organix
Summer 2010 was actually one of the more miserable summers of my life, for all that it was the resolution of things I'd hoped for for years. After two weeks driving across the country, watching the highway rush towards me was giving me mild panic attacks, and we still weren't done. We unloaded the stuff in Philadelphia, dropped off a mattress, a boxspring, and a U-Haul trailer in Connecticut, swung through New York to get 
sandmonkeywoman and the last remnants from the apartment, and then drove to Rochester to get another U-Haul trailer and all
tenrith's stuff. My paternal grandmother was taking advantage of a rare opportunity to see all three of us in the same place, so she was visiting Rochester and staying with my dad. My mom had the unorthodox and frankly shocking idea that it might be nice to see my grandmother while she was in town, and I had the critical lack of judgment necessary to think that despite my mom's reservations about whether it would actually work, I should at least pass this wish on to my grandmother. This blew up in my face, worse than I could have imagined - to make it worse, I was staying with my dad in order to spend more time with my grandma. I ended up spending a lot of time hugging my grandmother to help her stop shaking, listening to my dad's tirade. And then when I finally got out of there and came home to my mom's, she was also mad at me for some reason. Managed to get all-but-kicked-out of both family homes in a period of about twenty-four hours. It was probably the most unpleasant week of my life since high school.
Somewhere in there, my mom had banished me from the cramped 2-BR where she's now living, and I was hiding on the porch swing, sobbing. It's not really what porches are for - it feels terribly exposed, and the neighbors always look at you funny. But where else was there to go?
Eliza came out with her acoustic guitar, and told me we were going to write a song about it. Sat there and played music for me until I calmed down. And then we wrote a song about it - she played chords, I sang ridiculously bad lyrics about the whole ordeal, the roadtrip, the road, the endless and creepily green fields of Texas with their cows and their oil derricks, America's bigness. The end of the long-distance part of the love affair. Our parents' knack for failing us when we're under the most pressure. All the stuff that never quite made it into this journal, because each event was so ephemeral, but each one deposited a little more charge on me until I was frazzled and helpless. Turned into a thing of beauty, this weird little improv song nobody else would ever hear, released and made truly ephemeral. Maybe it was the turning point of the whole nightmare. That night, I went and sang backup at her open mic; the next day we picked up and loaded a U-Haul trailer for Lydia's stuff and I drove it all home for the last time.
Music has been important to us. No, that's not strong enough. Music has been transformative for us. Taking all the crap life deals you and sifting it out into music, into things of beauty that remind you of your strength and your pain, but don't weigh you down. Music has been transformative for Eliza, after all the shit she's had to deal with from this family of ours. I felt like a horrible person, leaving for college, and leaving my sisters alone in Rochester with my parents. And then Lydia left, and it was just Eliza. And the family crashed and burned around her, my dad's second divorce, his third marriage, losing the house, losing the car. And she suffered, and we could do nothing for her. Long silences in cell phone conversations, trying to convey support and trust and so much love through that thin band of signal.
And she walked out of the flames singing, with a guitar (okay, like, three guitars) and a vision. And we could take no credit for it.
Anyway. My sister's been away from home for the three-and-a-half years she's been at college. College hasn't been kind either, but it's been different, and at least at college there's been someone who's in control. And she's grown, and matured, and rejoiced and suffered, and kept pouring herself into her music. It's her life. In her free time, she helps bring musicians to play at Vassar, she mixes tracks for her friends, and she plays, endlessly, with the group of other students she's drawn together into a band, by herself, creating things. She has no illusions about having to find a day job of some kind when she graduates, and she's been thinking of finding ways to share music's transformative power with others. Things like sound therapy. But right now, she's making a go of it for real, because you have to try, even when your father and your common sense tell you the odds are stacked against you. And for five more months at Vassar she's got free access to a sound studio and an advisor who thinks she's got the best shot of anyone at Vassar right now. She's making a CD, if she can pull together the funds to pull it off. And she's looking for help.
All three of us care intensely about participatory creation, organic improvisation, the kind of music that takes who you are, who all the participants are, and weaves it into a coherent whole. The kind of music that creates understandings and forges communities. For Lydia and me it's part of why we're so passionate about rounds; it's central when sometimes we talk about what kind of religion we'd want to found, if we could. For Eliza, it comes out differently, and plugs into her jazz training, and you get a different, eclectic, sound. It's why this CD (and her fluid band with its changing membership) is titled "Eliza and the Organix." Music that flows and changes every time. Music that grows and does what it has to.
In a paragraph, separate from all the backstory:
My sensitive, fragile, strong, brave, angry, weird, spiritual youngest sister is making a CD before she graduates (because her college has a sound studio she can use for free), and she's trying to raise money to get it mixed and mastered and printed. So there's a Kickstarter project to get people to commit money to it, so she'll actually have the funds to do it, because everyone in my family is broke, and she herself is terrified of paying for life after college. It's here, it's live, and it's Kickstarter so she's got a deadline to raise the money or it won't work.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/elwaldman/eliza-and-the-organix-the-debut-album
Check it out, maybe? Make a tiny pledge if you think it's cool? Pass it on if you think someone else might be interested? Do some or all or none of those things, no obligation, no strings. I think she's actually pretty good, independent of being my sister, but it's a distinctive style and you've got to judge for yourself.
Also, more of Eliza's music here:
Page for her CD: http://www.myspace.com/eliza_and_the_organix
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sandmonkeywoman and the last remnants from the apartment, and then drove to Rochester to get another U-Haul trailer and all
tenrith's stuff. My paternal grandmother was taking advantage of a rare opportunity to see all three of us in the same place, so she was visiting Rochester and staying with my dad. My mom had the unorthodox and frankly shocking idea that it might be nice to see my grandmother while she was in town, and I had the critical lack of judgment necessary to think that despite my mom's reservations about whether it would actually work, I should at least pass this wish on to my grandmother. This blew up in my face, worse than I could have imagined - to make it worse, I was staying with my dad in order to spend more time with my grandma. I ended up spending a lot of time hugging my grandmother to help her stop shaking, listening to my dad's tirade. And then when I finally got out of there and came home to my mom's, she was also mad at me for some reason. Managed to get all-but-kicked-out of both family homes in a period of about twenty-four hours. It was probably the most unpleasant week of my life since high school.
Somewhere in there, my mom had banished me from the cramped 2-BR where she's now living, and I was hiding on the porch swing, sobbing. It's not really what porches are for - it feels terribly exposed, and the neighbors always look at you funny. But where else was there to go?
Eliza came out with her acoustic guitar, and told me we were going to write a song about it. Sat there and played music for me until I calmed down. And then we wrote a song about it - she played chords, I sang ridiculously bad lyrics about the whole ordeal, the roadtrip, the road, the endless and creepily green fields of Texas with their cows and their oil derricks, America's bigness. The end of the long-distance part of the love affair. Our parents' knack for failing us when we're under the most pressure. All the stuff that never quite made it into this journal, because each event was so ephemeral, but each one deposited a little more charge on me until I was frazzled and helpless. Turned into a thing of beauty, this weird little improv song nobody else would ever hear, released and made truly ephemeral. Maybe it was the turning point of the whole nightmare. That night, I went and sang backup at her open mic; the next day we picked up and loaded a U-Haul trailer for Lydia's stuff and I drove it all home for the last time.
Music has been important to us. No, that's not strong enough. Music has been transformative for us. Taking all the crap life deals you and sifting it out into music, into things of beauty that remind you of your strength and your pain, but don't weigh you down. Music has been transformative for Eliza, after all the shit she's had to deal with from this family of ours. I felt like a horrible person, leaving for college, and leaving my sisters alone in Rochester with my parents. And then Lydia left, and it was just Eliza. And the family crashed and burned around her, my dad's second divorce, his third marriage, losing the house, losing the car. And she suffered, and we could do nothing for her. Long silences in cell phone conversations, trying to convey support and trust and so much love through that thin band of signal.
And she walked out of the flames singing, with a guitar (okay, like, three guitars) and a vision. And we could take no credit for it.
Anyway. My sister's been away from home for the three-and-a-half years she's been at college. College hasn't been kind either, but it's been different, and at least at college there's been someone who's in control. And she's grown, and matured, and rejoiced and suffered, and kept pouring herself into her music. It's her life. In her free time, she helps bring musicians to play at Vassar, she mixes tracks for her friends, and she plays, endlessly, with the group of other students she's drawn together into a band, by herself, creating things. She has no illusions about having to find a day job of some kind when she graduates, and she's been thinking of finding ways to share music's transformative power with others. Things like sound therapy. But right now, she's making a go of it for real, because you have to try, even when your father and your common sense tell you the odds are stacked against you. And for five more months at Vassar she's got free access to a sound studio and an advisor who thinks she's got the best shot of anyone at Vassar right now. She's making a CD, if she can pull together the funds to pull it off. And she's looking for help.
All three of us care intensely about participatory creation, organic improvisation, the kind of music that takes who you are, who all the participants are, and weaves it into a coherent whole. The kind of music that creates understandings and forges communities. For Lydia and me it's part of why we're so passionate about rounds; it's central when sometimes we talk about what kind of religion we'd want to found, if we could. For Eliza, it comes out differently, and plugs into her jazz training, and you get a different, eclectic, sound. It's why this CD (and her fluid band with its changing membership) is titled "Eliza and the Organix." Music that flows and changes every time. Music that grows and does what it has to.
In a paragraph, separate from all the backstory:
My sensitive, fragile, strong, brave, angry, weird, spiritual youngest sister is making a CD before she graduates (because her college has a sound studio she can use for free), and she's trying to raise money to get it mixed and mastered and printed. So there's a Kickstarter project to get people to commit money to it, so she'll actually have the funds to do it, because everyone in my family is broke, and she herself is terrified of paying for life after college. It's here, it's live, and it's Kickstarter so she's got a deadline to raise the money or it won't work.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/elwaldman/eliza-and-the-organix-the-debut-album
Check it out, maybe? Make a tiny pledge if you think it's cool? Pass it on if you think someone else might be interested? Do some or all or none of those things, no obligation, no strings. I think she's actually pretty good, independent of being my sister, but it's a distinctive style and you've got to judge for yourself.
Also, more of Eliza's music here:
Page for her CD: http://www.myspace.com/eliza_and_the_organix
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