Dear Fear, It has taken me some time to get around to this, but with Valentine's Day having recently passed and the world evolving the way it is, I've been thinking a lot about love, affection and their opposites. It's high time I wrote you this letter. The world is full of teachings that would have me confront you, tame you, control [...]
Back in November, I was interviewed by Lizzie O'Leary, host of NPR's Marketplace Weekend who was querying different kinds of folks about their relationship to money, including me the artist. Our short chat was inspiring and has prompted more writing on the subject. Lizzie asked me to explain why I believe it isn't noble to be a broke artist. We have to [...]
This New Year's morning, my man and I were talking about the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. And about how I have enough decades behind me now to weigh and measure. I've been here long enough to attend births, to steward some into their own becoming, and be with others at the doorway to their deaths. [...]
On May 7, 2015, Karen debuted Suitcase in Berlin: Songs of Brecht and the Poet Troubadours at the Irondale Center in her hometown of Brooklyn, NY. In the program she wove together the story song composers she loves most including Jaques Brel, Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits and Noel Coward. A few days later she was featured with [...]
I am swept away by the story of the Rosetta Mission and our landing on Comet 67P! That it took over 6.4 billion kilometers to reach this landing strip, including all the gravitational assists needed to get our spacecraft there. That it all happened in just 11 years, barely a blip in the history of our species. Like the [...]
In the fall of 2014, Karen's longtime cabaret pal and collaborator KT Sullivan, director of the Mabel Mercer Foundation in NYC, invited her to curate and direct a European offering as part of the Foundation's annual cabaret festival. "Kabarett with a K " was held at the Cutting Room on October 24, 2014 and featured many members of Karen's [...]
I really didn't know much about Philip Seymour Hoffman until he died. I hadn't seen most of his films and none of his plays. Yet I've been moved to read about him. His unexpected death struck a chord and prompted people to weigh in on not only how he died but how lived. I found it fascinating that people [...]
You've got to find some way of saying it, without saying it. - Duke Ellington In cabaret, I've experienced enormous freedom. I've lived moment-to-moment for an hour at a time, using anything that comes up in myself and offering that to my musicians and my audience. The result of my dipping into my own emotional palette is that others dip into [...]
"Nature is a glorious school for the heart! I shall be a scholar in this school and bring an eager heart to her instruction. Here I shall learn wisdom, the only wisdom that is free from disgust; here I shall learn to know God and find a foretaste of heaven in His knowledge. Among these occupations my earthly days [...]
Let's face it: some music is really hard on the ears! I don't mean the noise that's out there, I mean the real and serious music. What makes music rough is this beautiful, unstable and highly useful thing called dissonance. In a dissonant chord, the notes aren't aligned harmonically and so the sound is tense and unpleasant. But dissonance [...]
