2 days in Pennsylvania. Finding new friends, losing old ones.
So we are a day away from it being a year since the tour, and I'm unbelievably just finishing this journal now!
Steven Minissale (the loss of a mentor and friend.)
Our experience of Pennsylvania was only two days and each day was spent in a different city. I will give you the details of these events as they are but they were sort of stagnant and cheapened by the surrealism I felt from a loss of a friend I'd suffered. Around this time, on the ride into Pennsylvania, where he is/was from, I found out that my friend, a talented an ambitious blues player, Phil Minissale, whose father Steve was a hero and a dear friend to me had passed away. He was a young 50 years old. I hate the feeling of this serving as some sort of eulogy, even nearly a year later, and the pressure to represent the vibrancy of a live and beautiful person, and to attempt to convey the inspiration he inspired in me and the closeness I felt as a friend despite our age difference, makes me sick. He had been in the hospital throughout autumn and winter battling cancer bravely. It was a rapidly accumulating chain of events that ebbed and flowed between hope and then sudden horror as surgeries would go wrong or infections would occur, and other complications would fight his resolve, as his improvement and declivities would roller coaster with maddening and heartbreaking capriciousness.
I visited him at Stony Brook hospital with my new girlfriend at the time, another friend of his, Heather, just before I left for tour. That day he was hopeful and improving, he was emaciated but had a wattage in his eyes like few men have anymore. His inky long hair and tan aged skin, giving him the appearance of a wise and dignified native american chief. He told me to give the world what I am and to mean it, that he believed in me and was proud I was taking this tour. He said he considered me another son and wished me the best and gave me so much love. I told him I'd do my best, that he was such a catalyst to so much of my work and my passion, and that I looked forward to sharing the accounts of my adventures with him when I returned a month later. It was hard for me to leave that day because there was a sense that neither of us believed that promise of a meet up when I returned. It was the last time I saw him. Steve was artistically talented and brilliant. Loving, witty, blunt and self aware. He made me challenge everything, especially myself. He'd cut to the chase with everything he said and asked, and made sure we both knew why I said or felt something and visa versa. He had an ageless and yet eternally experienced quality to him, possessing the energy and passion of a young person but the wisdom and bluntness of one who has seen many years. The aura he radiated was confident, calm, mirthful and intelligent.
The Power Of Storytelling (One Of Steve's Great Lessons)
He was a mentor and a friend who changed writing, performance and music with me forever with one assessment. We were at Cool Beanz in St. James where Phil and I met. It was an open mic and I'd performed as well as a few other poets and musicians. Later we retired the night to Michael Korb's house where Steve accompanied us. We spoke about the open mic and I commented on a friend's poetry performance. He said (paraphrased) "There's too much about her in the poems. Nearly every poem she performs, she makes the alienating mistake of making it about how she suddenly had this epiphany and we are being graced to hear it and learn from it. Bruce, the greatest writers and songwriters are story tellers. They represent life as best they can, and from that people can relate to what you're saying. Think of people like Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen who write about real life characters and scenarios, and from that, they provide the emotions and lessons for people to digest in the process. If you can do that, you will successfully provide entertainment, enrichment, and emotion for people." I was struck immediately. Being a huge reader and writer all my life, these words ring in my head and heart years later ever since he said that. Analyzing my appreciation of many singers and rappers I listened to, the majority of their work that I remembered was their narrative focused work. I've since written more than three dozen story-songs, some of which you've heard, the vast majority of them, you have not. I'm currently recording my first entirely narrative album, Rapologues, which I'm dedicating in part to Steve, because every time I write a song, I think of him, and nearly every time I go perform, I think of him. He came to see an AllOne & The Room show the year before he passed and he was so impressed and pleased, despite it being so left field, he listened intently and he GOT IT and he pushed me as he always did, to continue to make sincere and impacting music, a promise I made and will keep until the day I pass.
Coping With Loss, Eternity Through Memory
This may seem cold, and though I am an emotional person, I will not pretend that I have ever truly felt rocked by death. When my childhood friend passed, when my first dog passed, and both my grandparents passed, I did not cry profusely or sink into an irrepressible depression. I get sad and I feel like the world is dimmer and my stomach and nerves are hurt and heavy, but it is temporal. Every time I have experienced loss I have felt pain, but then an intrinsic logical and rational process washes over me to think of that person and the things that they taught me and the times I spent with them, and how I can make use of those things and radiate them out into the world. I know that my sadness will not bring them back or affect them at all somehow. I know that me putting my life on hold or shutting myself down and shutting the world out would not be something they would selfishly approve of. I don't believe in an afterlife, I'm not a particularly spiritual person. I won't go into these feelings in depth, or my feelings on belief systems because that is not important currently. I bring it up because for most people a huge part of comfort for them when someone they love dies, is a belief that they're in "a better place". I know that Steve, and all the people whom I love dearly and have lost, is "in" a good place. That place is in my heart and thoughts. He exists because he lead an important and a passionate life as a talented painter and a supporter of people and a lover of life. He lives as all those who have deceased live, in the memories of those he touched with sincerity. So long as I carry the lessons of understanding, adventure, creativity, integrity, passion, humor, respect and love with me, he will continue to expand outward in a network of positive events. I loved and love Steve, he was a wonderful friend and second father and mentor to me, and I will always cherish the times I had with him.
A (mentally) foggy Pittsburgh day.
March 4th was a Monday, we arrived in the afternoon, staying with Alexa's friends Noah, Justin and Chris, they had just recently moved into this new house that seemed like an apartment on the outside and was huge and spacious on the inside. All the guys were really kind and a ton of fun. I was likely reserved because I was still trying to process that I had just lost Steve. I kept my news from Alexa and tried to just enjoy the time and see the world new and be impacting to the people around me, as I promised him I would. We wandered around the swooping hills of Pittsburgh a bit, I was quiet for once, I thought about how I'm often hyperactive and absurd and should be more selective with what I say and how I say it and should endeavor to be powerfully miserly with my speech. I'm still working on this. Pittsburgh was the first time where we had no plans to perform anywhere on a stop. It was around this time of the tour I'd discovered how easy it was to download music on my Ipod. Here's a list of things some things I downloaded on the trip that I really enjoyed:
Felt: Felt 2 A Tribute To Lisa Bonet
Felt: Felt 3 A Tribute To Rosie Perez
Sadistik- Flowers For My Father
At The Drive In: Relationship Of Command
Blink 182- Dogs Eating Dogs EP
I was working on writing some new poems and just trying to sort out my head. Steve's death made me feel incredible stagnant despite being on tour for a month and performing and meeting all of these people. The guys of the house all pitched in to buy some pizza and I got a hero, which was disappointing. However, we did go over a list of funny things people from Pittsburgh say oddly, which cheered me up a little.
Here is the list of words either affected by accent or odd colloquialisms:
rubberband = gum band
downtown = dan tan
soda = pop
Carnegie = carnaygee
Albany = al-bany
huge = youge.
Eventually I was able to sleep, having been given an upstairs room with a phenomenal view of the city that spanned out really far. The next day we headed to Philadelphia.
Philadelphia
It is Tuesday March 5th, the eve of our return! We arrived in Philly in the afternoon. We ate, as tradition asked us to, at Chipotle. We stayed with a really sweet girl named Stephanie. She made vegan blondies from chickpeas. I downloaded an absurd amount of music from Kristoff Krane's band Abzorbr. I still don't know how I feel about it. The idea is there but the music is often jarring and too intense and scatterbrained to comprehend easily, then I realize self consciously that is exactly what most people probably think about AllOne & The Room. I picked up Stephanie's guitar and she and I sang the Decemberist's The Crane Wife 3 part opera together. She had an adorable charcoal colored cat with piercing eyes (so cat eyes). We had an open mic planned that day, at Mugshots Coffeehouse. I recommend going there if you are around. My friend Stasia met with us there and again, while we were so close to home it was still such a pleasure to see people I knew and visiting them in their environments. There were a few great performers and I gave a tribute to Steve aloud, and performed Pennsylvanian Patriarch, for my Poppy while in Pennsylvania, and dedicating it to Steven. Stephanie and her friends were there and very supportive, and I felt really emotionally drained afterwards. While Stasia gave us a ride home, Alexa performed her song "Two Tusks: A Waltz" from the album she later put out "A Bedtime Anthology" in the backseat of the car, which I recorded a video of, and have disclosed below. We fell asleep exhausted glad to know that we were just one day away from returning home to our welcome home show at The Pape Space!
I will leave the last day and show of the tour to it's own blog page, as it has exhausted me to write this one.
I love you all, never forget that you leave an impression on others, and to take advantage of that positively. Never forget those that you've loved and lost, carry them with you, share what you've felt and learned from them with others. It helps our deceased loves to thrive even now.
Thank you,
I am with you.
-Bruce
Steven Minissale (the loss of a mentor and friend.)
Our experience of Pennsylvania was only two days and each day was spent in a different city. I will give you the details of these events as they are but they were sort of stagnant and cheapened by the surrealism I felt from a loss of a friend I'd suffered. Around this time, on the ride into Pennsylvania, where he is/was from, I found out that my friend, a talented an ambitious blues player, Phil Minissale, whose father Steve was a hero and a dear friend to me had passed away. He was a young 50 years old. I hate the feeling of this serving as some sort of eulogy, even nearly a year later, and the pressure to represent the vibrancy of a live and beautiful person, and to attempt to convey the inspiration he inspired in me and the closeness I felt as a friend despite our age difference, makes me sick. He had been in the hospital throughout autumn and winter battling cancer bravely. It was a rapidly accumulating chain of events that ebbed and flowed between hope and then sudden horror as surgeries would go wrong or infections would occur, and other complications would fight his resolve, as his improvement and declivities would roller coaster with maddening and heartbreaking capriciousness.
I visited him at Stony Brook hospital with my new girlfriend at the time, another friend of his, Heather, just before I left for tour. That day he was hopeful and improving, he was emaciated but had a wattage in his eyes like few men have anymore. His inky long hair and tan aged skin, giving him the appearance of a wise and dignified native american chief. He told me to give the world what I am and to mean it, that he believed in me and was proud I was taking this tour. He said he considered me another son and wished me the best and gave me so much love. I told him I'd do my best, that he was such a catalyst to so much of my work and my passion, and that I looked forward to sharing the accounts of my adventures with him when I returned a month later. It was hard for me to leave that day because there was a sense that neither of us believed that promise of a meet up when I returned. It was the last time I saw him. Steve was artistically talented and brilliant. Loving, witty, blunt and self aware. He made me challenge everything, especially myself. He'd cut to the chase with everything he said and asked, and made sure we both knew why I said or felt something and visa versa. He had an ageless and yet eternally experienced quality to him, possessing the energy and passion of a young person but the wisdom and bluntness of one who has seen many years. The aura he radiated was confident, calm, mirthful and intelligent.
The Power Of Storytelling (One Of Steve's Great Lessons)
He was a mentor and a friend who changed writing, performance and music with me forever with one assessment. We were at Cool Beanz in St. James where Phil and I met. It was an open mic and I'd performed as well as a few other poets and musicians. Later we retired the night to Michael Korb's house where Steve accompanied us. We spoke about the open mic and I commented on a friend's poetry performance. He said (paraphrased) "There's too much about her in the poems. Nearly every poem she performs, she makes the alienating mistake of making it about how she suddenly had this epiphany and we are being graced to hear it and learn from it. Bruce, the greatest writers and songwriters are story tellers. They represent life as best they can, and from that people can relate to what you're saying. Think of people like Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen who write about real life characters and scenarios, and from that, they provide the emotions and lessons for people to digest in the process. If you can do that, you will successfully provide entertainment, enrichment, and emotion for people." I was struck immediately. Being a huge reader and writer all my life, these words ring in my head and heart years later ever since he said that. Analyzing my appreciation of many singers and rappers I listened to, the majority of their work that I remembered was their narrative focused work. I've since written more than three dozen story-songs, some of which you've heard, the vast majority of them, you have not. I'm currently recording my first entirely narrative album, Rapologues, which I'm dedicating in part to Steve, because every time I write a song, I think of him, and nearly every time I go perform, I think of him. He came to see an AllOne & The Room show the year before he passed and he was so impressed and pleased, despite it being so left field, he listened intently and he GOT IT and he pushed me as he always did, to continue to make sincere and impacting music, a promise I made and will keep until the day I pass.
Coping With Loss, Eternity Through Memory
This may seem cold, and though I am an emotional person, I will not pretend that I have ever truly felt rocked by death. When my childhood friend passed, when my first dog passed, and both my grandparents passed, I did not cry profusely or sink into an irrepressible depression. I get sad and I feel like the world is dimmer and my stomach and nerves are hurt and heavy, but it is temporal. Every time I have experienced loss I have felt pain, but then an intrinsic logical and rational process washes over me to think of that person and the things that they taught me and the times I spent with them, and how I can make use of those things and radiate them out into the world. I know that my sadness will not bring them back or affect them at all somehow. I know that me putting my life on hold or shutting myself down and shutting the world out would not be something they would selfishly approve of. I don't believe in an afterlife, I'm not a particularly spiritual person. I won't go into these feelings in depth, or my feelings on belief systems because that is not important currently. I bring it up because for most people a huge part of comfort for them when someone they love dies, is a belief that they're in "a better place". I know that Steve, and all the people whom I love dearly and have lost, is "in" a good place. That place is in my heart and thoughts. He exists because he lead an important and a passionate life as a talented painter and a supporter of people and a lover of life. He lives as all those who have deceased live, in the memories of those he touched with sincerity. So long as I carry the lessons of understanding, adventure, creativity, integrity, passion, humor, respect and love with me, he will continue to expand outward in a network of positive events. I loved and love Steve, he was a wonderful friend and second father and mentor to me, and I will always cherish the times I had with him.
A (mentally) foggy Pittsburgh day.
March 4th was a Monday, we arrived in the afternoon, staying with Alexa's friends Noah, Justin and Chris, they had just recently moved into this new house that seemed like an apartment on the outside and was huge and spacious on the inside. All the guys were really kind and a ton of fun. I was likely reserved because I was still trying to process that I had just lost Steve. I kept my news from Alexa and tried to just enjoy the time and see the world new and be impacting to the people around me, as I promised him I would. We wandered around the swooping hills of Pittsburgh a bit, I was quiet for once, I thought about how I'm often hyperactive and absurd and should be more selective with what I say and how I say it and should endeavor to be powerfully miserly with my speech. I'm still working on this. Pittsburgh was the first time where we had no plans to perform anywhere on a stop. It was around this time of the tour I'd discovered how easy it was to download music on my Ipod. Here's a list of things some things I downloaded on the trip that I really enjoyed:
Felt: Felt 2 A Tribute To Lisa Bonet
Felt: Felt 3 A Tribute To Rosie Perez
Sadistik- Flowers For My Father
At The Drive In: Relationship Of Command
Blink 182- Dogs Eating Dogs EP
I was working on writing some new poems and just trying to sort out my head. Steve's death made me feel incredible stagnant despite being on tour for a month and performing and meeting all of these people. The guys of the house all pitched in to buy some pizza and I got a hero, which was disappointing. However, we did go over a list of funny things people from Pittsburgh say oddly, which cheered me up a little.
Here is the list of words either affected by accent or odd colloquialisms:
rubberband = gum band
downtown = dan tan
soda = pop
Carnegie = carnaygee
Albany = al-bany
huge = youge.
Eventually I was able to sleep, having been given an upstairs room with a phenomenal view of the city that spanned out really far. The next day we headed to Philadelphia.
Philadelphia
It is Tuesday March 5th, the eve of our return! We arrived in Philly in the afternoon. We ate, as tradition asked us to, at Chipotle. We stayed with a really sweet girl named Stephanie. She made vegan blondies from chickpeas. I downloaded an absurd amount of music from Kristoff Krane's band Abzorbr. I still don't know how I feel about it. The idea is there but the music is often jarring and too intense and scatterbrained to comprehend easily, then I realize self consciously that is exactly what most people probably think about AllOne & The Room. I picked up Stephanie's guitar and she and I sang the Decemberist's The Crane Wife 3 part opera together. She had an adorable charcoal colored cat with piercing eyes (so cat eyes). We had an open mic planned that day, at Mugshots Coffeehouse. I recommend going there if you are around. My friend Stasia met with us there and again, while we were so close to home it was still such a pleasure to see people I knew and visiting them in their environments. There were a few great performers and I gave a tribute to Steve aloud, and performed Pennsylvanian Patriarch, for my Poppy while in Pennsylvania, and dedicating it to Steven. Stephanie and her friends were there and very supportive, and I felt really emotionally drained afterwards. While Stasia gave us a ride home, Alexa performed her song "Two Tusks: A Waltz" from the album she later put out "A Bedtime Anthology" in the backseat of the car, which I recorded a video of, and have disclosed below. We fell asleep exhausted glad to know that we were just one day away from returning home to our welcome home show at The Pape Space!
I will leave the last day and show of the tour to it's own blog page, as it has exhausted me to write this one.
I love you all, never forget that you leave an impression on others, and to take advantage of that positively. Never forget those that you've loved and lost, carry them with you, share what you've felt and learned from them with others. It helps our deceased loves to thrive even now.
Thank you,
I am with you.
-Bruce
Time, friendship, enduring , battles, fragile with much strength.
ReplyDeletebravery, honesty & truth.
Love, loss, inspired, Forever.
Journey, memories, friendly faces. Numb yet feeling.
Laughter, singing, colors, tradition of flavours & towns.
A Loving Tribute to those who've left their mark
& be forever in your heart.