Tag Archives: joe clifford

The Ups and Downs of Life as a Performing Artist

For every spectacular live stage performance you watch that seems like it was seamlessly evoked from thin air, you can bet that there were hours and hours of time spent in dark, crowded practice spaces going over those same songs again and again and again.

The performing life is odd. I don’t even know how to describe it. Especially for a person like me who is a library assistant (pretty much a librarian without librarian pay because I don’t have my MS degree) by day, musician by night. Most days I spend sitting in a quiet, old, dusty building in the middle of a semi-rural neighborhood in the Bay Area, helping old people find books about how to not die and kids find books about farts and diaper superheros. I have to make rent somehow.

library rockstar

My sister drew this for me, to describe my life.

At night, I am in a practice space with other musicians (the members of my band Kyrsten Bean, and the members of Nicky Garratt’s band Hedersleben), working on either songs I wrote or songs my band mates have written and we have all collaborated on. There is a lot of drilling of the same parts over and over again, debating about what works and what doesn’t. We record our practices and then I listen to them while I’m driving to the library the next day, to work so I can buy food and gas to fuel my life.

On Thursday night, Hedersleben had our first little sampler show at the Oakland Metro. It was a blast. I met a lot of awesome musicians in the bands that played after we opened, and in the audience of people who had come to check out this krautrock thing we are doing. It felt very good. I didn’t sleep much that night. The next day was the slowest day ever at the library. I sat at the reference desk or in the back room staring at the walls or ceiling, catching up on library projects, helping patrons, but mostly sitting. Staring. Wondering if the night before had really happened.

hedersleben***

That night after work, I went over to see the launch of my friend Joe’s book, Junkie Love. I helped with the trailer for that one by playing a junkie. My friend Joel was the star. It was filmed in my bedroom.

I was nervous to finally watch it for the first time in a room with 81 people, but when I finally saw it I was impressed. It’s a little love story. About what a junkie thinks love is–about dope being love and love being dope.

Here it is, anyhow:

***

It was the same thing that night. I went to the book launch, it was exciting to see my friends kill it with their readings and to watch the trailer I had been a part of.
After the reading, I bumped into Alan Kaufman, who had come to support Joe. We ended up having a conversation about performing life. I don’t know why I felt compelled to vent to him about it, he merely asked me how it had been filming the trailer in my bedroom. I told him that it had been heavy, and I’d felt like crap for a week afterwards. He totally got it. Alan is a beat poet, wrote the book Drunken Angel (which I am just now cracking open and is amazing). He’s been there.

I told him about how I’d just had a performance the night before, how exciting it was. We had a guy from a record label come out to see us, everyone loved it, I was on cloud nine. There are tours being booked, details being finalized. We are recording an album at the end of the month. I have a show with my own band being worked on for May 30 as we speak. So much of what I love. So much awesomeness. Then I spent the next day sitting at the library.

“That’s awful!” said Alan. I looked at him, and I knew he meant that exactly how it feels to me. That it’s not working at a library or being around books that is awful, it’s the contrast between being in the middle of a cosmic synergistic excitement hub of splendor and then having to drive to work the next day and sit and stare at books.

I’m not complaining, don’t get me wrong! I love libraries. It’s just a strange, deflating transition. I find myself sitting there asking myself if any of the excitement actually happened. Which of these scenarios is my real life? The one where I am on stage in my element, doing what I love, carting gear in and out, talking music language with fellow musicians, or the one where I am sitting still at a reference desk at a library in the middle of nowhere, a city most people don’t even know exists in the Bay Area as it’s unincorporated.

It’s enough to make me feel stark raving mad sometimes, the ups and downs. I love my life. I love doing music. I love that I took my dreams of childhood and am finally bringing them to fruition. But there are things I got to talk about with Kaufman that he just got immediately. Doing performances and then sitting in your room for days trying to decompress. Having your ego fed, having it inflate, and then having the pin stuck in the balloon as the air fizzles out over the next couple of days. Our conversation blew my mind, was just what I needed.  Joel, who had rode with me to the event, didn’t need a ride home, so then I went home to my diet coke and gluten-free cookie and stared at Facebook. Then I went to sleep, and got up to go work at the library.

Playing a Junkie

This past weekend was a strange one. I walk through life rather oblivious of things. I nod a lot and go, “Yea, sure! OK.” So, when I found myself convincing my friend Joe to use my room for a book film trailer, it didn’t strike me as odd. Even if the film was about junkies, and my room was to be a piss-in-the-sink hotel.

I’ve never been a heroin junkie, but I have lived in the Tenderloin in a piss-in-the-sink hotel. I figured, why not help a fellow writer and friend out and let him use my room in a nice quiet neighborhood of Oakland, instead of a hotel where, as Joe put it, “People might assume we were going to shoot porn.”

On a related note, last Saturday night Paul, who runs Bitchez Brew, invited me and some other local writers, including a friend of mine, Joel Landmine, to read our poems at Era ART Bar. It went well, was a lot of fun.

I introduced Joel to Joe at the last Lip Service West reading I attended, the one where Zarina Zabrisky, another local writer, was on fire and wowed the entire audience, and the one where Paul invited Joel and I to read at this past Bitchez Brew. Joe and Joel became Facebook friends.

Meanwhile, Joe was searching desperately for the best younger him to play a junkie in the film trailer for his upcoming book, Junkie Love. He posted about the trailer on Facebook, having learned Evil Ed from Fright Night was going to be a part of it, and Joel posts something like, “That guy’s really nice.” Joe sees an opportunity, and follows up with, “Hey, you look like a young me (a junkie), do you want to star in my film trailer?” To which Joel says, “Sure.” Joe doesn’t beat around the bush.

Some time goes by, and a thread starts on my Facebook, but gets sidelined by discussion of the best place to film this trailer. My bedroom gets volunteered.
Then, the night of the Bitchez Brew reading, Joe approaches me and asks if I want to play in the film trailer too. I shrug. “Sure,” I say.

(It strikes me that if I had gone through with my threat of deleting Facebook for good, none of this might have gone down.)

Sunday morning, Jamie DeWolf, the director, Joe and his wife Justine, and Joel arrive at my apartment. My roommates let them in, and thankfully I was awake, had a cup of french press coffee in my hand. I was up until 3am the previous night. It was now 9am, so I was still kind of like, “Duh.” We moved all my musical instruments out of the room and Joe and Jamie start making it look like a junkie den. Syringes, spoon with “tar” and cotton in it. The mattress is already on the floor, a sheet over the window, etc. I kept looking over and seeing Joe making little “heroin” balloons by my bookshelf.

Justine tells me she needs to make me look like a junkie, so she starts putting makeup on me. Joel by now looks like a bonafied junkie, bags under his eyes, pale complexion (he’s a skinny dude, with that James Dean kind of rough-around-the-edges look about him) and I give him a thumbs up. “Great job. You look like the perfect junkie.”

Then Jamie asks if I can take off my shirt, because he wants it to look authentic. So, soon I’m lying on one side of my bed, Joel on the other. I’m half naked (in a bra) with a blanket over me, Jamie filming, and Joe giving us directions on what to do. Insert lots of Boom Chica Bow-wow jokes about bedroom filming.

I didn’t know the script for the film before hand, which was probably good, because if I had thought about it too much, I might have freaked out. Basically, Joel is my junkie boyfriend in the film trailer. I’m sleeping. He wakes up, goes out to score dope, gets beat the hell up, comes back, then wakes me up. I kind of roll away, go “WTF,” with my facial expression, then spy the balloons he is handing me in his outstretched hand. I perk up. He smiles. I smile. Junkie Love. It’s pretty devastating, if you really think about it. There’s even one point in the film where we were filming in my bathroom with syringes and fake blood for a scene using my bathroom mirror.

We finish filming, go out and eat lunch, and they all head to the city to do a different scene. At this point, I’m actually starting to wake up. I walked through the rest of the day with kind of a blurry, heavy feeling going on. I went and hung out, talked with friends, but I couldn’t shake this raw, intense feeling in my chest. The feeling stayed with me the next day and is still lingering today.

I’m kind of an empath, and so there’s a part of me that is taking in the fact that Joe lived this life, and it’s a life many people live. He must be feeling pretty wack, watching his friends enact scenes from his past. The junkie life was a life I wanted to live as a teen, because I was an idiot, and a lot of my heroes in pop culture were junkies. But as revealed in a short non-fiction piece I’m writing, I was spared that road due to what must have been angels looking out for me. Instead, I just became a raging alcoholic by age 15. The junkies I traveled with at age 15 didn’t like to share, is what it boils down to.

Maybe I’m tripping because had it been different, that might have been my life. Or maybe I’m tripping because at 15 I was a street kid and me and my boyfriend’s two best friends were junkies, used to shoot up in front of us on a mattress in Golden Gate Park. I glamorized them. Now, at 31, I don’t glamorize that lifestyle at all, and re-enacting it was somewhat brutal. Things just seem to affect me much longer these days.

But I’m glad I could help. That was a good thing to be a part of, in my opinion, although I don’t know if I can ever actually WATCH that book trailer when it comes out. Me as a junkie ain’t pretty. See below.

20130319-155246.jpg

Why Do We Go There Part II (Why I Go There)

I am notably a little slow on the uptake. I read Joe Clifford’s response to my post Why Do We Go There, titled, Why Do We Go There (And Away We Go) when he posted it about a week ago, but it’s taken me this long to elaborate on my first post, to which I’ve been planning to add a part two.

In his reply, he disagreed with my reasoning in Why Do We Go There, stating that for him, and perhaps for many other writers who write about dark pasts (specifically, in his case junkie lit writers), it’s a feeling of being the scum of the earth and a need for attention, no matter if it’s negative attention, any attention will do.

Continue reading →

Weekly Feature: Interview with the Minds Behind UK PoV Magazine

I’m always on the lookout for interesting people to interview here on The Stifled Artist for the weekly feature titled, Creative People Who Rock(because I’m brilliant at coming up with names for things).Mainly, I look for people who are defying the norm and engaging in their creative endeavors in spite of realities, like having day jobs or not receiving anything monetarily for their efforts. In a society that is increasingly finance driven in regards to how creative we are allowed to be, Ben and Chris are putting together a high-quality magazine to showcase the work of a wide variety of talented people, with no monetary consolation whatsoever. I can’t wait to read the first issue, and not just because my poems will be in it. It will also include work by a number of other talented people. You can read more about the lineup on the PoV news feed.

Lip Service West, December 10, 2011

Through Underground Voices – which I discovered through a writing magazine at Barnes and Noble listing fifty indie places to publish your work – I found out about Joe Clifford, a local Bay Area writer and author of popular blog Candy and Cigarettes. I posted a comment saying, “Hi, I’m a writer, too, and I live in the Bay Area, too, mwahaha.” He wasn’t afraid, as he has faced scarier things than a fellow writer living in the same area as him, in fact, he then told me about the reading series he produces, called Lip Service West.

I submitted a true life story I happened to have in my archives, as these are what I write when I’m not masking true life stories as fiction. And now I’m reading it, tomorrow, in San Francisco. It all happened so quick, sorry I didn’t tell you sooner…I tend to downplay most public appearances.

I wanted to post a link to Lip Service West, and also share these videos. They are gritty. Be warned. Which gives you a picture of the kinds of stuff I address in my own writing, but with some different elements. Want to know what I’m going to share about from my life? Come! Listen. And hear the other fine writers who will be reading, all of whom I’m excited to hear, from reading their bios.

P.S. I just practiced my story on my husband and I did OK. It made him laugh and at the end he said, “That made me sad.” Mission accomplished!

Then I made my husband watch the following videos of readings by Joe Clifford and his friend, writer Tom Pitts, about days from their respective pasts, when they had different, shall I say, proclivities.

The hubbs was rapt, having once grappled such nefarious reaches himself. Looks like their mission was accomplished, too, at least in this tiny household in West County.

There are many other cool stories here, from last year’s readings. Check them out, and please, come to one of these readings. You won’t be bored, I promise.

And the moral of this story is: Reach out to other writers in your area. You never know what will happen.