simbi dare 1

I grew up in suburban East coast America both north and south, went to
an arts high school, moved to New York, several years later to Berlin
and now I live in Indonesia.  Berlin was definitely a transitional
point moving me out of the manipulation of the evil empire type thing.
 Suburban America is basically the training ground of the mind control
to support a plutocracy using capitalism as its theology and using
media and advertising to convince people to support them.  I made the
transition from a religious conservative family into a liberal
intellectual world of New York.  I worked at the Strand, volunteered
for community gardens, was the assistant editor of a literary journal
and finally majored in Comparative Literature at Columbia.  Study
abroad took me to Paris and Berlin, where I fell in love as so many
younger New Yorkers did with the art, the clubs, the scene, the
lifestyle and the affordability of Berlin.  I also realized I just
wanted to make music and to stop on my track to be professor activist
or what have you.  I didn't want to fix the world anymore but just say
how I feel, already a huge challenge for me.  My voice and opinions
always seemed very dangerous when I was young, i might end up like so
many people I knew--  in an insane asylum, put on drugs for ADD or
depression, or acting out the unexpressed emotions of the society in a
way that would end in some violent or drug-induced death.  My way out
was to stay quiet, read and play the piano, but I never said what I
thought.  Being in New York gave me the chance to say what I thought,
but I hadn't gotten to saying what I felt, and somehow I felt only
music could be the way.
So I ended up moving to Berlin to focus on music.  Berlin was
seductive to me for some simple reasons, like everyone wasn't so crazy
success oriented as in New York, constantly on a path seeking
achievement, constantly judging others and having little time to be
with friends.  In Berlin you could hang out in the park all day and
the club all night.  Soon I began to see the clash of communist and
capitalist values, there were the squats and the wine or dinners by
donation.  There were the new fashionistas and that was sort of us,
the only thing that seemed to matter for a long time was how you look.
 But I found it valuable to put all the different roles into play and
to work with image then bring it to exchange, dissolve or meltdown by
dancing in the club.  I loved that mode of communication and the
creativity, absurdity and humor you could bring to it.
I worked at a few places in Berlin, one being Herr Entertainment where
I met Peter.  There were two experiences through the zine that were
particularly significant for me, reviewing Burning Down the House and
listening to Christy and Emily.  Burning Down the House was about a
suburban American family somewhat similar to my own.  Mired in lots of
drama, drugs, affairs, selfishness and a kind of bland alienation.  I
remember the other reviewer, who Peter published alongside my review,
said it was horrible and if you want to see a movie about teen angst
watch Kids because Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson are people you can
relate to, unlike the people in that movie.  The thing is Chloe
Sevigny and Rosario Dawson are really cool and attractive actresses,
but they're not anything like the people in suburban America.
Thinking about that I realized my upbringing was always a sort of
unspoken tabboo subject for me.  I moved to New York at 17 and
supported myself by working at a bookstore, maybe ever since then I
was in some kind of survival mode.  That mode didn't take the form you
might normally expect, actually I felt the need to pretend to be the
person people wanted me to be in order to survive and be accepted.
Going to clubs helped me toss that person around and destroy it.  But
it hadn't gotten me anywhere near to expressing my feelings.  To do
that I needed to leave the hierarchical and demanding world of what is
cool and what is not.  People get themselves to a niche of coolness by
their taste and style and they get terrified to fall to the next rung.
 It helped to go to Java where I was able to jump outside of all the
rungs right down to going around with street musicians playing Bob
Marley to make money for breakfast.  Actually I went there to study
gamelan.
Now I'm in Bali with a scholarship to study gamelan.  I went back to
New York just long enough to see the beginning of the economic
meltdown and to get a yoga teacher training in Asheville, NC.  So I
teach yoga here and have been doing a lot of performance art.  Also
beginning to work on my first album which is a classical piano
recording.  I played growing up and that was the other thing at Herr
Entertainment, I listened to Christy and Emily playing the piano and
singing.  I saw some little corner where I could bring my worlds
together musically.
So the first picture is me at a Halloween party in Berlin, the second
is performing in Berlin, third and fourth are me at a recent
performance in Bali where I created my own potlatch, a Native American
ceremony in which you give away or burn all your belongings, as a
suggestion for a better Christmas.  There was also an amazing
performance by Teater Api, a group from Surabaya that performs the
scene where Chief Broom breaks out of the insane asylum in One Flew
Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
It's been amazing to be immersed in performance art scene here in
Java, Bali and Lombok. People are exceptionally socially and
politically aware and have a long tradition of amazing performance,
embodying spirits, masks, dancing, shadow puppets, and shamanistic
spiritualities that they can use in postmodern meltdown with the
things they seem to appreciate about contemporary culture, such as
comic books and metal music.  Actually the metal scene here is really
amazing.
Anyway, This is a big thank you to Peter for intelligence, kindness
and wisdom.  You gave me perspective that I didn't become aware of
until years later, but it was like some small seeds planted.

simbi dare 2

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