New song – “Puddy Wiot” – about those cwazy Wussian guwls

Last month I was out at a dinner with a presenter. The Russian rock group Pussy Riot came up in conversation. You probably know this is the group of young women who went into a church and recorded a video of their song protesting the Putin government’s connection with the Russian Orthodox Church. You also probably know that they got sentenced to two years in jail for the escapade. You also probably know that there was an international firestorm of support for them, and that many people across the Western world had a hard time saying the words “Pussy Riot” – especially news anchormen.

I said to her, “What a great thing to write a song about – their name is so great!”

The presenter, who runs a great family series, looked at me and said, “Don’t you dare sing a song about Pussy Riot at my concert.”

I understood, but I got an idea. It got me thinking about words – what you can and can’t say. Corruption is okay, but the name of a rock group presents problems.  So I wrote this song, which I probably could sing anywhere (except in Russia). Since they’re a punk band, I plugged in the electric guitar and pushed the distort pedal. It needs a caffeinated drummer. And if ANYONE wants to make a video of it, capturing pictures from the internet of the band and the ensuing madness, let me know.

Here’s the song -

If you like the song, you can download it here: billharley.bandcamp.com/track/puddy-wiot

Here’s to Puddy Wiot. Cwazy guwls.

Funnier Than Me

I have a contest on my web page related to my new book Lost and Found.  It’s to identify this critter that showed up in the twisted mind of Adam Gustafson and on the pages of the book:

This is all well and good, but what is really astounding to me is the variety of responses I’ve gotten about what the critter is. For example:

“As a veterinarian, I can certify that this animal is a most excellent example of a partially albino Badgerterrierius wingedcorvidium.     What’s quite interesting about this particular individual is that it JUST might be one of the few leaders of the radical animal liberationist group, International Chimeras Unite!, which you can tell by the position of its right arm and paw, preserved in the very typical greeting of the group: the outstretched (and outraged) claw.
Given the fine quality of this specimen, I can only surmise that it must be one of the few honored and revered leaders of this group.  Here’s why: International Chimeras Unite! has long been known to, upon the untimely death of one of its leaders (HBC–hit by car, RTA–road traffic accident, SBH–shot by hunter, ARG–ate rotten garbage), skin, stuff, and preserve their leaders, on a lovely wooden base.   Historians of ICU tell of one particular leader, Marcus “Skunk-face” Multipartzum, who was known for his fierceness in battle, his bravery in the face of all things putrid and stinky, and his short-but-lovely flowing tail.  His preserved body was known to be stolen by the arch enemies of ICU, National Organization of Female Sheep and Deer with Normal Taxonomy (NoEweDoeNT) during their infamous ‘Abolish Body Diversity!’ crusade.  I suspect that this might be that very same statue, and leader. “

At that’s only one of them. Many more you can read here. At first, they were all so good, I suspected that some insanely creative writer, like Salman Rushdie or a back-from-the-dead Italo Calvino, was bored and spending his time writing on my off-the-beaten-tracks web page. But no, Michele, our office manager reassures me, these are coming from all over. More depravity than I ever imagined. I am terrified and comforted at the same time!

It’s hard to admit that someone is funnier and more creative than I am, but my insight from this is that you all are a lot weirder and smarter than I ever imagined. I bow in your general direction.

And if you haven’t entered, it’s not too late to get weird with us. Contest ends on the 24^th. Go here.

Lost and Found – my new picture book

I have been informed by the powers that be that I should be doing a little promotion on my blog. Right. They’re right. Yes. Of course. In this case, it’s easy because I’m psyched, and I also get to talk about someone else’s work, too. My new picture book, Lost and Found, on Peachtree Press is coming out this fall and we just got some in our grimy little hands. It looks great, thanks to Adam Gustavson who has taken my little story and made it THE JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH – only it takes place in a lost and found box. Kirkus Reviews gave a nice advance review in which they say (ahem):

Storyteller Harley embodies a child’s fears with humor and sympathy… With stifling tension,  Harley has found the perfect emotional pitch to explore such universal childhood fears as visiting mysterious corners of the school or facing a terrifying adult. This story captures the essence of a brave child who confronts Authority. Within this child’s view of the world, full of questions and pressure and misunderstanding, wisdom comes—sometimes from the unlikeliest places.

And just to show you how together I am(okay we are, since, um ,this was someone else’s idea) , here’s a short video of Adam and me talking about how great we are. Okay, the book, I mean, the book. We are great only in so far as the book – oh forget it. Longer talk will follow. And    I kind of look like hell in the picture because twelve hours before one of my darling bees stung me right below the eye. Vanity, vanity -here goes

Performance Space – yours to make your own

I have been away. In many ways. Let’s see if I’m back. Here’s something:
I’ve been reading Liz Lerman’s really great book Hiking the Horizontal – Field Notes of a Choreographer. I’ll write more about it in another post. The book has made me think a lot about my work. Her discussion about site-specific dances (designed for a particular space) got me thinking about performance spaces.
Performers are confronted with many different kinds spaces, and many are not initially conducive to good performances. For artists who do a lot of community work, sponsoring organizations often aren’t in the business of presenting performance and only have a vague idea of what’s involved. They don’t know that the space is important. Hey – it’s big, it’s open, there are some chairs, here’s a platform! No problem!
And the truth is that the environment a performer works in has a HUGE influence on how successful the performance goes. Yet, it’s often the thing that is last considered in community performance. One mark of good performing artists is that they take care to make the space as welcoming to the audience and conducive to the performer’s work as can be.
For storytelling and solo performance, here are some things I try to keep in mind:
The performance space is my home – people are coming to my place to see me. I try to get there early and walk around and know the place. I like to do at least a fifteen minute sound check, even with a simple set up – not just to make sure the sound is all right, but to get the sense that the stage is mine.
How close is the audience? For solo performance, I want them as close as I can get them. It’s ironic that many theaters don’t put the audience where they need to be – I hate high school auditoriums with the first row twenty-five feet away. That is a physical and psychic distance that needs to be bridged and it’s not easy. (Not to mention, for family performers, the danger of kids just running around in front of you, unattended…). There’s a lot of wasted energy in those places. I often ask if there are chairs that can be brought in to bring the audience closer.
How close are audience members to each other? An audience is a living, breathing thing, and in order for it to be alive, it must be a group, not a scattered assemblage. Open seating in a large auditorium that won’t be filled presents a real problem. People sitting in the back in ones or twos while the first three rows are empty can kill a good performance. In one nightmare performance venue, the sponsors brought in inner city kids and in the first show demanded that there be a seat between each child so that “nothing bad” happened. In a fit of weakness, I allowed it. It was horrible. Death on wheels. Nothing happened. Good or bad – a completely dead show. The next show I insisted they be brought together. All were amazed at how good the show was. No one was hurt. Maybe they learned a lesson. I know I did.
Is the audience comfortable? Do they feel cared for? While a lot of this is out of control of the performer, I try to do everything possible to make sure that the physical comforts of the audience are taken into account. In a school show, I insist that chairs be brought out for the teachers (some teachers, god bless them, sit on the floor with students) – I’ll wait until they’re there, because I don’t want teachers standing for forty-five minutes. I will close off portions of a space if the sight lines are bad. I try to make sure there’s some music playing when groups walk in (not always successful) that sets some tone – I have a couple of playlists on my ipod that I feel set the tone. And under some conditions, if it seems appropriate, I’ll talk to the audience before hand in the aisles – (Sometimes not appropriate – the magic of someone appearing on stage when the lights dim is a potion, for sure).

Sometimes to shake things up I will change the rules about how people sit. In a school where the kids always sit in the gym one way, I’ll have them face another wall. “What’s this?” they say. Something different? And I do everything I can to get the blowers turned off and will pull the plug on the cooler holding the milk boxes if it’s making too much noise. White noise is very tiring to an audience. And the performer.
While school gyms don’t allow much adjustment, elsewhere, lighting matters – the focus should be on the stage. While storytellers like to see the audience, a darkening of the audience shifts the focus towards the stage – we’re so easily distracted that it helps to give people some place to naturally have their attention drawn.
What’s all this mean? Don’t be afraid to ask for what you need. And don’t be afraid to make changes to a space that haven’t been made before. “We’ve always done it this way” is not a reasoned argument, it’s an excuse, and it’s worth fighting it.
I believe, in the end that performance places ought to be sacred spaces, if only for the time the show is taking place. Aside from street performers (who create sacred spaces nonetheless), we need to try to make our theaters a place where people feel lucky to be. I will never forget the feeling of walking into Clowes Hall at Butler University to see Louis Armstrong when I was ten years old. The carpet was lush, the seats were comfortable and you could bounce on them until your parents stopped them, and when the lights went down and Louis Armstrong came out and started to play “Hello Dolly” I thought I was in another world.
I would like my show to be a little (just a little) like that.

Art and Public Health

Well, it’s taken years – way too long – but I finally have a professional video of one of my song (Not destined to be the video star, I suspect). Along with Rhode Island Public Broadcasting we’ve produced a video of my song “Wash Your Hands”. Working with Maria and Scott Saracen and kids from Henry Barnard School and Paul Cuffee School, we took the song I wrote a couple of years ago and it’s now being played on Rhode Island public television, and hopefully will go to others around the country. The RI Department of Health is promoting it and getting the word out to other state health departments.

If you go to my website, you can download the song for free, and also free posters here.

Making the video, and working with so many talented people, has reminded me of what my work is. I want to make good music, and good art. But I also want to say something. I have never been one for lecturing in my work – I would rather be descriptive of a kid’s experience rather than prescriptive of how they should behave. But in some instances, particularly ones of public health, it just makes sense to tell it like it is simply and directly. This is one of those.

A number of years ago I served on an advisory group for the Harvard Center for Children’s Health. I would go up to Cambridge and sit in a boardroom every couple of months and listen to public health professionals and researchers talk about their findings and then try to figure out how to let people know what they had learned. There tends to be a separation between the academic world and folks on the street and we were trying to bridge that gap. One of the things I learned about public health is that no one ever sees the plague that didn’t happen, and public health programs are concerned with stopping the plague before it happens.

If art (however you want to define that…) helps, so much the better.

This is nowhere more true than washing hands. It seems so ridiculously simple and stupid you almost don’t want to say it. But it has to be said. Over and over again.

As an aside here, I might say, at the risk of grossing out a number of people, I am always amazed at the large number of people (adults, males) in airports who do not bother to wash their hands in the restrooms. Astounding. Eeek. Ewwwwww. ‘Nuff said.

So we can spend billions of dollars on expensive procedures, but health is mostly preserved through simple things. Like washing hands. The problem is no one makes money at it. That’s the problem with our health care system – it wants to make money, not preserve health.

So here’s my offering. I wrote it as simply as a I could. It is not high art. In fact, I purposely used the melody of the typical children’s taunt for the hook in the chorus (na na na na naaa!). That minor third is the children’s interval.It will drive you crazy if you let it. And if it keeps some kid from getting sick (or the adults, too), then I don’t mind at all.

Hope you like the video.

Why we do what we do…

Just one of those moments that reminds you of what you’re doing and why.

Last week I was at Israel Loring School in Sudbury Massachusetts, in my customary position, standing in front of a microphone, underneath the backboard in the gym in front of three hundred kindergarten, first and second graders sitting on the floor.

I was telling my own twisted version of Sody Salleratus, “Big Bert”, which I have told WAAAAAY too many times, but still love to tell. As I’ve said in other posts, when you know a story really well, something else happens when you tell it.

It sure did.

I got to the point where the girl in the family is going over the bridge to the store. I use the word “sashay” to describe her movement (“She sashayed out the door. She sashayed down the road. She sashayed over the bridge.”) (I think I owe a nod here to Roadside Theater and their version – “Fat Man”.)

I stopped.

The audience looked at me, wondering what I was up to.

“Sashay,” I said. “What does that mean anyway. Anybody know?”

Usually, nobody does. So I tell them it’s a little dance step and go on with the story. Vocabulary lesson accomplished, and I’ve engaged the audience.

But that day, a kindergartener on the far end of the front row raised her hand.

I stop and look at her.

“Do you know what it means?”

She nods. She’s sure.

Well, this is just great, I think. I love this.

“What does it mean?”

“It’s a ballet step,” she says.

Now I am surprised. (Would that be chasse? I didn’t know that term until I went searching today…) No ballet expert myself – I learned how to sashay in fourth grade gym class with a scratchy record, Mr. Keller the gym teacher, and Janice Kahn, who I kind of liked. It was a nice move for a fourth grade boy, because no one touched.
Now I’ve stopped telling the story. This is interesting.

“I didn’t know it was a ballet step,” I said. “Thank you.”

I take a breath to go back into the story, but the lexicographer in the kindergarten class is not done. She has her hand raised again, and she is very self-assured.

I pause, “Yes?” I ask

“I know how do it,” she says.
“
Well,” I say, “that’s fantastic. Would you like to show us?”

She nods and stands up. Completely fearless. She is a dancer by trade! If only her teacher were here to see!

“Go ahead!” I say.

She raises her arms to her sides, faces the audiences, side-skips from one side of the gym to the other, keeping her arms perpendicular to the ground, her feet crossing ever-so-slightly at each step, then back again across the floor, and sits down. There is a spontaneous round of applause.

It is the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen. I am struck near speechless.

“Thank you,” I said. “Now we all know what sashay means.”

I go on telling the story, knowing the picture in three hundred heads is different than it was before.

Actually, make that three-hundred and one.

Mine, too.

Thom Enright – so long

I got the word last night from a friend that Thom Enright had died. While it wasn’t a surprise, it still hit me in the gut and he’s been on my mind all day, and will continue to be – appearing in my thoughts at times I least expect it and staying there for a while until he goes away and comes back later on.

Thom was a guitar player’s guitar player. He played on three albums of mine, and if he hadn’t gotten sick, he would still be my go-to guy when I needed electric guitar. He played on “Blah Blah Blah” which won a Grammy, “I Wanna Play” (nominated for one) and my latest “adult” album, “First Bird Call”. He could play all different styles of music and was up for anything. I’m always trying to figure out how to do something I have no business doing and depend on the musicians around me. “I want it to sound like this,” I say, “and I don’t know how.” The musicians around me help me figure it out. Thom was one of those.

I love the Providence music scene. It is not a big scene, but there are a lot of really great players. Duke Robillard, Marty Ballou, Vinny Pagano, Bill Miele,Dan Moretti, Greg Abate John Allmark. My pal Martin Grosswendt. Keivin Fallon. Cathy Clasper-Torch. Many, many more. I love watching them. Like I said, Thom was my go-to guy for electric guitar. Before Thom recorded with me, I had Paul Murphy play on my albums, and then he died suddenly – way, way too young. Both of those guys were good as it comes. I have a distinct memory of Paul laying his guitar on the floor of the studio and rolling marbles up and down the strings, trying to get a sound we could use when we recorded Roger McGuinn’s “Hey Mr. Spaceman”. And I’ve called on Duke, one of the very, very best, to record with me, and he was happy to do it, making suggestions about sound and arrangement. One of the blessings of recording music for kids is that musicians, who can be very private and reserved people, open themselves up and really give their best. Given the chance, they are very playful. I read an interview with Mark Knopfler once and he said that when he’s making an album, he tries to be the worst one in the room. That’s hard to imagine, but with all these guys around me, that was easy for me to do. It always freaks me out when they ask me what I want.

I’d seen Thom play many times before I ever talked to him. He was a member of the Young Adults, THE Providence band in the late seventies, a breath away from making it to the national scene (David Byrne auditioned for them, and they passed….). He was in the Raindogs (am I right on this??) which was a monster band including the great Scottish fiddle player Johnny Cunningham that got screwed by their record company and self-destructed. He played bass with Duke, I think. He was a killer blues player, and knew reggae like nobody’s business.

And he was a great acoustic player and singer, too. Sitting in nick-a-nees, the very funky bar in the jewelry district of Providence, I heard him do a killer rendition of “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right”. Just right, not too much, letting those amazing words do their work, really rock-solid singing, with his very heart-felt and clean fingerpicking. He knew how to pull the strings with his right hand to get a percussive sound, but not lose the tone, which is a very difficult thing to do. I know.

I first called Thom to play on “Blah Blah Blah” – I wanted a soundscape for my story “Joey, Chloe and the Swamp Monsters”, which is kind of a child’s “Heart of Darkness” story. The kids have to go into the swamp to retrieve sneakers. It’s funny, but scary, too, and I had no music written out – i was experimenting with sound and knew some of it should be slide and there should be bent notes and weird stuff. it was atmospheric (and also a twisted version of “The Hokey-Pokey”). We didn’t know each other and I put him in the booth and everybody was playing while I was just telling the story in a separate booth, knowing I would go back and do my part again – I just wanted sounds.
At a certain point, he lost it. “I don’t know what the……. you want me to do.” He was pissed.
(And I should say here, everyone who knows Thom knows that he had a very dark streak in him. I only had inklings of it, but I saw it then for the first time, and several times after. He could be a tough customer.)
“It sounds good, I said. “Just play along and we’ll figure it out.”

Actually, I was shitting in my pants. But like I said before, I just put the best musicians in the room and hope they can figure out.
Thom nodded and went back to work. And he came up with great stuff. After the session he called and asked if he could come back in, saying he had some more ideas. He knew that I trusted him. How could I not?

Thom got diagnosed with cancer several years ago – he started getting headaches while he was driving the shuttle bus at the Providence airport (further proof that justice is hard to come by in this world) It was a bad kind, and he lived longer than the doctors said he would. He played more music but knew he was going. I wasn’t really close to him, so mostly heard through others what he was going through, though we did talk several times.
I should have called him more, but like I said, he was a private person, and it’s difficult to name things, sometimes.
Which is why I’m doing this here.
Thanks Thom. I’ll miss you.