Songs for the Struggling Artist Songs for the StrugglingArtist

Because my play is about Cretan history and the neighborhood I live in is full of Cretans (and other Greeks), I figured I should apply to my local arts council for some hyper local funding. That is, New York State or New York City funding would be too broad, I would need Queens funding. So I went to the Queens Council on the Arts’ website and all that was there was a little box for putting in a password. There was no website there or anywhere. I went to their NYC gov page and it led to several defunct social media pages. Was the Queens Council on the Arts no longer operational? I felt like I should have heard something if this were the case. Isn’t this news?



To keep reading The Mysterious Disappearance of My Local Arts Council visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog.

This is Episode 369

Song: Take the Money and Run

Image of QCA from Spectrum News



To support this podcast:

Give it 5 stars in Apple Podcasts. Write a nice review!

Rate it wherever you listen or via: ⁠https://ratethispodcast.com/strugglingartist⁠

Join my mailing list: ⁠www.emilyrainbowdavis.com/⁠

Like the blog/show on Facebook: ⁠https://www.facebook.com/SongsfortheStrugglingArtist/⁠

Support me on Patreon: ⁠www.patreon.com/emilyrdavis⁠

Or help me pay off my tickets to and from Crete on Kofi: ⁠http://ko-fi.com/emilyrainbowdavis⁠

or PayPal me: ⁠https://www.paypal.me/strugglingartist⁠

Join my Substack: ⁠https://emilyrainbowdavis.substack.com/⁠

Follow me on Twitter ⁠@erainbowd⁠

Me on Mastodon - @erainbowd@podvibes.co

Me on Hive - @erainbowd

⁠Instagram⁠ and ⁠Pinterest⁠

Tell a friend!

Listen to The Dragoning ⁠here⁠ (it's my audio drama) and support via Ko-fi here: ⁠https://ko-fi.com/messengertheatrecompany⁠

As ever, I am yours,

Emily Rainbow Davis

At this evening of art, artist after artist talked about feminism as a key to understanding their work. “Ok,” I thought, “I’m in a safe crowd. There’s no reason to soft pedal the underlying feminist ideas in my work when I talk about it. I’ll just lay some things out that I usually obscure a little bit.” So, thinking I was in a feminist crowd, I talked about some feminist stuff and explained some of its feminist underpinnings.

How quickly I discovered that I had misread the room! Immediately, I got pushback about an underlying conceit in The Dragoning. (A show, by the way, that while it IS feminist in its mission, I’ve never explicitly labeled it as such.) The next thing I knew I was trying to explain that yes, men do kill women. And at absolutely terrifying rates. (How I wish I’d had numbers right then – but now I know that, globally, it’s six women every hour.) All night long, I’d been hearing feminist, feminist, feminist but as soon as an actual feminist issue came up, the room seemed very different. How did we all have such different perspectives on feminist art?

To keep reading Feminist Art Might Mean Something to Us, visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog.

This is Episode 368

Song: Put Yourself First

Image by Wilhelm Gunkel via Unsplash



To support this podcast:

Give it 5 stars in Apple Podcasts. Write a nice review!

Rate it wherever you listen or via: https://ratethispodcast.com/strugglingartist

Join my mailing list: www.emilyrainbowdavis.com/

Like the blog/show on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SongsfortheStrugglingArtist/

Support me on Patreon: www.patreon.com/emilyrdavis

Or help me pay off my tickets to and from Crete on Kofi: http://ko-fi.com/emilyrainbowdavis

or PayPal me: https://www.paypal.me/strugglingartist

Join my Substack: https://emilyrainbowdavis.substack.com/

Follow me on Twitter @erainbowd

Me on Mastodon - @erainbowd@podvibes.co

Me on Hive - @erainbowd

Instagram and Pinterest

Tell a friend!

Listen to The Dragoning here (it's my audio drama) and support via Ko-fi here: https://ko-fi.com/messengertheatrecompany

As ever, I am yours,

Emily Rainbow Davis

In the past, I’ve made my own residencies – with the assistance of my friends’ generosity of space. These self-styled residencies have always been highly focused and productive dives into a project. But this time, at my first official residency (i.e. not one I made up) I found something quite different than the ones I invented.

Funnily enough, I found this group residency not nearly as productive as ones I’ve done on my own. What with so many activities and long leisurely meals and field trips and lectures and presentations, our days were so jam packed I could barely squeeze my daily writing practice in, much less dive deeper. There was so much stimulation, so many interesting people, so much to respond to, I found it difficult to drop into the kind of quiet I need to make words into something significant. You might think this trip, this residency, had been a failure if you were measuring by productivity but it occurs to me that residencies like this one may be for something else.

To keep reading Was the Residency Productive, visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog.

This is Episode 367

Song: I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For

Image by Emily Rainbow Davis





To support this podcast:

Give it 5 stars in Apple Podcasts. Write a nice review!

Rate it wherever you listen or via: https://ratethispodcast.com/strugglingartist

Join my mailing list: www.emilyrainbowdavis.com/

Like the blog/show on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SongsfortheStrugglingArtist/

Support me on Patreon: www.patreon.com/emilyrdavis

Or help me pay off my tickets to and from Crete on Kofi: http://ko-fi.com/emilyrainbowdavis

or PayPal me: https://www.paypal.me/strugglingartist

Join my Substack: https://emilyrainbowdavis.substack.com/

Follow me on Twitter @erainbowd

Me on Mastodon - @erainbowd@podvibes.co

Me on Hive - @erainbowd

Instagram and Pinterest

Tell a friend!

Listen to The Dragoning here (it's my audio drama) and support via Ko-fi here: https://ko-fi.com/messengertheatrecompany

As ever, I am yours,

Emily Rainbow Davis

You might be surprised to learn this if you only know me through the blog (or podcast) but once upon a time, I could be counted on to create a bubble of good time around me. It’s one of the reasons it’s not a terrible idea to invite me to your party. (Remember when I asked you to invite me to your party a few years ago? Back in the before times?)  I may tend toward rage, fury and righteous indignation here on the blog but out in the world, I’m generally a reasonably nice and pleasant lady to be around. Having been isolated for so long (even before the pandemic, due to the migraines) I sort of forgot what my own personality could be like.

To read more of Emily Is Fun visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog.

This is Episode 366

Song: Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

Image by Emily Rainbow Davis from Mudhouse Agios Ioannis Crete

To support this podcast:

Give it 5 stars in Apple Podcasts. Write a nice review!

Rate it wherever you listen or via: https://ratethispodcast.com/strugglingartist

Join my mailing list: www.emilyrainbowdavis.com/

Like the blog/show on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SongsfortheStrugglingArtist/

Support me on Patreon: www.patreon.com/emilyrdavis

Or help me pay off my tickets to and from Crete on Kofi: http://ko-fi.com/emilyrainbowdavis

or PayPal me: https://www.paypal.me/strugglingartist

Join my Substack: https://emilyrainbowdavis.substack.com/

Follow me on Twitter @erainbowd

Me on Mastodon - @erainbowd@podvibes.co

Me on Hive - @erainbowd

Instagram and Pinterest

Tell a friend!

Listen to The Dragoning here (it's my audio drama) and support via Ko-fi here: https://ko-fi.com/messengertheatrecompany

As ever, I am yours,

Emily Rainbow Davis

There are so many reasons  I’m glad to be alive in JUST this moment. There are abundant stories to read or watch. I can listen to music anywhere I go. Podcasts are a thing. Migraine medicine is really taking giant leaps ahead. It is a richer world in terms of diversity and representation. So much progress has been made.

But as my 50th birthday looms ahead, I find I am also in a kind of mourning for the world I grew up in. Sometimes I feel as though I have been dropped in a strange future and expected to thrive, when the truth is, this strange world grew up slowly alongside me. I may feel like a stranger in it, but we must have grown into this together.

To read more of The One Thing I Might Have in Common with Ron DeSantis, visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog.

This is Episode 365

Song: Last Year's Troubles

Image by DrStew82 via WikiCommons



To support this podcast:

Give it 5 stars in Apple Podcasts. Write a nice review!

Rate it wherever you listen or via: https://ratethispodcast.com/strugglingartist

Join my mailing list: www.emilyrainbowdavis.com/

Like the blog/show on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SongsfortheStrugglingArtist/

Support me on Patreon: www.patreon.com/emilyrdavis

Or help me pay off my tickets to and from Crete on Kofi: http://ko-fi.com/emilyrainbowdavis

or PayPal me: https://www.paypal.me/strugglingartist

Join my Substack: https://emilyrainbowdavis.substack.com/

Follow me on Twitter @erainbowd

Me on Mastodon - @erainbowd@podvibes.co

Me on Hive - @erainbowd

Instagram and Pinterest

Tell a friend!

Listen to The Dragoning here (it's my audio drama) and support via Ko-fi here: https://ko-fi.com/messengertheatrecompany

As ever, I am yours,

Emily Rainbow Davis

I used to be the kind of person who tried not to take any medication. If I had a headache, I’d try to avoid taking anything for it out of some sense of nobility or stoicism. Maybe I thought it made me strong to suffer? Maybe I thought it somehow made me a better person? Now that I know that some of those headaches were probably migraines, I understand that this was exactly the wrong strategy. Pretty much every migraine medication works better the sooner you take it.

This tough guy approach of resisting medication is very common in this country. I think of former Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (remember him? Oof) who recommended aspirin and toughing it out for any kind of pain. It’s odd, because on one hand, sure, we are an overmedicated nation. The story is that we take pills for everything and use medication for things we shouldn’t. There is an opioid crisis, after all. But simultaneously, as a nation, we have a strong skepticism about medicine. We’ll take unregulated supplements, unrestricted herbal remedies and expensive “natural” medicines. Like many American things, we’re on a wild pendulum of being both overmedicated and undermedicated simultaneously.

To read more of In Praise of Medicines visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog.

This is Episode 364

Song: The Remedy (I Won't Worry)

Image by Dan Smeadly via Unsplash

To support this podcast:

Give it 5 stars in Apple Podcasts. Write a nice review!

Rate it wherever you listen or via: https://ratethispodcast.com/strugglingartist

Join my mailing list: www.emilyrainbowdavis.com/

Like the blog/show on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SongsfortheStrugglingArtist/

Support me on Patreon: www.patreon.com/emilyrdavis

Or help me pay off my tickets to and from Crete on Kofi: http://ko-fi.com/emilyrainbowdavis

or PayPal me: https://www.paypal.me/strugglingartist

Join my Substack: https://emilyrainbowdavis.substack.com/

Follow me on Twitter @erainbowd

Me on Mastodon - @erainbowd@podvibes.co

Me on Hive - @erainbowd

Instagram and Pinterest

Tell a friend!

Listen to The Dragoning here (it's my audio drama) and support via Ko-fi here: https://ko-fi.com/messengertheatrecompany

As ever, I am yours,

Emily Rainbow Davis