What should I do about Youtube?

zoekeating:

My Google Youtube rep contacted me the other day. They were nice and took time to explain everything clearly to me, but the message was firm: I have to decide. I need to sign on to the new Youtube music services agreement or I will have my Youtube channel blocked.

This new music service agreement…

01/26/15

dear US followers

67-tardis-street:

(and other non-french followers who either don’t understand the situation now in France, don’t want to understand it or give their opinion on the subject without grasping it)

On Wednesday morning in Paris, two armed men irrupted in the premises of the satirical journal Charlie Hebdo and killed…

01/11/15

popwatch.ew.com

This is a pretty down and dirty recording from a great night at my old haunt Don Hills with some old and new friends, recent collaborators and the great Fred Schneider. Before we went in, I was asked for my thoughts about returning to this stage, where i first started to garner some attention and where John Cameron Mitchell and I first trotted out Hedwig in the club that inspired us to invent her in the first place. So I wrote this:

“I used to perform every Friday night at Don Hill’s as the band leader for Sqeezebox. We backed up some of the most talented and inventive drag queens in New York, playing shows full of experimental performance, theater and some of the best pop, punk and classic rock songs. Some of my favorite memories involve candles: walking around in a circle on stage holding devotional candles with The Dueling Bankheads performing a seance while playing “Bela Lugosi’s Dead:” tossing long white candles and match books out to a crowd of 600 and watching them light and wave the candles overhead while Sherry Vine repeated the chorus to “Total Eclipse of The Heart.” Of course I will never forget watching Mistress Formika find her inner rocker singing “Fight For Your Right To Be Queer,” which became a the club anthem, and ripping off her drag on stage in a fit of punk rock ecstasy. Then there were all those great times backing rock stars like Debbie Harry, Lene Lovtich, Joey Ramone, and jamming with Courtney Love and Billie Joe Armstrong.

I think the best part, though, was being on that stage every week with Jack Steeb. Jack and I were in my band Cheater together, the band that became the Angry Inch, but we were also in the Squeezebox band together, playing those great shows every Friday night for a packed house, hanging out with our friends and boyfriends in front of the club on the hood of my car, watching all the queer rockers file in for the show or step outside for a cigarette. Jack and I moved to New York together to make it: to be rock stars, to be queer, to be queer rock stars together. We shared an apartment in Fort Greene, listened to albums, went to shows, drank Slivovitz, delivered pizza. Jack played bass in my bands Bimbo Limbo Spam and later Cheater. I remember once, when Richard Hell was looking for a bass player/keyboardist for a Japanese tour, Jack and I went in as a team, willing to forgo pay and play for nothing but the travel expenses. Sadly, the travel expenses for two were too high and he couldn’t make it work - but he wanted to and we had a blast jamming with him in that rehearsal space on Avenue A. When Cheater started to make a name for itself and we were in the Squeezebox band and playing the early Hedwig shows, it felt like we were really getting there, a couple of queer punks making it in New York on our own terms.

Jack didn’t make it with me, though. Jack was an addict and an alcoholic. I was a classic enabler. I remember snorting cocaine and getting drunk with him until the wee hours just to hang out on his terms, getting fucked up and listening to “The Blue Mask” and “Slanted and Enchanted” and Teenage Fan Club, watching Falcon International porn while finishing off a bottle. I also remember searching all over some of the seediest neighborhoods of Baltimore and Philadelphia when Cheater was gigging there and he had disappeared. I remember the day his mom called to tell me he’d gone missing two days, and searching all over the lower east side for him, even climbing up fire escapes to peek into the apartments of some guy he may have hooked-up with. I remember finding him in the strangest places and in the most disturbing conditions.

I was hopeful when he went into rehab. We put the band on hold almost a year for him, which kind of killed that project. When he was sober for a year, my boyfriend Michael and I went with JCM to his AA/NA meeting. One after one, people got up and told their stories. The stories all seemed to me to have the same theme - addiction was like a lover that only wanted to scam you out of everything: your money, your things, your friends, until you had nothing left. I wrote “The Long Grift” for Jack, sung from the perspective of someone who’d figured out the game and had the strength to send his lover packing. We all really thought Jack had won the battle. This lover, though, never stays gone. He keeps banging on the door, promising, lying: “This time will be different.” After about 10 years of his careering from recovery to addiction, I remember John calling me up to tell me that we had lost Jack.

Coming back to Don Hill’s with Tits of Clay to play a bunch of punk rock songs would in itself inspire a nostalgic swooning. The show is a benefit for Road Recovery, which uses music to help at-risk youth battle off the threat of addiction. The combination of the place and the event and the songs and the cause fills my head with all the great nights I had at Squeezebox and reminds me of the dream I chased there with Jack, the great times we had and the ones we lost because of his illness.”

12/22/14