New York: Day One

I walked from 95th and 5th all the down to Sardi's on 44th yesterday. Took me about an hour.

The sun was bright, the air was crispy cool, and the people were everywhere. It's one of the best times of the year to be in the City. Maybe it was out of fatigue, but I didn't bring my video camera along, and now I wish I had, but it doesn't matter.

I walked past all the museums on museum row, the Guggenheim, which still looks like a gigantic toilet bowl to me, crossed over into Central Park and into the Zoo. Just as I got to the giant clock, I heard bells, and saw all the animal statues overhead circling around.

And kids! Kids everywhere, smiling and laughing, and others being grumpy, while their parents tried to convince them this was fun.

Kept going south until I ran into a video shoot coming at me. It was Levi Johnston, surrounded by his famous entourage, but the focus was on him and a blond model. As the passed, I looked behind and saw that his coat was being held together by a line of orange clippies.

Got to Sardi's just in time to see Jim and meet the critic, Peter Filicia. He asked me, "What's the one thing you'd like to see in this article?" And I said, "That Zero is back and the world needs him and his righteous anger."

Ate a quick lunch, Ed Gaynes joined us for a sec and then we went to see the Danny Kaye show off-Broadway. The guy playing Danny was uncanny. This show has been running six months, and, as good as the performers were, it reminded me what a great book Zero has, and how much of a genius Jim is.

Then we sauntered over to St. Clement's where they were taking down a set. A girl in a Follies t-shirt came up to us and asked if we were parishioners. We told her we were the next show and she told us they were striking Brigadoon, that they have a local company which began back in 1924, started by some rich people, who hired someone to use their kids to put on Pinafore aboard their yacht with the audience sitting on the shore. (I love the '20s).

Then, they did it again and again, starting a theatre company which donated all the proceeds to charity. The company has done so ever since. Each company member donates their services and they put on a Gilbert and Sullivan show every year in the Spring and then a more Broadway type show in the Fall.

As we were leaving St. Clement's this tall, a good looking guy asked if we would hold the door for him, and it turned out to be one of the producers of Zero Hour, who runs the resident company there at the church.

We had a great conversation about Zero Hour and his company, the Peccadillo, learning that St. Clement's and the Cherry Lane are the two oldest off-Broadway houses in New York. He was very proud of their history, so I promised to do good video blogs about this.

By then, we were both hungry, so we zipped over to 46th and had matzo ball soup at the Polish Tea Room, and told the owner there that we were developing a new show based on his restaurant. He was very pleased.

By then, we were exhausted, so we stopped off at a subway station to get Metro cards, and then cabbed it back home. Steinbeck was happy to see us, and he showed his happiness by staying under the bed asleep.

I've had a little diarrhea the past few days, but it finally cleared up last night.

We flopped down on the bed and watched the season finale to "Mad Men," and then Jim went to sleep while I finished off the Dallas/Eagles game. Dallas won.

Sights in New York Pt. 1

We made it to New York for "Zero Hour," which starts previews on Friday. Today I walked about 3 miles from where we're staying down to Sardi's to meet with Jim, who was doing a press interview.

So, I was crossing 59th Street when I saw an entourage coming my way. A camera man and assistants were walking backwards, shooting someone coming my way.

Then, I realized it was Levi Johnston, son-in-law of the execrable Sarah Palin.

He was being taped, walking with a blond girl (and me without my video camera!).

As we passed, I looked behind and saw that his coat was being held together with a series of orange clips that ran all up and down and his back.

I love show business.

A Special Honor.

I felt very specially honored last night.

We had an attendance of eight at the workshop. It's a drop-in group that's a 20 dollar donation to Kulak's Woodshed.

Marc Platt announced it at the top. He sat on a stool near the piano and said, "Tonight we're gonna write a song about Steve leaving. We're gonna call it "Goodbye, For Now."

I must have scrunched up my face or something because he said, "Why? You don't think it's a good idea?"

"No," I responded. "It's fine. But you couldn't think of a better title?"

That made Neil laugh out loud because he loves getting one over on Marc.

Marc laughed, too, and tried to think of a comeback, but I think I got him. Or maybe he topped me. I doesn't matter. What matters is that there was an easy camaraderie.

In the workshop, coming up with a new song or song idea each week is part of the deal. And it can be about anything. You can write a song about an ashtray and make it work if you believe in it, as someone said.

Then, Marc got one of the newer guys, whose name I should remember but I don't, to play guitar.

He said to him, "You said you could come up with music. Play guitar. Play something. Make us a song."

He came up with a combination of G Am C G / G am C G / em A C G / em A C D.

Then, another guy I hadn't met but said he knew me, probably because I'm visible down at the Woodshed, came in with a guitar. He had long hair parted down the middle. Grizzled face. As if he'd walked in from the desert (completely possible in Los Angeles). Marc knew him.

He was slower at picking up on the chord combination, but he had a husky, cool voice. And when Marc said, "Okay, give us the opening line," people were fussing with "Don't want to say good bye," but it all felt done before. And then Desert Guy suggested ... I can't put it here. It's like giving away your trademark before you own it.

But I thought it was interesting that the one who came up with the winning hook was the one who knew me the least. That's probably a reflection on me.

Then, Marc put me on the piano and it was up to me to sing the song as we put it together.

Talk about surreal! I said, at one point, after having completely failed at adding anything of substance to the song, "I feel like I'm writing a love letter to myself." Now, my brother, Scott, the psychologist would insist that, for me, this would not be unfamiliar territory. Still, I just couldn't do it. After all, I don't know what it's like to live with me.

At the end of the night, we had a song. Or the first draft of a song, anyway. And it was a communal experience that felt really good for everyone involved. Naturally, the song is going to have to be a huge smash for any of us to make a buck on it, splitting the copyright 8 or 9 ways, but it was a great creative experience.

Speaking of creative, Ernie came over and helped me get rid of bags and bags of junk up here in my loft. I actually have floor space again!

Next week, we begin tech rehearsals for Zero Hour in New York. It's all happening so quickly.

I will, of course, give you the backstage story with my video camera. We have a superb team, going ahead. So, if you like this kind of thing, let me know. I enjoy doing it.

Song Festival

It was like the old days.

Last night, at Kulak's Woodshed, I announced the forthcoming NoHo International Song Festival. Getting back together with Paul Zollo this past week has brought back a lot of memories of our days working National Academy of Songwriters. The Acoustic Underground series that we created and produced, along with Dan Kirkpatrick and Blythe Newlon, had a big impact on the music scene at the time because people competed to get into the program, and when you compete, you get better at what you do.

Some people hated that it was a competition with prizes, because, ultimately, we all know that art is subjective and what may seem like the "best" one year feels old the next.

What I have seen, however, in the year or so since I began volunteering on camera three, is growth and character and personality emerging from the scene down at the Woodshed. The thing is that Paul Kulak does his best keep the place going, impossibly difficult for a place that isn't, really, a business, but is a labor of love music hang-out.

But it's up to the songwriter community to really make it into something worthwhile. After all, the Woodshed is a place devoted to great music. Great songwriting.

So, remembering the lessons of the past, which culminated in an "Acoustic Artist of the Year," which birthed the great Dan Bern, among other wonderful artists, my feeling was that we needed an event which would bring together the best of the best, and encourage everyone to be on the best game.

Here is what I said:

Tonight we announce that in the Spring, Kulak's Woodshed presents the first NoHo Int'l Song Festival. From this point on we're, all of us, collectively, going to choose the best of the best songs that are coming through the Woodshed.

The goal of the festival is to put a media spotlight on our scene. But first, we have to create that scene, which we're doing and have done, and we have to name it and celebrate it.

Paul Kulak has been documenting the singers and songwriters that both come through here while on the road, and who are on the scene locally, now, for the past 10 years. And this year, we want to make it easier to find the best of the best, so we're putting on a song festival, hopefully in conjunction with the NoHo Arts Festival over on Lankershim in the Spring of 2010.

Many of you think I'm a nice person. But, no. I'm vicious and cutthroat (said with a smile). Every night that I come through that door, I have one goal, and that's to be the best songwriter in the room.

I hope is each of you also have this same goal. In fact, I only love one thing more: NOT being the best songwriter in the room. Because when I see excellence, it reminds me what excellence and greatness look like, and it inspires me to be that good. And If you're the one who beats me that week, look out. Cuz that means we're throwin' down. I'm going to come back the next week to make you up your game.

If you wonder why you haven't been noticed by the media before, it's because they don't give a shit about you and and you aren't news. Nobody cares about a lone singer/songwriter in this town. But a scene, a community that has character, that's a news story. That's something they will write about. Here are the two things you need to do:

1. Come in here every week, upping your game, writing the best songs of your life. Come to the open mics, work it, rehearse it. Be a part of this scene.

2. Listen to the other songwriters and identify for yourself the best songs FROM THEM you've heard every night. Then go up to that person and tell them how much you like that song. But notice each other.

See, songwriters are notorious for not being able to know what their best material is. So, you, me, we, collectively, the songwriters and volunteers of Kulak's Woodshed, have to know what the best is. We are all, together, going to make this festival work.

3. Join the social media groups we've started online at Facebook and ning.com. Start uploading your videos and mp3s, and then listening and interacting with each other.

And that's it. If you have any more questions, I don't have answers. You now know everything I know.

"The Revolution Starts Right Here" -- Steve Singing.

At the song swap the other night at Kulak's Woodshed, I sang the song "The Revolution Starts Right Here." And here is the video of the performance:

At Long Last: The HIV Travel Ban is Lifted.

Back in the old days, kiddies, there was a particularly racist, homophobic and utterly powerful man in Congress named Jesse Helms. Along with a lot of other carefully calculated statements of outright hatred of gay people, he managed, due to his powerful position in Congress, to ban all HIV positive people from entering this country.

This was a particularly egregious and obnoxious law because, first of all, most HIV cases at the time, came FROM the US. Also, it meant that no international meetings about HIV/AIDS could be held in the United States, because people with HIV couldn't attend unless they already lived here.

It also kept couples from different countries apart, one being unable to enter the country if they had HIV.

But, finally, it's over. President Obama has signed an order ending this ban.

It's about time.

"Muddy & Bo" by Paul Zollo.

I post this because I think it's a wonderful song, performed by my friend Paul Zollo, but also because I directed and edited the video. It was supposed to be a simple backyard, straight-forward video, but I was enjoying the music so much, I just kept shooting, and this is what we ended up with. He thinks I should do this for a living. I admit it is one of my favorite passions. I have 207 videos up on YouTube!

Health Update: Triglycerides.

Blood test: Triglycerides over 800, which means there's so much sugary, fatty sludge in my blood, they can't even test for cholesterol. I've been here so many times before. Once, it was as high as 2100. (It should be down around 150 or less). This is a side effect of my anti-virals.

Dr. Ruchi called Dr. Tony, my primary care infectious disease doctor, and told him she was worried about pancreatitis. So, Dr. Tony calls me in and we have a confab to decide what to do.

But we already know: diet and exercise. Diet and exercise. Diet and exercise.

Dr. Tony actually had a visiting doctor with him today and said for me to act gay because this doctor is studying gay men's health.

So, I flipped my wrist and said, "Gay, gay, gay!"

Dr. Tony said we could change my antivirals, but then I'd be back on three times a day, and he's not sure it would actually make all that much difference. Currently, I'm taking Atripla, which consists of three AIDS drugs all jammed together in a one dose per day pill.

So: Diet and exercise. Diet and exercise.

I told the visiting doc that we gone through this many times. I get on a healthy diet, and then I want pizza and then I want french fries and Popeyes, and the next thing you know, I forgot I ever ate healthy food.

I'm a Southerner, for god's sake! Fried food is comfort food! (And damn them for inventing fried Twinkies AFTER I became diabetic.)

So, diet and exercise. Diet and exercise.

Flash Forward "Does" The Bonus Round.

ABC has a new series called "Flash Forward," and I was watching it on Hulu. (Yes, that's a plug. No, they didn't pay me to mention them). In the pilot, everyone in the world has a suddenly 2 minute, 17 second blackout where they experience a dream, a vision. They see themselves and what they're doing exactly 6 months from the present day.

In other words, they know what they're going to be doing, and where they're doing it, six months from now.

But one of the characters intrigues me. He's a Korean FBI man who saw nothing, meaning he was either asleep or dead (though others said they saw themselves asleep or dreaming). More clues arrive and he learns he's going to be murdered in March.

His reaction, at first, was fear. So, he fought back against the investigation they're going through to piece together a "mosaic" of that day (from as many witnesses as possible).

Then, in this most recent episode, he suddenly began to get giddy and loose. They were all drinking together in a bar, for instance, and one of the characters cautions him about drinking too much.

He looks at the scold and says, hey, man. I know when I'm gonna die. I might as get some living in.

Other characters begin to act in the same way. Released from the normal, daily fears, they suddenly feel free and positive and without a care.

That feeling. That's what I called the bonus round.

I was aware of my giddy freedom, personally, but I wasn't aware of how much I weigh myself down with fear and anxiety until the day they told me I was going to live. I sang about this last week at Kulak's with my original "Lazarus" song. It's on the Bonus Round Sessions CD.

And I've written about it many times over the past years since coming back to life. It was almost visceral. I can tell you the exact moment of the epiphany, when I felt the weight of the world come back down on my shoulders. I was in the living room holding the vacuum cleaner and it descended like a thought, a feather of anxiety touched my clean mind. It flew in and out so quickly, I almost missed it.

For a moment it went away. But then, as if coming out of amnesia, the kind you only see on soap operas, I remembered "the weight." I could feel it pressing down on me. The pre-bonus round Steve. Like a child being reborn into a world of fear and anxiety, and yet created only by my mind.

One second I was carefree and had limitless potential.

The next moment, I was the worry rat thrown back into river of anxiety to drown.

The other night, at Kulak's, as I was about to sing "Lazarus," I was explaining to Tatiana, a young writer on the scene, that Lazarus, in the story, was brought back to life.

Her first question was, "What did he think about that?"

In Flash Forward, some of the characters are saying, "The future saved me."

I remember when I could see my future. And like this FBI character, there was a certain comfort in knowing I had only just so much time and no more.

I'm reminded of the old Chinese saying about how a child who dies has the longest life and an old man, the shortest.

I know that that state of mind, of perfect freedom, is available. I know it is because it's only a state of mind. Having gone there, I know what it feels and tastes and smells like. The question is whether I have to know when I'm gonna die to get there again.

So Long, Geocities. And Thank You.

Its time has passed. It was a great idea, conceptually back in the early days of the very limited world wide web. "A place where everyone can have his own website," all organized into communities with virtual street addresses.

I set "The Steve Schalchlin Survival Site" up in the Broadway community because we had just finished our first staged reading of The Last Session and now I was Sondheim. In fact, I was Jerry Herman, Neil Young AND Stephen Sondheim. (It's a dead link now.)

And, because I was dying of AIDS, no one dared tell me different. I would go out of this life as the suddenly discovered genius that never was, except for this one last work, a testament to his own life.

And then I ruined it all by living. Oh, well. Can't lose 'em all.

Nowadays, with social networking, "having a website," is kind of meaningless unless you're trying to sell something. Virtual neighborhoods aren't really neighborhoods if the people "living next to each other" have no interaction. A nation of monks, as Dean Pitchford described songwriters.

My relationship with Geocities gets even more complex. It was the creation of a gay man, John Rezner, and his partner, David Bohnett. David said it was really John's vision. Until then, those who weren't schooled in computers had only email and listserves and BBS's. Having your own website was huge!

Plus, the interface, which improved over time, made it possible for non-html coding of webpages. I had already taught myself HTML by clicking on websites, picking it up randomly. So, I was slightly ahead of the curve in the early days and my website got some attention, especially because of its unique subject matter: Man dying of AIDS puts diary online.

David took a personal interest because John Rezner had died of AIDS some time before. "The Last Session" was about to, or had just become, a little mini-phenomenon.

So, when Geocities went public, the first big New York Times Business Section story began with three paragraphs about my online diary. I was always very proud of that, to feel newsworthy. I wonder if that article is archived?

But, Geocities just never made any money, and when the web went "social," it became "a cultural relic" (according to this article). And now, Yahoo is shutting it down.

The truth is, though, many people were helped by Geocities. Their lives where changed. I am a living testament to this. Thank you, David. And here's to the memory of John Rezner.

UPDATE:
Gabi sent this:

I did a search and on Sunday, March 16, 1997
http://www.bonusround.com/mar97.html
you wrote:

"MONDAY MORNING NEW YORK TIMES Business Day section. In an article about Geocities, they include my little Survival Site in the story. Of course, they spelled my name wrong, but, HEY! When ya got a name like Schalchlin, you learn to cope. Can't wait until people start typing "Schachlin" into Yahoo and coming up empty. Another brush with fame goes slipping through my fingers. *sigh*"

So I put "Schachlin" into search at the NYT archives and found it. :-)

New Neighborhood, No Money Down
By SREENATH SREENIVASAN
Published: Monday, March 17, 1997
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/17/business/new-neighborhood-no-money-down.html