I Ching: the creative.

In what I hope will be a new regular feature, I'd like to share with you the I Ching reading I got the other day.

For those of you who don’t know, the I Ching is the Book of Changes, an ancient system of Chinese divination that offers various subtle descriptions of situations one might encounter in life and how best to handle them.


My Mom has always been really into the I Ching, and when I was a bratty 16-year-old I would grudgingly go along with her readings. Then one time in college I borrowed her book and the reading it gave me was so eerily, exactly appropriate to my situation that it gave me pause. Since then I’ve taken it pretty seriously. And lately I’ve started adding this to my morning routine (since I’m currently unemployed I have the luxury of crafting a morning routine that isn’t ‘jump in the shower and grab a bagel on your way out the door.’)

Critics might argue that the answer is not found in the book at all, but in yourself –- and to this I say: BINGO. The book is a tool for sorting through your perceptions and getting some perspective and figuring out what to do. Something you can’t always figure out for yourself.

Anyway. All of this is to give you some context for this bit of wisdom I received the other day. I got the hexagram “the creative” which is the very first one in the book of changes. (The second one is “the receptive.”) It told me this:

The course of the creative alters and shapes beings
until each attains its true, specific nature.

RIGHT ON, I Ching. This mantra has been sticking in my head. It makes me think of the things I’ve learned through creative projects –- things that taught me about performance, sure, but more importantly made me who I am. (And of course, the I Ching isn’t talking about the creative in terms of art but in terms of the most basic life-giving principles.)

Specifically, I immediately thought about these three creative experiences in the last five years, and what they taught me:

BLUE on tour in Poland, 2004 & 2005:

• How to sing and be heard outside. How to hold attention and throw focus.

• How to push past limitations. How to keep going when you are exhausted and the situation is fucked. (Like: there isn’t enough power for lights so we’re going to have people turn their car headlights on. Or, a dog has wandered onstage and is peeing on the set. Or, the set is on fire. I could go on and on.)

• Taking the sheen off the idea that skills can be transferred to you magically upon contact with a “master”. The real training, what makes you strong and reliant, is in doing difficult things.

• How to teach when you can’t rely on language. How to adapt exercises to meet my own needs and the needs of the group.

• How to be a good host. How to make soup in 15 minutes.

Undine (2008-2010) (this makes it seem like Undine is a short-lived friend of mine) (which maybe she is):

• How to withstand pure terror. How to withstand a panic attack. How to do something when you really, truly think you can’t do it.

• How my voice works, how to make it strong without pushing too hard.

• The curative properties of BEET BLAST.

• How to make decisions. Lots of them.

• Why sometimes the best thing you can do is be brutally honest with someone about what you think, and sometimes the worst thing you can do is be “nice” and gloss over the fact that you are not in agreement.

Repeat After Me (2007-present) (now it’s like I’m writing a resume):

• The strength of impure sources, impure training: the strength of a mutt.

• How to be super physical & vocal without hurting myself. (Of course this was only learned after a prolonged period of being super physical & vocal and hurting myself).

• The thrill of doing the thing you fear the most –- the liberation that results from doing it. That’s how you become fearless.

• The liberation in getting a truly bad review. The liberation didn't come right away, of course -- first there was the jaw dropping and the stomach churning. But later there was the sick pride that comes from being loathed for your work.

In general, the thread I see running through these three experiences is:

• Working with your body & voice, with strength and purpose, without pushing too hard

• Withstanding fear, panic, exhaustion and failure, and how this makes you stronger.

• Relying on yourself and trusting your gut when it comes to learning, teaching and growing.

• Learning how to do something by first learning how NOT to do it.

And that’s pretty interesting.

THANKS, I CHING!

Battling Perfectionism

I think of myself as a recovering perfectionist. The clearest insight I had about this came when I was seeing a therapist two years ago (back when I could afford the luxury of mental health) and told her that I struggled with perfectionism, but not really, because actually I wasn’t doing anything well enough to qualify as a perfectionist.

Wait, she said. So what you’re telling me is you would be a perfectionist if you could just do things a little more perfectly?

Well… yes.

Yeah, that still counts as perfectionism.

Because I was going through my actions as if there were a level of perfection that it was possible to achieve. Because I was comparing myself to mythical people (or the real people around me who I was remaking in my head as more perfect beings) and finding myself lacking. Because I was beating myself up all the time for not doing things the right way, the better way, the more thorough way, the more organized way. The perfect way.

So that Perfectionism -- damn, is she a tricky beast. She invades your thinking without you even realizing it. One day you’re taking notes at a company meeting, the next day you’re hunched at your computer taking an extra thirty minutes to get the font right so people can read it, the next day you’re taking an extra hour to organize everyone’s action items at the top of the notes even though nobody reads them (of course there’s a nice dose of Martyr / Victim Complex that always seems to crop up alongside Perfectionism. They’re sort of like that mean girl in elementary school and her super sweet best friend).

(Wait, except Peppermint Patty isn’t really a perfectionist, is she? Well, you get the idea.)

Anyway, in my epic struggles to not let Perfectionism boss me around, I have found a few techniques helpful:

• Leaping into things before I’m fully prepared -- leaping past that urge to be “prepared enough” (which is impossible) by jumping in when I know that I am in fact not fully prepared. A sort of “fuck you” to perfectionism.

• Laughing at the things I have done perfectly and not taking their supposed perfection seriously. As in: look at these amazing gleaming golden NOTES I took at the company meeting. Aren’t they perfect? Aren’t they an incredible shining example of what notes should be?

• Admitting right away when I don’t know how to do something or think I may have done it wrong. In effect, thwarting that perfectionist desire to know everything and hide all failure by being openly, publicly honest about my mistakes and what I don’t know.

• Remembering that a completed imperfect task matters more than a task that comes in late because I needed to know more, prepare more, edit more, etc.

Caveat: one undesired outcome of these techniques is that I sometimes overcompensate and use this as an excuse to NOT PREPARE. Which is not the same thing at all, and only gives the Inner Perfectionist fodder for telling me what an incompetent, lazy, unbaked fool I am. No: the trick is to prepare -- to take things seriously -- but to also leap in no matter what when leaping is called for.

I must admit, though, there is one aspect of Perfectionism I haven’t yet figured out how to handle, and that is other perfectionists.

Again I turn to Peanuts for inspiration. Of course Peppermint Patty isn't the Perfectionist, it's freaking LUCY! Watch, she's basically my Inner Perfectionist in cartoon form, and Charlie Brown is her poor misguided Martyr / Victim aka my SENSITIVE SOUL:

In the same way that recovering alcoholics find the company of practicing alcoholics to be the most challenging, and in the same way that recovering alcoholics can’t expect other people to change their drinking habits -- I have to figure out how to interact with people who display perfectionist tendencies, without giving in to perfectionism myself and without expecting them to change.

Because maybe they don’t have a problem with perfectionism. Maybe it works for them. I imagine that some people take great comfort and pride in their drive for perfection. In fact a lot of things in this world would not exist were it not for perfectionists. So I’m not knocking it. But for me it’s toxic.

So what I need to figure out is how to tolerate other people’s desire for attaining perfection, without letting it trigger my own toxic desires. It’s pretty tricky. Maybe I need to find the equivalent of AA for Perfectionists.

Hello. My name is Faith Helma, and I am a perfectionist. It’s been three days since I gave in to a desire to be perfect. (Ok, fine: three hours) (Ok you got me, I am actually obsessively editing this post RIGHT NOW. Fine, I’ll just post it.)

There you go.

Variations on Causa a la Chiclayana

Alright, well since nobody cares about my sensitive business plan, I’m going to start writing about food. Not to say that this is a “food” blog. It is still a “sensitive person with crazy impossible business ventures” blog. But damn it, food is something I love to prepare and eat and think about. And in fact the more seriously I take the rest of my creative pursuits, the more I recognize that cooking is just another creative outlet. Plus it satisfies the other need of mine, to be of use to people.

So I’m going to start writing down some of my cooking experiences. And I’m not going to take photos yet because I have a camera phobia.

I fall in the improvisational camp when it comes to cooking. I love to read cookbooks and food blogs (my favorites right now are The Pioneer Woman and Bitten -- though Mark Bittman has now been absorbed into the Diner's Journal so we'll see if my love continues). I consult recipes for reference but I can’t bear to cook something exactly the same way twice so I usually start to tinker with them right away.

For instance: I found this 1950s Latin American cookbook which is fascinating (it translates Salsa Cruda as “uncooked spiced tomato sauce”) and actually has a wealth of recipes I’d never encountered before. I found a recipe for Causa a la Chiclayana (seasoned mashed potatoes with fish and vegetables) that intrigued me, because instead of mashing potatoes with milk and butter and serving them with gravy, you mix them with lemon juice, chopped onions and olive oil. I made this meal and was blown away by how simple and mindblowingly delicious the potatoes were – still potatoes, still comforting and starchy and filling, but also light and spicy and piquant.

Now I make them at least once a week, and can’t go back to the regular kind of mashed potatoes. I also can’t help but add in variations. Here’s the recipe from the cookbook, and then some variations:

Causa a la Chiclayana:



And now for the variations:

Variation #1: I like to let the onions sit in lemon juice & salt for a while before adding the olive oil, making them essentially into lightly pickled onions.

Variation #2: I started using dried chipotles instead of fresh chiles. You know what, you should go find dried chipotles and start using them in everything. You can chop them up and cook them in butter for fried eggs, or add them to chili or any beans you’re cooking… anyway I won’t go on and on about it, just understand that they are divine.

Variation #3: I started adding in fresh parsley from our garden, which is the only thing that keeps on growing through the winter.

Variation #4: I realized if you didn’t mash the potatoes and instead roughly chopped them you’d have an incredible potato salad. I am waiting for the right summer party to appear so I can bring this. I bet it would be awesome with hard boiled eggs too, and maybe even chopped pickles.

Variation #5: This week I was boiling the potatoes and had made the lemon onion mixture, and I decided to also make a kale salad my friend Judy showed me how to make (using raw kale, but you massage it with your hands so it breaks down almost like it’s been steamed). While I was massaging the kale I had a flash – I should mix it in with the potatoes! So I did! And it was awesome. Kind of like colcannon but less hearty & creamy, and sprightlier because of the lemon and chiles.

Variation #6: my favorite variation: you can fry up the leftover potatoes (if there are any) in the morning for breakfast.

Look at all those variations! Basically that one recipe opened my eyes up to a huge revelation: that mashed potatoes are incredibly versatile. My favorite thing to serve with these potatoes is a big pot of beans, with fresh tomatoes chopped up and spooned on top (when they’re in season). Imagine that! Before I encountered this cookbook I would have thought lemony mashed potatoes topped with fresh tomatoes was the wierdest dish ever.

Anyway. So that’s my cooking lesson for today. A very sensitive cooking lesson. Let me know if you end up cooking this and come up with variations of your own!

Beet Blast!

The time has come, to give the world my recipe for BARSZCZ. That’s Polish for borscht (you can read about the variations on barszcz/borscht elsewhere).

Some background on my Borscht obsession.

People of non-Polish or Jewish descent never get excited when I talk about my fabulous borscht recipe, so I call it beetroot soup. But that doesn’t really get people excited either. So now I’m thinking about calling it BEET BLAST.

I’ve seriously been considering starting a company where I bottle up my special BEET BLAST and sell it as a miracle cure for colds and hangovers*.

Because, no joke, that is what it is. In the last year I have made up a big pot of BEET BLAST at least once a month, and I’ve only gotten sick once – and that was over in a day.

I originally tasted this soup when I was in Poland, land of endless tasty soups (including pickle soup). Just about every restaurant and bar mleczny offered the delicious red barszcz (pronounced badly by me as BAR-shuh-chuh). At train stations you could pay like a dollar and get a styrofoam cup filled with steaming red broth.

I loved it but didn’t even think about making it myself because I assumed there was some complicated soaking/extracting/fermenting process involved, and anyway I’d never eaten a beet before or held one in my hands so I had no inkling of how to cook with one.

Flash forward a couple years, and our beautiful, mad Polish director friend Luba is staying with us while she directs a play. I learned a lot from her but the most profound, simple thing I picked up was her approach to cooking. We would come home after a long, grueling night of rehearsal and whereas I might throw a frozen pizza in the oven, she would pull out lentils and carrots and celery and onions and toss things in a pot with water and before I’d even taken my shoes off she’d have a delicious, thick lentil stew bubbling on the stove ready to eat.

One day we had a party. I think we were barbecue-ing, and everyone came bearing six packs of beer and hot dogs. While we sat around the kitchen table gossiping and drinking beers, Luba calmly filled a gigantic stock pot with water and threw in carrots, celery, onion and freshly scrubbed beets. At the end of the night she cut lemons in half, squeezed them into the pot and announced that the barszcz was done. Now, I don’t remember how it tasted that night – but I do remember the next morning when we all woke up and stumbled into the kitchen. Luba ladled rich ruby red broth into mugs and passed them around, saying, “Here. Polish cure for hangover.” OH MY GOD. It restored order to the world.

So, flash forward some more. It is a week before my solo show opens and my throat is sore and I can feel sickness coming on. I need my voice for the show. I panic. I am pacing the aisles of the grocery store late at night throwing garlic and oranges and cough drops into my basket when I wander past some beets in the produce section. The memory of Luba’s delicious soup comes floating back to me, and so I buy them and take them home and boil them up in a big pot of water. I squeeze in some lemon, and then I drink the broth.

People, I have tried the various “cures” for colds – popping vitamin c, gulping cayenne, lemon and honey in hot water, chicken soup with ten cloves of garlic. I’ve always gotten a cold anyway. But after I drank down this elixir, the oncoming cold was GONE. And this despite a punishing schedule of tech rehearsals and neverending singing!

So, I am a believer. I am a proselytizer, even though I know that preaching about something is the surest way to turn people away from it. I can’t help it. I WANT THE WORLD TO KNOW ABOUT BEET BLAST.

Here is my simple, lazy, very untraditional** recipe for…

DELICIOUS MAGICAL BEET BLAST

+ Fill up a big old pot with water and set it to boiling on the stove.

+ Take 2-3 beets. Scrub them clean, and if they’re especially gnarly, peel them. Cut them into quarters and toss them into the pot. The water will immediately turn dark pink or red… if it’s more pink than red I might add another beet.

+ If the beets have greens attached, wash those and toss them in as well.

+ Chop up onion, carrot and celery. One each is good, but if you have less it’s ok. I just use whatever I have on hand. And don’t chop them pretty – you won’t be eating the vegetables themselves.

+ If you have parsley, throw in a generous handful. And throw in a clove or two of garlic.

Honestly, that’s about it. If you’ve got other bits of vegetables around you want to throw in – potatoes, turnips, mushrooms – anything you’d add to a regular vegetable stock will taste great.

+ Let it simmer on the stove for at least an hour. The house will smell so healthy and delicious. Then take a lemon, cut it in half and squeeze both halves into the broth. You can use lime in a pinch, though I don’t think the flavors mesh quite as well. Taste it – you may need to add more lemon.

+ Add salt and pepper. And then you can either drain out the mushy used up vegetables (saving the broth, of course!) or just let them sit in the bottom of the pot while you ladle out the broth. Luba said if you leave them there the flavor will get more intense each day. But some people get kind of grossed out seeing the vegetable parts floating around in there.

What I do nowadays is make a big old pot of this stuff, freeze half the broth and drink the rest over the next 2-3 days. Then you’ve got some on hand if you get sick and can’t get out of bed.

* This will fit in nicely with my kindergarten classroom/karaoke lounge/therapeutic dance party business.

** Supposedly the traditional Polish way to make this is to let the soup naturally ferment and sour (as opposed to adding the lemon). I’m not badass enough to try that yet, though.

How to Rock at Karaoke

Since I'm on a "how to" kick. And since singing is occupying too much brain space. I present to you: my SEVEN STEPS TO ROCKING AT KARAOKE.

Actually - I don't know that following these steps will guarantee that you become a karaoke star. They're really just my arbitrary, iron-clad rules for how one should approach karaoke. Are there other metals you can be clad in, if you're not absolutely certain? If so, I'd rather call these rules copper-clad.

COPPER-CLAD! If I ever form a clog-dancing a cappella women's celtic singing group, this is what we'll call ourselves. Not, as my dad suggested, LOVIN' COVEN.

Now, I should say before I go into the SEVEN STEPS: I am assuming that you are going out to sing karaoke with a group of good friends who will stand up and applaud you no matter what you do. God help you if you go by yourself. That is madness (though, scroll down to read the craziest karaoke story of my life, to find out what happens when you go karaoke-ing by yourself). It is much easier to be crazy and stupid if you have good friends around you cheering you on. AND BY GOD, I WANT YOU TO BE CRAZY AND STUPID. It is your inalienable right.

Step 1: Do not give a fuck. Attitude is the most important thing. If you have a crazy hat or scarf or some other costume element, wear it. The crazier the better. People will love it. Seriously, this trumps singing ability any day. You can be a great singer and bomb at karaoke by having no presence. You can be a terrible singer but rock out by being flamboyant. Presence is way more important than hitting the right notes.

Step 2: Pick a song you know backwards and forwards and love with all your heart. Say, “A Little Less Conversation, A Lot More Action.” There is a reason someone always sings a Neil Diamond song at a karaoke bar, and it’s because his songs are very easy. Same goes for anything by Phil Collins, Nancy Sinatra and Jimmy Buffett (bless his heart). But you’ll be fine if you pick something you sing along to on the radio or in the shower. Don’t think about it too much, just pick something. And word to the wise: be careful of Pink Floyd, Tina Turner and Janis Joplin. They are harder than you think.

Step 3: Sing it with gusto – but not so much gusto that your voice cracks. Keep a tiny bit of yourself pulled back so you can hear your voice and how it sounds.

Step 4: If you can do it without looking at the words, work in some basic moves – turning your back on the audience then whipping back around, laying down on the floor with arms outstretched. Again, it’s not precision that counts here, it’s guts and enthusiasm. Which is why people get drunk.

Step 5: Read the crowd. If you’re in a country bar, this might not be the time to bust out your favorite Mary J. Blige song. Are there a lot of old drunks at the bar? They might appreciate some Hank Williams. Do you find yourself surrounded by drunk frat boys? Dear god, this is not the time to sing Tori Amos (or maybe it is… I am a fan of the “sing a ‘fuck you’ song and walk out the door” technique, myself).

Step 6: Don’t repeat a song that you already rocked the shit out of the last time you were out. You will likely have a diminished effect. It’s better to move on to new terrain, and come back to that one when you’re in a new situation – a new crowd, a new town, after a 6 month absence. If you do the same song every time… I don’t know, it just feels like cheating. I recommend this formula: one new song, one core song.

Step 7: What to do if you bomb. Well, you know what? It happens to everyone. You don’t have any control, so you’re likely to bomb once in a while no matter how good a singer and performer you are. So bomb big. If you realize in the first 3 notes that you don’t actually know this song, sing it loud and sing it proud. Ask the crowd to help you out. Stop singing altogether and launch into a ridiculous dance routine. Go into the crowd and give the mic to the person who is singing along the loudest. Sing horribly, gleefully off-tune. Or you can always try speak-shouting with passion, that works sometimes.

Things to remember: some of the worst karaoke experiences I have had involved songs I thought I knew backwards and forwards. Some of the best I’ve had are with songs I was totally unsure about going in (or didn’t know at all). Of course, some of the worst were also songs I realized with a sinking heart upon hearing the first chords that I didn’t know after all. But whatever, the point is, either way it’s done after three minutes and the crowd doesn’t care that much.

And a story to bring this all together, entitled My Craziest Karaoke Experience:

Once I was at my favorite karaoke bar – Chopsticks III, the How Can Be lounge – and someone was celebrating a birthday with a huge party of friends, with a huge birthday cake sitting untouched on the table. A man walked in, and when his name was called he put a chair on the dance floor and proceeded to do a seriously bizarre version of “A Little Less Conversation, A Lot More Action.” He started out sitting in the chair and ended flailing around the room, screaming the song at the top of his lungs. When he was done, he put down the mic, grabbed the cake and walked out the door. Five minutes later the bartender asked if anyone knew who that guy was, because he’d smashed the cake on someone’s car and driven off. That has nothing to do with rocking it, it’s just a weird story. But man, even though that guy was genuinely crazy and he ruined that poor girl’s cake, it is the best karaoke story I have.

How to Write Songs

I didn’t write my first song until about a year and a half ago. I had thought of myself as someone who had no talent for songwriting for so long that I didn’t even realize that I had written a song until two months after the fact. People kept asking me, “who wrote that song?” and I would say, “oh, this friend of mine helped put the music together, and then I put some words over that.” And then they’d say, “so, you wrote it,” and I’d say, “oh no no no, I just took the words from this old fairy tale and rewrote them a bit.” Finally a musician friend of mine told me that this COUNTS AS SONG WRITING.

And so it started to dawn on me that I could write songs.

Like every other person my age, I can play 3 chords on the guitar and had tried my hand at writing songs before. They always sounded clumsy and too rhyme-y and embarrassingly sappy so I decided I didn’t have a talent for putting words to music.

But this was different. I’d set out to cover songs and make a weird performance piece – and somehow because I wasn’t trying to write a song, a song emerged.

Once I’d done that I realized that it was in fact quite easy to write a song. My favorite method – since it’s what got me started – is to take a line from a poem or song you love. Let it worm its way in your brain out of context, like a mantra. In my case it was this line, from the German fairy tale I was basing my performance on: where did you come from, enchanted girl?

So, I wrote a whole song called, “Enchanted Girl” with that line as its chorus. I stole all the words from the crazy fairy tale. I took the trippiest phrases and mashed them up out of context and changed things around to make it rhyme and work rhythmically with the music. Voila! A song. Turns out that’s totally legitimate!

Here's a picture from the book, by Heinrich de la Motte Fouque, illustrated by Arthur Rackham:



And here's a picture from my show. I'm just giving you some visuals here so you don't get too bored by all the blathering on about songs.



In general, I find copying a song you love to be a great place to start. Here is the great paradox: if you set out to make something original, it’s going to sound like a copy of someone who did it better anyway. But if you SET OUT to copy someone, people will notice your originality. Or compare you to someone you didn’t even know you were copying.

In my case, people keep talking about the influence of Bjork and PJ Harvey on my songs when here I thought I was ripping off Stevie Nicks. And to be perfectly honest PJ Harvey wasn’t really on my radar before people started comparing me to her. Then I had to find out so I wouldn’t sound like an idiot who didn’t even know which album I was ripping off.

Another thing I’ve learned: the less words, the better. Words in songs are a blunt force. They just need to grab you. For years I thought a song had to be all complicated but if you start with the most basic, simple point – say, I AM FEELING SAD TODAY – or maybe WE WILL ROCK YOU – it will get more complicated and nuanced the more you work on it. Usually. Or if it doesn’t you can keep it to yourself. I wrote a song, "Black Valley," which I thought was blunt and powerful but finally realized was only powerful to me. To everyone else it was just repetitive and boring. So I stopped performing it.

Anyway. Point is: I wish song writing weren’t so shrouded in mystery and that more people talked about how to do it.

Though it’s ironic that I’m writing about how easy song writing is today because at the moment I am struggling mightily with a song I’m trying to write for the new Hand2Mouth show, Everyone Who Looks Like You. It’s an attempt to capture the kind of frustrated yelling that comes out of a family fight. In, you know, song form. We’re calling it the Yelling song or the Screaming song but unfortunately right now it sounds more like the Groaning Zombie song or the Polish Funeral song. And all I can think about is how impossible it is and how little skill and experience I have as a songwriter. So… yeah.