Tag Archives: Israel Kamakawiwo’ole Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What A Wonderful World

Finally, A Little Good News!

August 1, 2020 marilyn jaye lewis Leave a comment

Yesterday was sort of a good day, by the end of it.

The Ab Ab Pro phone call was frustrating, just because there is such an enormous amount of work to do. And both of us are more than a little frustrated with the entire world still moving at a snail’s pace because of COVID. And everything always needing more and more money to move to the next step. (I was not looking forward to telling Peitor the financial details of what the accountant had told me, but obviously, I had to.)

So far, in the 35+ years that Peitor and I have known each other, we don’t argue. Which doesn’t mean that most of the time we see eye to eye on things, because we absolutely do not. But we don’t argue about it.

But yesterday we were at this sort of point — after 2 hours of going over the financial figures for various parts of our production company — where we were talking to each other in this really measured, careful way — each word under a microscope — like we were in marriage counseling or something and trying not to explode at each other. It was sort of bizarre and definitely exhausting, emotionally. For both of us.

When we finally hung up, I really wasn’t able to get too much done on Thug Luckless: Welcome to P-Town, because I was so drained. I’m hoping, though, that today will be really creative for me regarding Thug.

But then, last evening, Kevin, the director of my play Tell My Bones, called with some incredible news regarding another potential zoom broadcast of a staged reading of the play — and this one is really, really exciting, gang.

I can’t go into the details on the blog yet, but, man — it was really great news. And I could start to feel again what life had felt like before the virus hit the world and brought every single one of my projects to a crashing halt.

So, that is making me happy. And I have two days ahead of me, free and clear, to work on Thug Luckless: Welcome to P-Town. So, I’m feeling like maybe I can take some time now, block out the stuff that sort of stresses me out, and just focus on the manuscript that’s in front of me and just feel really happy about it.

Plus, that little cat that I call Henrietta — actually I just call her “little sweetheart” — stopped by to visit us around 6am, so I hung out on my kitchen porch with her for a few minutes. She makes me so happy because, unlike any of my 7 feral cats, she lets me cuddle her!! She hasn’t come around in a couple weeks, so it was such a nice surprise to see her cute little face suddenly pop up at the kitchen window. (Now, if only a little alpaca would come visit!!)

Okay, well, I hope you have a similar day ahead of you — stress-free and really creative! And maybe even an unexpected visit on your kitchen porch from one of God’s delightful little creatures. I have nothing to leave you with today because last night and this morning, I was still listening to Israel Kamakawiwo’ole singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” endlessly on repeat (see yesterday’s post for that link). Well, actually I did also listen to Blixa Bargeld singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” (1995), because William at the a1000mistakes blog over in Australia sent me a link to it during the night. So I’ll leave you with that! Thanks for visiting, gang. I hope you have a great Saturday. I love you guys. See ya.

Trying to Make this Day Not Suck!!!

July 31, 2020 marilyn jaye lewis 2 Comments

Even though I don’t have television and I don’t listen to the radio, I still get plenty of really terrible fucking news.

It can get so difficult to pull myself up out of that garbage once it gets into my head.

COVID 19 is, of course, surging everywhere once again — and not just in America. And even though the vaccine is really really close (yay!! — Phase 3 of the clinical trials are beginning), the cure is what we need because…

Nick Cave’s Instagram feed announced this morning that tickets for the Ghosteen tour of Europe next summer are back on sale and even though I already have my ticket — thanks to my friends in Switzerland — at this rate, without a cure, as an American, I will likely never be allowed to travel anywhere ever again.

So a cure would come in really handy right now. (I’m getting really tired of worrying about absolutely everybody; it’s time for me to be really selfish now. I want to see Nick Cave. So please find the cure!!)

Also, the surge in the violation of the 1st Amendment Rights of college and university students all over America is the scariest fucking thing I’ve encountered short of the white Anarchist-Socialists absconding with the Black Lives Matter movement — and leaving Black people — whose lives actually do matter — once more in the fucking dust. (“Black Lives Matter” now basically only means “I Hate Trump”.)

If you are interested in helping to fight for the Freedom of Speech rights of students, you can check out (and join) the Speech First movement. They are a not-for-profit, run primarily by women, fighting for the rights of students. On Instagram, they are @speech_first.

If you aren’t aware of how bad it’s getting here in the US — students who express opposing viewpoints to the extreme Leftist/Socialist/Progressives masquerading as Democrats, are not only physically assaulted on campuses but receive death threats and have vicious online hate campaigns started against them, which are often sanctioned by the faculty.

And those “old school” teachers who don’t get on board the new train to violent Intolerance Land, also get those online hate campaigns started against them and can then even lose their fucking jobs.

And lest we forget, gang, this once actually happened:

Auschwitz pleads with 'disrespectful' visitors to stop posing on ... — Train tracks leading to Auschwitz

Well, okay.

The earthquake in Los Angeles did lead to canceling my meeting yesterday with Peitor (which has been moved to today instead.) (I know — it’s my day to focus only on writing Thug Luckless: Welcome to P-Town, so, yes, I am a wee bit irritated. ) But I did do a ton of Abstract Absurdity Productions work on my own, yesterday. Including a one-hour phone conference with the accountant in NYC, regarding setting up our LLC, etc., and my brain had pretty much exploded by the time I got off the phone call.

But as far as I know, the earthquake was not Peitor’s fault, so I’m going to try really, really hard to not be irritable through the entire 2-hour phone call today.

And then the rest of the day (and whole weekend, in fact) will be devoted to working on Thug Luckless. So I need to look at the bright side.

Okay. I know you’re really dying to be updated on this: My workout routine now consists of 2 mornings of yoga, 2 mornings of the treadmill, and 2 mornings of aerobics — and then one morning to just say “fuck it” and not workout at all.

I really feel great — I do — but I am not losing even an ounce of fucking weight. It is making me completely insane because, as loyal readers of this lofty blog know so well, I eat really really boring, healthy non-fattening vegetarian food. So why I’ve put on 12 pounds and can’t budge it off of me, is something that leads only to madness if I ponder it too much.

So the only other option is to just stay off the fucking scale until the virus is finally gone from our cultural landscape. So that’s what I’m going to do.

Gone are the days of this past winter, when I had that crazy digital scale that repeatedly enabled me to reach my goal weight in about 3 hours’ time. I miss that!! I don’t fucking care if it’s lying to me at this point, just tell me I lost 12 pounds!! Restore to me the beautiful life I had 12 pounds ago!!

Anyway. I’m not really that insane, but it does bother me.

Okay. I am just going to say one other thing that is bothering the fuck out of me: certain family members. Who refuse to ever just tell me that I’m a good writer. And even when something I’ve written has brought tears to their eyes, they can’t say that what I wrote was good. And if I tell them that other people responded really positively to it, too, then those readers “are closeted gays.”

Okay, thank you. Thanks for that. Thanks for that vote of encouragement, you know? I’m fucking 60 now — you’d think it would stop mattering that my family doesn’t support my writing. Or that they can insult all of my readers, all over the world, in one fell fucking swoop. But it does indeed bug the shit out of me.

Jesus.

But I don’t want to be part of the “cancel culture.” Don’t want to disallow that everyone is entitled to their opinions. So, I just bite my tongue, as they say, and I move on.

Well, all righty! I’m going to get going here, gang. I hope your Friday is really good to you, wherever you are in the world (but not so “Good,” that they send out some Romans to nail you to a cross). Thanks for visiting. Oddly enough, last night, I was back to listening to IZ because his voice makes me so fucking happy. Makes me forget about COVID, and family, and seemingly unrequited love, and LLCs and budgets and investors, dirty politics, and all the fucking damage people can do. So I leave you with it again, even though I only posted it here 2 days ago… Enjoy. I love you guys. See ya.

Hitting It On All Cylinders!!

July 29, 2020 marilyn jaye lewis 4 Comments

Wow, yesterday was just a really, really great day.

It was the best day I’ve had in a really long time.

It was one of those revelatory days. I won’t go into too much detail about it, but several writers were unexpectedly emailing me with feedback about my newest works and it actually kind of blew me away.

One man wrote in response to that new flash-memoir piece I wrote last Friday — he’s not the potential publisher; he’s a much younger Iranian writer, although I think he’s living somewhere in Europe now. He asked if he could read the piece, so I sent it to him a couple days ago, never dreaming it would affect him as much as it seems to have.

Since he is the sole person to have seen that piece so far, it took me by surprise that he liked it as much as he did. And, of course, it made me feel great. Because almost no one responds directly to me about my writing anymore. They just don’t.

And then, my friend in Brussels (a photo- journalist) sent me an email with feedback about my upcoming novel, The Guitar Hero Goes Home.

He is the first person to give me any meaningful feedback whatsoever on the entire novel (other people have given me feedback on specific chapters) — and the manuscript has been circulating for over a year already.

Plus, I only sent it to him a few days ago, and I honestly never dreamed he’d read it so quickly. or have such meaningful feedback for me. There’s one small part about the main guy’s heart attack that I see now I need to clarify. Plus, this friend is also the guy who told me he hated my original title, which I did end up changing, so he doesn’t mince words.

Anyway, he said really kind things about the novel. It’s experimental fiction, which can be dicey, but he ultimately seems to have really liked it. Words such as: compelling, intense, challenging, elusive.

I love those words!

Also, yesterday, one of the webinars I took re: Abstract Absurdity Productions, was about developing a film festival strategy (which festivals to submit films to — if any — and why).

I have had really good experiences with the 4 different film festivals I’ve submitted to in the past, two of them were Tier 2 festivals, one was a Tier 1. I won’t go into all the details, I just want to say that from what I learned yesterday, I became sort of aware that my writing is really good.

The guy giving the webinar is the programmer for a Tier 2 festival that I’ve entered twice over the years, and both times scored just 2 points shy of being a finalist, but that is still a really good score, and they make a big deal about it. It’s still an honor. But what I didn’t know is that that particular festival gets thousands of submissions, 80% of which are no good, right off the bat. So only 20% even get into the judges’ hands

I was quite astounded by that number. And I sort of saw my own projects from a different angle.

The Tier 1 festival I entered was one sponsored by the Academy Awards (the Oscars) and I scored in the top 8% out of 7000 entries that year. I knew that was good, even back then. I wasn’t aiming to win — I was aiming to make connections and see what the feedback was. So I knew the score was good, but from this new distance of time, I see that my work consistently shows up. And in smaller places, it actually even wins the awards.

So, it was just a good day. I was getting a new perspective on my work. Coming to a new understanding about it, since I get so little outside feedback anymore.

And then, of course, Peitor and I did actual “Ab Ab Pro” work on the phone for a few hours and got a lot accomplished. We have narrowed it down to the 3 micro-micro shorts we want to write the scripts for next — with an eye toward shooting them as soon as feasibly possible in these days of COVID. (We have literally 20 micro-micro-shorts in development. And 3 other projects that are from 4-10 minutes in length that we kind of consider our “gems,” including Lita måste gå!)

We do have just so much work to do but it really is moving forward and I feel really happy about that, too.

I’m at that place in my life now where, as long as I can get to the close of a day and feel really good about the day and want to come back and experience my life again tomorrow — that’s what matters now. So I am always so grateful when I do have just a really affirming day.

Okay. Today is all about beginning the re-edits of The Muse Revisited Collection, in anticipation of publishing POD trade paper editions of all three volumes in the collection.

And then Valerie in Brooklyn is supposed to call later to discuss where we are on all this cover art I still need! (Primarily for The Guitar Hero Goes Home so that I can actually finally publish it.)

Nick Cave sent out yet another Red Hand File early this morning — still relating to his really amusing one from the other day, where he tried to score a free piano from Fazioli in Italy. Now it seems that some fans have started up crowdfunding campaigns to buy Nick that really expensive piano. (Not so far from what I thought was a ridiculous comment to make — that we were taking up a collection to buy him one for Christmas. Apparently not so ridiculous a comment after all.)

Anyway, he has asked his fans to not do that. That he can buy his own piano.

Sort of weird, right? That fans took this really delightful post of his and turned it into this thing.

All righty. Well, I’m going to get started on the editing here. I hope you have a really nice Wednesday, wherever you are in the world, gang!! Thanks for visiting. I’m going to leave you with my listening-music from last night. I’ve posted it here before, but it is really just lovely — probably the most popular contemporary ukulele recording out there, even though Israel Kamakawiwo’ole has been dead for a number of years already.

I had this on repeat for I don’t know how long last night — in bed, lights out, sun setting — and it took me to some amazingly rapturous places. His voice was so beautiful. This is his medley of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What A Wonderful World.” Listen. Enjoy. Find peace, baby!! I love you guys. See ya.