Songs For The Struggling Artist

The little black velvet notebook reappeared and I thumbed through it. I had called it The Adventure Book and at the top of each page, there was an idea I’d written there at some point. I don’t remember why I decided to do that or why I stopped but I assume it was meant to encourage the development of each idea. In re-reading these ideas from I don’t know how long ago, I was struck by how many of them I’d actually made happen.  To keep reading A Different Measure of Success visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog. This is Episode 407 Song: The Champion Image of my Adventure Book by me, Emily Rainbow Davis To support this podcast: Give it 5 stars in Apple Podcasts. Write a nice review! Rate it wherever you listen or via: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ratethispodcast.com/strugglingartist⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join my mailing list: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.emilyrainbowdavis.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Like the blog/show on Facebook: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

A patron of mine sent me a message about receiving my zine, explaining that her husband found it easier to read the paper version because he didn’t really read so much on the computer. I said I understood and felt similarly – that I much preferred paper to reading on-line. Which is funny, really, because I publish most of my stuff on the internet. This exchange made me think of a moment of transition that happened at one of my jobs years ago. It started like this: I’d been working at BAM as a teaching artist where one of my main gigs was doing pre-show prep workshops. Whenever we’d get assigned a show, we’d receive a packet of information about the show, information about the school, our contracts, and if it was available, a videotape of the show we were going to teach. It had gone like this for quite a few years when the program manager (maybe the third one I’d worked with at that point) started to email us PDFs of show information instead. And this is the moment of transition. To keep reading Print This for

Folks over on the Period Drama subreddit recommended the Russian series, Detective Anna, and as previously established, I am a particular fan of period workplace dramas about women, so this seemed right up my street. Anna is not really a detective, though. She has visions of dead people who then help her solve their murders. It’s a ghost detective show, I guess. Like a Pulling Daisies or The Ghost Whisperer or Medium. (There’s a genre now, it seems.) Detective Anna takes place in the late 1800s in a small Russian town called Zadonsk so it has a pleasing amount of period overcoats and hoods and hats and such. I’m enjoying it for the most part. There’s something about it, though, that feels very familiar and a little uncomfortable. The titular character, Anna (not a detective), is a young woman who has a talent, surrounded by men who do not acknowledge it. To keep reading Something Familiar About this Russian Show visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog. This is Episode 405 Song: Nobody Takes Me Serious

Because I get my Feldenkrais liability insurance through a massage therapy umbrella, they send me Massage Therapy Journal, which I read, even though I am not a massage therapist. I figure I might learn something. What the heck? In the issue I just finished, they talked a lot about how to avoid burnout and take care of one’s self at work. Much of the content involved identifying one’s top strengths and leaning into them. Now, about a decade ago, I got really into the Strengths Movement which was focused on a similar idea. I thought it was interesting for both work and education. I identified stuff I was good at and figured out how to lean in to those things. Then I promptly forgot about it and now I can’t even tell you what I determined my strengths were back then. The burnout article suggested using the VIA strength finder to determine your top five strengths and values. This sounded familiar to me. I thought I probably had taken this test before so I searched for it on my computer. Yes, yes, I had – about a

The other night, I found myself watching an interview with a theatre practitioner I admire a great deal. He’s an amazing performer, director, teacher and thoughtful analyst of his craft. I found myself taking notes – adding them to previous documents I’d created, filled with his tips and tricks. But as I was taking notes, full of enthusiasm and excitement, I felt an undercurrent of “Why?” Why was I furiously writing down his clown exercises or his recipe for comic developments? I haven’t put on a clown show since 2009. I haven’t had need to exercise my physical comedy chops in ages. I know a fair amount about these things. I care about them. I still have curiosity about them. If any of my beloved teachers gave a workshop here, I’d sign up for it. But not because I have any use for it. I don’t have a life for which any of this knowledge is necessary, which somehow makes me very sad. There’s something about having spent decades growing my knowledge about things that I now never get a chance to exercise that fee

Despite my appreciation for Yorgos Lanthimos’ earlier work, I was not planning on seeing Poor Things. A lot of my feminist friends were not fans and I figured I could skip it. But then I learned that Kathryn Hunter was in it, playing a madam, and I got curious. (I worked with Kathryn on a show in London a while ago so she’s very dear to me.) So I watched it. Apparently there was a whole conversation around whether or not this was a feminist film. (Answer: not.) But it is, as my friend said, some men’s idea of a feminist film. Which is really not the same. This is not to say that men can’t make feminist films. If Lanthimos made a bio pic of Gloria Steinem, maybe that would be a feminist film. (Though maybe not if he chose to focus exclusively on her relationships with men or only her Playboy bunny stunt but otherwise it would be hard to NOT make a feminist film about Steinem.) But while this film may pass the Bechdel test on a technicality (I think the conversation between Emma Stone and Kathryn Hunter was lon

The other day, I was feeling so much despair about how things are and where we were headed as a culture. I thought, “If someone showed up with a time machine and asked me if I wanted to go back to the 70s or 80s to live, I’d absolutely say yes.” I told my friend about this feeling and she said, “I’m coming with you.” We figured we should bring her kids and her husband (she was pretty sure they’d want to go, too), and my partner and maybe another friend of ours and her family – if they were up for it – and we were ready to start over in the past. A past that would be familiar, because we lived through those decades as children, but would likely look different through our adult eyes. To keep reading I Would Accept that Time Travel Invitation visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog. This is Episode 401 Song: Like the Weather Image by J Huang via Unsplash To support this podcast: Give it 5 stars in Apple Podcasts. Write a nice review! Rate it wherever you listen or via: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http

Despite my swearing off Wrongfully Convicted podcasts, I found myself watching a similarly themed docu-series recently. I was maybe halfway into the first episode before I realized it was a doozy of a wrongful conviction case. Were it not for the theatre element, I might have quit watching right then. I’m glad I stuck around. Mind Over Murder is about the impact a murder had on a small town in Nebraska called Beatrice (Bay-AA-trice). Six people were sent to prison for the crime, then pardoned and exonerated but it’s still a painful and contentious issue in the town, even decades after the events. The documentary shows us people who are still convinced that the exonerated people did it and tells the stories of many of the people involved. All of that would have been enough for a fascinating documentary – but happening alongside it is a community theatre production of a verbatim style show about the situation. Not surprisingly, for this theatre maker, the theatrical element was the most touching piece. The show

The venue told us to tag them on social media so they could share our posts. I said, “We’ve tagged you multiple times on Twitter, TikTok and Facebook. Are you not seeing them?” “Oh,” they said, “We’re not active there. I guess it’s really just Instagram.” For some people (mostly Millennials, I guess), “Social media” just means Instagram. I happen to loathe Instagram the most. So for me, I lean toward Twitter and Facebook – but it’s all social media to me. I still post things to Instagram, even though I don’t like it. I figure I can’t afford to leave anyone out. Sometimes something hits on LinkedIn. Sometimes a thing is a hit on TikTok. It’s possible that these are sort of generational silos, where different generations gather in one place or another. I guess since Friendster and MySpace are gone. Gen X tends to go wherever – and I think that is actually a useful instinct because our numbers are small. So when sharing our work, for example, we can’t just talk to ourselves. To keep reading Social Media Silos vi

A friend of mine has developed a show to be performed on Zoom. It’s an innovative concept and she’s doing that innovating in a form where people don’t necessarily expect to see innovation. She asked someone to attend this show and they said, “I don’t do Zoom,” which understandably got under my friend’s skin a little bit. It’s a little like someone saying they don’t go to the theatre when you give them a postcard for your show in a theatre. To keep reading "I Don't Do Zoom" visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog. This is Episode 398 Song: Video Killed the Radio Star Image by Vinicius "amnx" Amano via Unsplash To support this podcast: Give it 5 stars in Apple Podcasts. Write a nice review! Rate it wherever you listen or via: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ratethispodcast.com/strugglingartist⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join my mailing list: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.emilyrainbowdavis.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Like the blog/show on Facebook: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

There are probably some artists that aren’t utterly flummoxed by the question “What’s next?” but I am not one of them. It’s usually an inner cascade of “Oh dear god, I don’t know! How will I go on with no real plan! This person just wants a simple answer. I have nothing. No plans. Nothing is next! I’m doomed!” This is not because I don’t have any possibilities on the horizon. I’m just not ready to look at the horizon, particularly if I’m in the middle of a project. Maybe to regular people, with regular jobs, “What’s next?” seems like a perfectly normal question – but to me, and a lot of artists I know, it is fraught with challenging uncertain questions. To read more of What's Next? visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog. This is Episode 397 Song: What now? What's next? Where to? Image by Tim Mossholder via Unsplash To support this podcast: Give it 5 stars in Apple Podcasts. Write a nice review! Rate it wherever you listen or via: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ratethispodcast.com/strugg

Since I have several podcasts that are now hosted by Spotify, I receive their newsletter (four copies, one for each podcast) which offers podcasting tips. I mostly ignore them, as I have read MANY tips previously and there’s rarely anything new. I clicked on the most recent one though, since it was about how to grow your audience. I’m in the middle of putting out a new podcast so I figured I could use some reminders of that kind of information. Ultimately, there was nothing in it I hadn’t seen before but something about it made me think about what they were suggesting in a new way. So many tips involved making some other form of media alongside the podcast. It felt like they were saying that in order to have success as a podcaster, you had to make videos. To bring ears to your podcast, you should also write a newsletter. It struck me as absolutely absurd. In order to create one thing, you have to become expert at several others. Let me tell you, I didn’t get into audio to make video. If I wanted to make video

The podcast I was listening to was about the crisis in journalism – about how so many news sites were disappearing, how so many journalists are losing their jobs and about how the landscape was changing so dramatically and not for the better. (This country has lost one third of its newspapers and two thirds of its journalists since 2005 and it is accelerating.) I was only half listening – truth be told. I was still pretty wiped out from COVID and I was dozing a fair amount. But then – after a history lesson in how journalism was funded and then how that landscape shifted and then shifted again – I sat bolt upright at a concept the guest (Ezra Klein) brought up. He said we should not think of ourselves as consumers of the internet but as generators. His feeling was that we are all rather passively engaging with the internet, without realizing that we are creating it while we do that. Basically, the idea is that we are creating with our clicks. What we engage with and look at and pay attention to is the interne

On Monday, March 4th, I tested positive for COVID. I tested negative on March 1st when I woke up with a swollen throat and subsequently slept for the later part of the weekend. By Monday, the fever had gone and I was feeling a bit better. But I tested anyway because I had a rehearsal to go to and I wanted to be able to go in clear. Surprise! The thing is – I have been very careful. I’ve rarely eaten indoors at a restaurant. I don’t go indoors for longer than a couple of minutes without a mask. I wear a mask on the subway and also the grocery store, two places I’m often alone in my caution. The week before I tested positive, I’d barely gone anywhere. The lone risks I was taking were related to my show – rehearsing and attending our shows without masks and celebrating our performances indoors unmasked afterwards. That’s it. I knew I was taking those risks (for the first time) and I did it with full awareness of what I was doing. If they’d have been responsible for this case, I would have felt it was an appropri

Close observers of my work might notice some commonalities between my most recent audio drama, The Defense, and my previous audio drama, The Dragoning. They both feature nice women who develop magical defensive and destructive abilities. They both hinge on fear and power. They are structured very differently and the contexts are not the same, but at the center of both are nice and dangerous women. You might say I’m trying to work something out. We’re in the middle of rehearsing for and recording The Defense and sometimes I’ve found myself self-conscious about the things these audio dramas have in common. I imagine some critic saying. “Doesn’t this woman have any other ideas?” But, of course, I do have other ideas. I have so many other ideas! But when an idea presents itself for realization, sometimes you just have to move forward, even if you’ve looked at a particular theme before. You don’t throw ideas back into the muse’s face when she presents them to you, even if they look a little like one you received b

A while back, I wrote about how they started locking up the toothpaste at my chain pharmacy/drugstore. Since then the drugstore has only expanded their lock-up program. Now, they lock up soap and deodorant and vitamins and eye drops and much more. There were a lot of news stories about this; These big drug stores (CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid, etc) were claiming that there was a massive theft problem at their stores and they needed help to fix it. But then, those stories were debunked. Not only has theft not gone up, it has, in fact, gone down. It turns out that these big drug stores are attempting to make more money by getting governments to pay for their security – because of all this CRIME that’s increasing. This has worked for them. Here In New York, our governor just launched an initiative that would give these places a tax break and provide extra security for them. To keep reading Are They Trying to Go Out of Business? visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog. This is Episode 392 Song: Bright Future

There’s not nearly as much criticism as I expected in this artist’s life. When I got started, I really thought people would be lining up to tell me what was wrong with my work all the time. I think it’s what a lot of people are afraid of when it comes to sharing their creations. What are people going to say? I know now that the thing people are most likely going to say is nothing. I want to be clear that I’m not asking for criticism. Sometimes nothing is better than whatever catty thing someone wants to tell you. I’m not complaining about not receiving insults to my work. But what I was NOT prepared for and continue to be floored by is the extraordinary indifference to it. It feels like – I come out on stage in my elaborate costume that I spent weeks making out of found objects and I expect some applause. I’ve just made a grand entrance! But – not only do I not get applause, or boos, – the crowd doesn’t even stop talking. So I stand there awkwardly in my egg carton gown trying to work out what I should do. No

We decided to watch the second season of The Wheel of Time (A fantasy adventure show on Amazon) and by the middle of the show, we were laughing our faces off. This was not because the show is funny. It is not. It takes itself very seriously. But we were cracking ourselves up due to the near universal use of Whisper Acting. The Wheel of Time is hardly the first show to go all in on Whisper Acting but they go hard and it happened to be the show where it started to become ridiculous. We started talking about it because the dialogue was so hard to hear or understand and yet the action sequences were loud and aggressive. We’ve read many of the articles and watched the videos about the trends in sound design that make this happen and have led to an extraordinary percentage of people using the closed captions or subtitles when watching TV. It’s partly the sound design, sure – but it’s also the acting. So many people are whispering. Like, so many. Is this what they’re teaching in acting school these days? If so, I ki

In the past few years, when I’ve made theatre or audio drama, I’ve mostly drawn on people who were already in my circle or in the circle of my circle. This is generally my preferred way of doing things, as it allows me to avoid the more businessy side of the business. (I know it’s show business but for me, it’s art.) But this time, neither my circle nor my circles’ circles were big enough to do the job of casting my show. I had to engage with some casting websites. The last time I went to a casting website was 2018 and they’ve changed a lot in the intervening years. They’ve also changed a lot since I started my company. To keep reading An Indie Theatre Person Visits Some Casting Sites, visit Songs for the Struggling Artist blog. This is Episode 389 Song: The Safety Dance Image by JerzyGorecki via Pixabay To support this podcast: Give it 5 stars in Apple Podcasts. Write a nice review! Rate it wherever you listen or via: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ratethispodcast.com/strugglingartist⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join m

This surprise re-broadcast is brought to you by COVID 19! Almost four years after COVID came into our lives, I have, for the first time, tested positive. I have literally no idea where I could have picked it up but here we are. So, in honor of my positive test and the upcoming four year anniversary of this business, I give to you this encore episode. It was 195. If you'd like to read it instead, visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog. Song: Dragon Ate My Boyfriend Image by Mauriciokell via Pixabay To support this podcast: Give it 5 stars in Apple Podcasts. Write a nice review! Rate it wherever you listen or via: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ratethispodcast.com/strugglingartist⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join my mailing list: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.emilyrainbowdavis.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Like the blog/show on Facebook: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/SongsfortheStrugglingArtist/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Support me on Patreon: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.patreon.com/emilyrdavis⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Or help me pay