Tall Trees in Georgia

In the summer of 2007, my lovely friend Morgan surreptitiously added some cover songs she recorded to my itunes and it took this long until my shuffle actually got around to playing them. I was instantly taken with the song, "Tall Trees in Georgia", which was originally written by Buffy Sainte-Marie (who ironically enough, Timo turned me onto last summer.) I went to Youtube to see if the original video was there and found a rendition by Eva Cassidy. I was immediately taken with Eva's energy. She sits there humbly in front of the audience, acoustic guitar in hand and announces this song as one she's loved since she was a little girl. She sings it so beautifully and when I listened to the words, they described so much of my own life. I looked Eva up and was sad to see that she had passed away from melanoma back in 1996 and that her success came posthumously after someone found her cover of "Over the Rainbow". This is a shout out to a wonderful energy and gratitude for having found her mellifluous voice now. Better late than never.

*MUSIC REVIEW* - Biker Period

One day I was having an epiphany about a photo series that would include really hard men, you know the Hell’s Angel type doing really soft things, like playing with puppies or smelling flowers, etc. I thought this would be an amazing way to show that you can’t judge a book by it’s cover (although that said, most people do wear their inner essence on their outer sleeve.) In a very synergistic moment, my friend, Timo from New York called to tell me he just collaborated with a cellist, Kristen McCord to create an ethereal, ambient body of work and they were naming it, “Biker Period.” I was blown away because that became the perfect name for the visual I was getting. What if rough men got their period and experienced that type of emotional vulnerability that women do each month? Of course, apart from a couple of courses in college, I am no photographer, but the two fit together all the same.

Biker Period is the first ambient music to challenge the top contender on my list, the mighty Brian Eno. Their Myspace page, which describes them as “visual/experimental/southern rock”, is humorously oxymoronic being filled with a string of repetitive somewhat disturbing images and descriptions of being part heaven and part hell. As you wait patiently for the player to kick in (depending on your connection and how well the Myspace server is doing that day), there is no doubt that if heaven had theme music, this would be it.

The song “Wall” begins with lilting guitars that fill my lungs with new breath and once the cello kicks in, tears well in my eyes and make me optimistic for a better world. It may sound a bit grandiose but this makes me experience the beauty of melancholy. Many great saints have said the beauty is in the longing and “Wall” is the perfect song to reflect that longing of your truest desire and inspires fearless faith.

“Balls” kicks in with a little more gusto. The urgent plucking that acts like a door knocking, asking, “Are you there?” The cello responds and lets you know that I am here and I will be there for you as long as you need me. The crescendos reflect the vicissitudes of our lives; the changes in our moods when we feel like we are swinging from a vine, back & forth and wishing for the stillness of serenity while trying to find it within no matter what is happening externally. At one point, you experience bliss and literally hear the cawing of birds. You realize you are present and aware of the moment, which is a rarity in our lives that usually are filled with thoughts of a limiting past and projection of a future that doesn’t exist.

The gravitational pull of “To” almost inspired me to go into spontaneous meditation. Again, they use lilting sounds to draw you into their experience of heaven. You go through the darkness of a moonless night to the light of the sun and then back again into the dark to experience the journey all over again. They add a bit of vocals to accentuate the tone of the instruments, adding more delightful crescendos (honestly, who doesn’t love a good crescendo?)

“Meat” is the darkest note of the bunch and a hint of the hell that they describe. There is a nightmarish tone to it and screams of frustration that are only short-lived but feelings we have just the same. This song being the shortest of the bunch, says to me that the negative doesn’t have to outweigh the positive and if we can drop what we don’t desire quickly, we are more apt to get to what we do choose for ourselves even faster.

Biker Period is only one of the many musical projects that Timo Ellis has going on. Check them out on www.myspace.com/bikerperiod, Timo at www.myspace.com/therealtimoellis and Kristen McCord at www.myspace.com/kirstenmccord.

It's Not You, It's My Libido

I remember fondly the first moment I heard about gay bars at the ripe age of 17, after being denied at the third straight bar we tried to enter, lacking proper ID to get past the bouncer. It went something like this: "I know of a gay bar we can probably get into!" Before I could sing one line of a Culture Club song, my best friend and I were effortlessly gliding through the door at Ryan's, the hottest gay bar in upstate New York. Little did we know we had met our destiny as the hottest fag hags in town.

Nothing could have seemed more glamorous or fun than to be immersed in a gay man's lair where multitudes of hot men danced with us, doing poppers beneath the disco ball to "You Spin Me Round", getting us drinks and lavishing us with the male attention we had never experienced before at any straight bar. Usually, we'd have to wait until the end of the night when all the "cooler girls" were taken and the guys left over were too drunk to even see your face clearly, but horny enough to take you home anyway. Gay men actually appreciated us, commented on how great we looked, genuinely seemed interested in our lives… and our outfits.

Soon my friend and I were the belles of the ball. We increased our entourage of homos, and soon all our closest friends were gay or fag hags that we recruited from the "underage club for future female alcoholics". They not only would happily go shopping with us, but actually had real concern for what clothes we chose, what color lipstick best matched our complexion and taught us how to look "fierce". They fed us the lines to every Madonna song while they cooked for us, made up beds for us to sleep in (while our parents thought we were sleeping at girlfriends houses) and even wrote notes for us so we could skip school when too hung over to deal with Biology. They became not only our best friends, but our mommies & daddys all wrapped up into one.

For years, I really thought I had "boyfriends". Of course there were the ones with only one foot out of the closet who would sometimes make out with me. The only time I ever came home with a hickey was from a gay man (aptly named BJ) but I didn't really know how to tell my furious mother that, so I let her think she was raising a potential slut for the convenience of heterosexual assumption.

Then one night I was watching as a drag queen successfully hit on this really hot guy. Sure, "she" was gorgeous and had a much better butt than me, but as I watched her Adam's apple bobbing up and down and listened to her deep, husky voice with its femme fatale cadence, while my friend Joe simultaneously tried to convince me to distract one guy while he had sex in the bathroom with another, it hit me like a ton of bricks: YOU ARE NEVER GOING TO GET LAID IF YOU CONTINUE TO HANG OUT WITH GAY MEN.

Maybe it was that I was maturing or that I needed more male attention below the neck, but my libido was crying out to me and it was time that I listened. I had to break up with my homos.

I genuinely enjoyed hanging out with them and to this day, I have the best times with my gay friends, but being a wing "fag hag" just isn't enough and they weren't willing to compromise. To be in a bar around straight men (the gays ultimate conquest, btw) watching them drool over women without the hope of a date was akin to a vampire in a room full of pulsating vein filled necks they couldn't bite.

We could still "be friends" but I just couldn't spend every waking moment with them anymore. This didn't fare well with most of them and after I met the love of my life, it really turned sour. My main homo, Greg, who I had planned to start a family with where he could go off with men and I could, well, take care of the kids (side note: WHAT WAS I THINKING?!?) didn't take it so well. He made me mix tapes all with songs relating to the true value of friendship and every conversation turned into how friends stuck with you till the end but when romance was involved one was always taking a huge chance and setting oneself up for potential disaster. I realized then that the gays could be as selfish as the heteros when they wanted their women, but that my primal need for sex and affection could only be relieved by one of the two.

So in essence, it is never you my dear gay boyfriends, it's just my libido.