a pair of runaways. What a life, eh? One minute you’re sitting pretty in your janky home on the hill, working like a bastard, enjoying your cat and your garden in a placid famblyman setting. Next thing you know a swarm of ronies come flapping in and you’re out on your ass again. So it goes. The lil lady and I broke our heads trying to come up with ways to salvage our life in that rusty old sausage factory N.Y.C., but with the lease coming due & wintertime looming there wasn’t a plan in sight, so here we are being a pair of mooches again. Amsterdam is where my family live, all in separate houses now, and I’m lucky to be able to count on em in gruesome times such as these. Our 10-day quarantine is over and we’ve been creeping around the old spots, empty canals, rainy days, looking to get smart, fit, and a bit less drunk.

What a summer, though! It was a weird and eerie privilege to be one of the few musicians in NYC still performing almost daily. I talked about that all plenty in my last post, but now that I’ve had to do without it for a while I’m beginning to realize how lucky I really was. Might ease me itchy fingers with some fresh livestreams, if there’s still an appetite for those these days. But yeah, so our lease expired on October 15th and that’s where the rug got pulled out from us. Sold most of our things and stashed the rest with pals. Spent two weeks in Ariel’s old hometown of Tupper Lake - see the photos above - and came back to the city to vote and fly on off again, this time to my old family stomping ground. Seems to be the thing these days. 

All of which was a bit of a bummer. Not where I’d fancied myself being at this point in my life. Tactical retreat, eh?

But hey, big news on the album front. Impatient tho I’ve been to just release the damn thing - I’ve had a “finished” solo cut since June - I held off because a few really wonderful opportunities floated my way. The one I can finally talk about is that Tony Garnier is playing bass on the record. That’s a big deal - Tony’s an absolutely legendary career man who’s played with everyone from Tom Waits to Paul Simon and whose main gig is as Bob Dylan’s permanent touring/recording bassist from the 80s on. I don’t think I could’ve picked anyone in the world over him. We recorded his parts on Sept. 29th at Van Gelder Studios in New Jersey - you’d have to Google that place to get a handle on how many legendary albums were recorded between those walls - and it sounded glorious. Ghosts galore! All of this was made possible by ace producer Perry Margouleff, who’s been a mentor of sorts for years - he gifted me the 1930s Gibson-made guitar that I used on *Masks & Mirrors* as well as the new album - and who will be doing the mixing for the final product. How bout that? And it actually looks like there’s more to come on the overdub front, altho I’d rather not jump the gun on that one till it’s all done.

Delays are only natural in this time of the Rona, I suppose. The people who helped fund the album on IndieGoGo have already received a copy of the solo takes (without any of the fancy production or overdubs) that got Perry and the other industry chaps interested in the project. Seemed only fair to hook up my backers, considering the original release date I set on the crowdfund was May or something. Everyone else is gonna have to wait, I guess! What with the goddamn pandemic and the political madness it seems a lot of people in the biz are waiting till the new year to start putting things out, and it looks like it’ll be the same for me. We’re not even done overdubbing yet, let alone mixing, mastering, and pressing the records! Meanwhile I’ve got to figure out what to do with my time here in the old country. I’ve got some work ahead getting all me ducks in a row for the album release - quack quack - preparing videos, photos, album art, PR shite, Fancy Contacts and so on. Meanwhile, while I have the last of my summer fat left to burn, I’d better try and get back to writing... I usually put out albums at a leisurely pace of one every couple years, but what with performing being a thing of the past I might as well try and double that. The fuck else am I supposed to do? With the world likely to remain all gummed and masked-up there’s not many options for us music bums aside from scribbling like hell and trying to land a record deal or something. Eh? Or get a real job, I guess, which is what I may have to do come January unless a miracle happens. Never had one yet, can you believe that? All I’ve ever done is play music.

Could be worse. I’m not grumbling. There’s been enough encouraging news & feedback on the album front that I’m feeling genuinely hopeful about the whole Career thing… I already felt good about the album but I feel even better about it now that all these people I have such enormous respect for are willing to sign their names to the thing. So I’m soldierin’ on, lads lasses & everyone in between! See you on the other side of the damn ocean some day!

[lettersfromleslie]

welcome to the new normal!

[lettersfromleslie]

SUMMER HEAT / EMPTY STREETS / JUSTICE NOR PEACE IN SIGHT / BUT STEP RIGHT THIS WAY FOR THE ONLY SHOW IN TOWN

Hello again from the belly of the beast!

It’s been a weird, hot, bittersweet summer. The new abnormal has made itself at home, the phases of the ‘rona have been swimming by, and one way or another life’s gone on living… Just wanted to put down a quickish sketch of what that’s been like in our lovable ol meatgrinder N.Y.C.

The lil lady and I spent the three months from mid-March to June in lockdown. I talked about all that plenty in my last post. It was a very surreal and foggy phase for us and looking back it’s hard to form a clear picture of what we did or how we felt. I think that fogginess has a lot to do with the mood swings, the phases of the news cycle, the ever-evolving picture we had of the world and our place in it… I kept my sanity by working on the album. It was good to have a mission in that. It was good too that I’d done the crowdfund and people had already paid for the damn thing, which kept me from slacking off too much. When I wrote my last post on May 2nd I was feeling quite blocked-up and discouraged because I wasn’t getting my takes, but then towards the end of May things started falling into place and before I knew it I had the whole album on tape. And whaddaya know, I think it’s a pretty good one! Probably the best one I’ve done. It was the first time I deliberately set out to write and deliver an album on a schedule, setting my dates without having the material in place, and I think that led to it being a very tight, compact statement. Of course the songs wound up being a bit more introspective and quarantine-y than planned, but that’s just how she goes, eh?

I wrapped up recording work around the beginning of June. That coincided with the period that Ariel and I started really venturing out again - starting on May 29th when we first joined the BLM protests against police brutality. I have to admit it doesn’t come naturally to me to talk about the protests online - not because it’s not important, but because I’m unsure if my voice would be as meaningful or articulate as the voices of those who are speaking from a lifetime of experience. Everyone’s feeds are already flooded with this stuff, and being a vaguely foreign white boy with an escapist bent there seems so little use in me going up and taking the mic. I'd just be repeating what I'd had to learn from others.

But that said - taking part in the protests was absolutely eye-opening. The energy and anger and emotion were relentless, and the demands for fairness and justice were so obvious, so simple to understand, and just so plainly the right thing to do. Which made it all the more incredible that it didn’t seem to affect those we were protesting in the slightest. I naively thought that the NYPD would at the very least be eager to put it out there that they, too, were against the indiscriminate killing of unarmed people, black or otherwise. I thought they’d take a knee with us. Not out of the goodness of their hearts, necessarily - but still, maybe just for the sake of PR. Intead we got to watch them go out of their way to perform live demonstrations of what we were protesting against over and over again… That’s to say my skinny white ass got a real crash-course in the harsh realities. We got kettled, intimidated with helicopters, we watched people get rounded up and beaten with batons for violating the 8PM curfew, we were there when that cop car rammed into a group of protesters on Flatbush Avenue… We also saw the looting, and the cop cars on fire, and the trash fires all along Broadway and on Union Square.

What can I say about it? It was fucked. It’s fucked. To be treated as an enemy by the police for protesting police violence. What else to assume than that they were taking the side of violence? They acted more like heavily-armed counter-protesters than peacekeepers. And of course it all led me to examine my own life and the advantages I’ve had. If you’ve been following me over the years you know I’ve always made a point of organizing my life in such a way that I have room to kinda detach from modern life and dream. And I used to think everyone could just do that. I was always proselytizing about it when I was a kid. “Just go live it!” All the while unthinkingly accepting the free passes that society would give me. Playing the free-spirited ragamuffin, simply expecting the world to recognize me in my role - and the world did! - while in a different body I wouldn’t have been recognized. That’s clear enough. So what kind of hypocrite would I be if I wasn’t out shouting for the same freedoms for my fellow humans? It’s something of a karmic debt at this point.


While all this was going on I also had to be dealing with my money situation, which was getting pretty bad. For reasons you can imagine I wasn’t in a place where I could apply for unemployment or any other kind of government assistance. My album crowdfund, the livestreams, and a little help from family and friends had seen me through the worst of the lockdown, but by the end of June I really had to start busking again. Sink or swim.

So, back to old Wash Square. That park has been through some phases in 2020, lemme tell you. It started out seriously mad. When I first started busking again the protests were still going full blast. March after march would weave in and out of the park, speeches were held, kneel-ins, sit-ins, you name it. I’d play the lulls. Around mid-July that righteous energy started making way for some seriously weird craziness. The NYPD had by this point stopped enforcing any of the usual small stuff and the Weird Ones had taken note. A squatter who called himself Jesus built a permanent home for himself and his followers in the fountain. Noise complaints were a thing of the past. Fights and brawls galore. Drugs, nudity, raves, and a riotous fuckitall feeling in the air, masks off, hands on, summer of mad recklessness. Me and my quarantine brain weren’t quite equipped to join the fray. I just kinda nervously skitted around the edges of it, yodeling here and there. Bit absent I was, maybe, but how can you go carefree gonzo when doing so means constantly risking killing someone’s granny by accident? I kept my social distance. There were some bad encounters. Bottles thrown at me while playing. Got assualted by some nut outside the W4st subway station, yanking me by the hair, punching me in the noggin. It was clear to anyone out there that the police had thrown their hands up at the situation and were letting people find out what life was like without them. As far as I could make out this unofficial police strike emboldened both the bad guys and the protesters without getting the cops anything. They might’ve been hoping the resident bougies would put their foot down one way or another, bark up the food chain some, but forget about it. There wasn’t much backlash or pushback from these upstanding, tax-paying pillars of society - they all just skipped town and headed for greener pastures. This mass exodus of wealth which had seemed temporary back in April started really accelerating around this point and by now the absence has started to feel permanent. If there’s any force of NIMBYism left in the Village I haven’t seen it. Those who have stayed on seem to have adopted a live-and-let-die approach. Aside from the fairy-lighted open-air restaurant patios with their potted plants and plexiglass dividers the streets belong to the people again, for better or for worse.

Personally, I don’t mind at all. Why should I? The money’s tough, but hell. I’ve always been broke. I’ve spent all my seven years in this city staring up at the rungless ladder which is Manhattan. If it can stop being a playground for the rich, it might become a place where I could actually hope to live someday.

Anyway, the last month has seen a sort of stabilization of the status quo. Some of the park regulars are back. R&B Lee, who used to be stuck down underground in the W4st subway station, has made a permanent place for himself and his giant PA on the western corner of the fountain. Jimmy the drummer is out all the time with a revolving cast of players. There are DJ sets on weekends and they get loud as all hell. So music’s back, but it’s a different world, and a much louder one. I’ve taken to playing in the small circle of benches on the western side of the park. There’s really not much space for unamplified music; the regular acoustic jam sessions have moved to other, more private locations and Colin Huggins, the park’s much-beloved pianist-in-residence, has more or less given up for the time being. Johan the living statue is out again much of the time. The portrait artists and street art sellers and fortune tellers are back, but the park poets are still in absence, probably conferring with their muses. Check out this article by Charlie Crespo with photos of some of the characters who are out and about.

Meanwhile the atmosphere out there is weird, anarchic, and sorta wonderful if you’re into that sort of thing. I guess I am. You won’t get bored hanging out on Washington Square in the summer of 2020, that’s for sure. Different threads of activism and action going on in every corner, friendships forged, love-ins, creativity, occasional bad chaos and ill energy, along with a good helping of just regular old hedonism in radical trappings. For a while there were great crowds of activist kids sleeping on the lawns and yakking all night about the revolution… The cops put a stop to that one, started clearing everyone out of the park again at midnight. Honestly a lot of it feels like what I always imagined the sixties might’ve been like. I’ve often looked at it a wee bit wistfully wishing I could be twenty again for it, with a head full of hot air and a fabulous tolerance for risk, instead of with bills to pay, dwindling resources, and a partner & a cat to look after. Oh, but I’ll be alright.

To everyone who’s still in NYC and has been worried about going out in public: if your health & conscience permit, come to the park sometime & let me sing a song for ya. I mean, do it responsibly - don that mask, bring your hand sanitizer, observe that distance - but New Yorkers have been knocking it out of the park when it comes to beating the virus, and that means the risks are lower and going out is almost as safe as it used to be. The park has plenty of room to socially distance. No one will bother you about it if you bring a picnic blanket and a bottle of something. The subway is safer to travel on than you might expect. The nights are hot and humid and saturated with all the great unknown we’re traveling through together.

And as far as I can make out, it’s the only show in town!