Rent, Touring, Waterbeds, and an Ode to Kindness in an Age of Tension

Download the free MP3 of "Ay Del" by Haale, below.

In 1999 I moved from an apartment on 4th street on the outskirts of Park Slope, Brooklyn to a room on the corner of Rivington and Allen on the Lower East Side, right above a Mexican restaurant that served greasy eggs with home fries for $2.50.

I had a room in a two bedroom apartment that I shared with an actress and dancer. She made good artichoke dip, read People magazine, and occasionally did showgirl gigs in Atlantic City to supplement her income. My room was a little square, around 11 feet by 11 feet. I was subletting from her ex-roommate. He had emptied everything out of that room, except for one piece of furniture: a king-sized waterbed. Splayed out like a manatee, taking up 80% of the floor space, there it was, a shining monument to impracticality, my king-sized waterbed.

When I was a kid growing up in Philly and hanging with my lip-gloss wearing disco babysitter named Denise, I heard about waterbeds a few times. It was the 80's and waterbeds were a dying breed, a dumb idea that still evoked the mystique of a 1970's California party scene. When I thought of waterbeds I thought of shag rugs, psychedelic posters, large aquariums, and sex.

But here we were in the post-sex, self-help year of 1999 (or at least of my life). As I stood there looking at the waterbed, I thought, this might be a good thing, the waterbed, maybe I'll have some soothing dreams of being at sea. Sails and waves and distant horizons. Could be a healing thing. Could lower my basal anxiety level!

I paid about $600 a month for the small, well-lit room and the magic bed. To my friend who paid the same for a two room house in North Carolina, with a backyard and a washer and dryer, this was preposterous. To most people I knew in NYC, it was a steal. In that little room, I started writing poetry. I had a small blue end table I had painted myself, a hanging shelf, with a wonderful selection of cassettes--yes cassettes. Of Elis Regina, James Blood Ulmer, Caetano Veloso, Eric Dolphy. I wrote some good poems in that room. Something about the simplicity of it all helped put me in the right frame of mind. Only the essentials. Paper, pen, music, books, my undulating bed. And a feeling that I was living simply, not cluttering my life with things.

A year before that, I was down in Boulder, Colorado at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics for a summer writing program started by two great poets of the Beat generation, Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman. One day during class Anne wondered out loud why any of us "young writers" lived in NYC anyway. Rent was so high. When she lived in NYC, she went on to inform us, she paid almost nothing for rent. She was free to read, write, commune with other writers all day long. If she was a young writer today, she said, she'd live somewhere in South America. There, she imagined, and I agreed, the vitality of art and culture might not be stifled by exorbitant bills.

Right now, in 2007, we are living in an age of manufactured terror and fiscal tension. The rubble of unending wars, nuclear proliferation, dissolution of Geneva Conventions, 2500/month rent bills, mountains of water bottles, and pcb ridden waters are dark consequences of our (or some people's) addiction to power, money, and so-called progress. While all these hellish elements are swirling about our globe, we are trapped in the mundane, overwhelmed by the cost of living, and enslaved to our own rabid consumerism. Not good for music, art, or anyone's nerves.

Over the 10 years I've been playing music in NY, I've played with many amazing musicians. The ones that aren't struggling to stay afloat with a full time job, and are lucky enough to sustain a living by playing gigs, usually play with many bands. It's rare to see a great musician have the luxury of time or the luxury of a cheap rehearsal space to spend all their days on one or two projects that might not be lucrative, but might have some profound meaning to them, and might eventually lead to music that is innovative and authentic enough to enrich our lives if we put down our cell phones long enough to listen.

Kind of depressing, but of course there's always something good happening in the cracks of any system. And as things get worse, our coping mechanisms get stronger. Community. Tribalism. Barter Economy. Friendship. Helping each other out. In this age, kindness and generosity are our most precious natural resources. And then of course there is nature, and the sea. As ugly as the planet has become in places due to pollution and war, we still, in this country and on most of the globe are lucky to have hundreds of thousands of square miles of park, forest, desert, river. It's our duty to enjoy this and to raise our level of happiness. The more miserable we get, the more miserable we allow our governments to behave. Only hurt people hurt people, and so we owe it to each other and the planet to heal ourselves, and quit the nonsense!

Over the last 6 months, since Jan 2007, I've been touring with my band. We've got to experience the best of all this bright-side talk. Kind, funny, generous human beings, as well as creeks, caves, redwoods, oh puentia cacti, and waterfalls. We've stayed with old and new friends in Philly, DC, New Orleans, SF, LA, Chicago, Yucca Valley, Austin, Santa Cruz, Great Barrington, Atlanta, Charlotte etc. etc. Sincere, hospitable people, they are everywhere.

After Bonnaroo, we jumped in a river in Tennessee, sat under a waterfall and it beat upon our backs like the earth had 1,000 fists. We went to the desert of Yucca Valley and slept under the sky. We covered our bodies in clay on a tiny deserted island in the middle of Lake Norman in North Carolina. We ate rice and vegetables beside a bonfire, while we listened to Ben, the arid agriculturalist outside Joshua Tree, tell us stories about his urban punk days in Chicago when he had one foot Mohawks, and in his glasses I saw our little fire dance, and in his eyes I thought I saw a found man. He showed us what he had grown in the desert, radishes, for instance, I ate one. It was delicious, and so was the water that came out of a spring he found on the land.

Yes there is terror, there is fiscal tension, but there is also joy and there is also love and there is also beauty. And more people are full of it and/or capable of being full of it than we would ever guess. Isn't it important to know this, say it, feel it, tap into it, be it, and pass it on? Surely more than any pill, self-help book, or waterbed, knowing this and living it lowers my anxiety level,

And so I say...
Nothing we can buy will fill our gnawing souls.
We are of the sea, of the desert, of the mountains, of this world, we are alive---what a pleasure, what a gift.

As the wonderful poet Sonia Sanchez once said, "This is not romantic, this is hard-core."

I listen to the crickets.
I throw off all that deadened me.

Haale will be perform on Wednesday, August 8, at the Highline Ballroom, 431 West 16th Street, NYC

Photos by Nader Davoodi and Aaron Pichinson.

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