ReCOVery: A Conversation With Joshua Starkman
Words by George Wilde / Edited by Sam Ferguson / Photos by Katie Sikora
This interview is part of an ongoing series of interviews with New Orleans creators entitled ReCOVery: Conversations In Creation.
Joshua Starkman is the personality behind the web series and brand “Have A Great Day.” He has also had a professional career as a gigging guitarist and bandleader in New Orleans for over a decade. This conversation took place April 11, 2020.
George Wilde: So, you’re alive.
Joshua Starkman: Yeah, I don’t have any more symptoms.
No symptoms?
Well, fatigue and congestion, chest shit that I’m still dealing with. It’s taking for fucking ever. I’ve been told it varies from person-to-person. I didn’t get tested but I assume I have it.
Yeah, I’ve heard the duration is pretty intense.
Yeah, you think it gets better. It comes in these weird ways: some people get it in waves, some people it’s just a couple days, some people don’t feel it. I have friends that are my age, like three and a half weeks. I’m three weeks in.
Damn, that is a serious illness.
Yeah, it is. What I’m experiencing is mild, and I think I was kind of playing it down because I don’t want to freak people out. There were definitely moments where I really had to work through breathing and opening my lungs up because it’s a hard mucus that’s kind of dry and doesn’t really move.
Damn.
And it’s weird. My experience was it had two distinct phases. The first week is you experience fever, headache, loss of smell and taste — which is something that I still don’t have quite completely, it’s about 80%. I had some chills and some fever stuff, but it was mostly intense sinus pressure and your body’s really out of it. Kind of like you’re wobbly. It’s almost like you’re tripping, you’re disoriented. And it was fair, probably a five or six out of ten that first week, and then it chills out, and you’re like, “Oh, I’m turning a corner,” and about a week after there’s a day where I…the chest stuff intensified again. That comes back after all the shit. This past week was me dealing with chest pains and aches. So, if we’re gonna talk about treatment. I’ve cut out dairy and sugar from my diet almost completely. I eat healthy. I take a lot of supplements because my parents are like alternative health practitioners. My dad’s a chiropractor; my mom’s a midwife. Upped all levels of vitamin A, C, and D. Zinc. I’m probably taking like 2,000% of everything. Which is fine. One symptom I’ve also heard from other people is like dysentery, diarrhea, upset stomach. That can happen, too. Breathing exercises. I’ve been doing meditation…this thing feeds off stress. You have to bolster your immune system. You have to not look at the news as much, not do things that trigger stress reactions because that affects the chest. Like even people who are completely healthy — like “take my breath away,” you know, the song? Your breath gets taken away by emotional stress. Like I was watching Westworld. There’s way too much sex and stress, and I just felt my chest just freaking out over it.
That’ll get your heart rate up.
Yeah exactly. So, like reducing that stuff is really important…Oh, also, I’ve been taking, like, Chinese medicine herbs, just another thing…and turmeric tea, ginger, you know….
I don’t know what’s going on because I haven’t received any responses from anybody in the government, or any grant application programs.
Tell me what you’ve been doing on that front.
I’ve applied to all of them, and I haven’t heard back from any of them!
Which ones?
MusiCares. NOLA Business Alliance. Jazz Fest…None of them I’ve heard back from. I applied to SBA, the small business loan, [and I] didn’t hear back from them, other than the “Save your confirmation number” page at the end of the application.
I had a “Save your confirmation number” as well.
I can understand how it is taking a long time because everybody’s applying. I applied to unemployment, as a self-employed person, and I don’t know about you, but I’m holding my breath for Monday to see if I get money. To see if their system is actually working despite how infrastructurally unsound it is online.
Obviously musicians are out of work. What happened with you? Did you have a lot of gigs, a lot of revenue streams coming?
YES!
Did they stop? Tell me about where you were before March 10 or 11 and where you are now.
How my gigs were affected? Well I had a lot of really interesting and cool stuff lined up that was coming off all the momentum from the online stuff I’d been doing.
Give me an example.
Emceeing events, playing private gigs where I had negotiation power. I had a lot of money lined up.
Can you tell me about some of those?
Yeah, just like wedding gigs, Royal Street Stroll; I had my own event, Have A Great Day: Tonight. Because Have A Great Night was the other thing I did with comedy. But I was going to host it; I was going to fly a friend in from L.A. That was going to be at the Howlin’ Wolf Den, and that got cancelled.
What was the date of that?
March 21st? Yeah.
Sorry, so just to line it up: you had some MC gigs, you had Royal Street Stroll –
No, that was like, performing. I had my own private wedding gig. I had wedding gigs through NOLA Dukes. Bacchanal on Mondays with Charlie.
On Mondays? Charlie…
JS: Halloran
Oh, duo.
No, calypso, like a full band. Percussion…And obviously I got sick, so I’m not doing any videos with people online, so I’m just on reruns. I don’t feel like making any videos myself. And also, this is just a good time to reassess and pivot and learn new skills and shit.
Where are you at with that, tell me about that? The reassessing, the pivoting. I saw the reruns.
I’m gonna do that a little while longer until I feel better.
What’s the engagement like on those?
Meh, OK. Everyone’s seen them. I’m just holed up entertaining people, just keeping the good vibes flowing even though it might not be hot. It’s kind of funny. It’s funny for me to navigate that. That impulse to make it hot, to make it relevant, that’s an old habit, but we’re in a new world. You know what I mean? Like, moving forward, how am I going to use the internet to be relevant in a way that I see as even more authentic to myself because I think in times like this, they’re revealing of the type of person that you are, and your depth of human understanding and caring.
Tell me more.
Well, I’m going to move more into thoughts, and talking [laughs]. And meditative types of conversation-prompting. Yeah, there’ll be music. I’m going to write songs and things like that. I think it’s a time to delve more deeply into myself. Because a lot of it has to do…what I’ve done is showcase other people, but obviously now I can’t do that as easily, which is fine. For some reason I feel calm about everything. Except for, perhaps, we’re not hearing back from the money side of things, but we’re all in the same boat. There’s a collective suffering going on. It’s an even playing field, I don’t feel like, separate. We’ll see, this is the first month [laughs].
Yeah, I hear what you’re talking about. I’m interested in what your plans for Have A Great Day are. But you brought up a lot of points, and I want to hear about all of them. The first one is this idea of, like, you’re going from what’s hot and new and relevant….
Promoting people’s new works and content, yadda yadda, very capitalistic.
Right, but you follow that up with “It’s a new world,” so what’s the connection between that and pivoting from what’s hot and relevant to where we are now? What are you seeing? What are you thinking about with the world we’re in or will be in?
Well, for me it’s leaning into a certain sense of responsibility I feel for people’s morale. And my own. A big part of the reason why I do it is because it makes me happy to do it. [laughs]
That’s a good reason.
Why would you do something that’s contradictory to your spirit? But I feel that in our society people do that to some extent because they see models working for other people, perhaps not seeing that they’re doing it because they’re happy. The other person that they’re looking at. And you know, you got to find a soul alignment. And this is a time of transformation and adjustment, and I’m all for it because, to be honest, I was kind of tired of gigging [laughs]. Tourism gigs suck, dude! I’m sorry!
What sucks about them?
For me it didn’t feel like I was completely doing something that was aligned with my spirit. So, if you’re asked objectively…if money wasn’t part of this, would you be doing it? A lot of my gigs I would say, “No.” You know what I mean? I don’t want to play a wedding. “Have A Great Wedding”: I don’t necessarily need to play it. If it was my friend, sure, really taps into me. Yeah, totally. If it’s something about singing songs or singing my own songs or playing my own music or my own project, sure. But the whole “Rise and grind! Hustle, hustle, hustle!” — it’s just like…eh [laughs]
It’s not inspiring.
No. But that’s the position that we’ve all been put in as artists because that’s the fucking culture.
The Grind?
Yeah, I’m speaking in an idealistic way, but it’s only idealistic in contrast to hyper-capitalism.
It’s interesting. I think some people probably think that artists are in some way above or sort of immune to the rat race. I think there is a common conception that that’s the case.
Depends what cities you’re in. New Orleans doesn’t have the rat race dialed in as tightly as some cities.
Within the music community or within the whole community?
Yeah within the music community, but you definitely…OK I was in L.A. for a month. There’s definitely some dudes who are like bohemian-ish, free-ish, you know, hippie-ish, whatever label you want to give it, kind of outside the nine-to-five grind, pop culture world. But there are definitely musicians who are totally within that grind, they function within it, and, you know, good on them, they’re making tons of money.
So it sounds like you’re in a position where you don’t want to be doing a lot of the things you’ve been doing.
Meh…But the thing is, foreseeably I’m not going to be doing them. People aren’t going to be coming back here for a year or two. Come on.
So, is that part of the reason to get out from under some of those things you don’t like to do? Because they’re not going to happen?
Yeah, exactly. Also, I have my lifeboat built. I built the ship over a couple of years. The online thing. It’s just a matter of leaning more into that.
So how do you lean into that? Where’s the lifeboat? Where does it go? Where’s the shore?
Where does it go…. To a place that feels good…. I don’t know what the details of that are because I’m still healing, but I’m a big proponent of the idea that the open hand receives the gifts it needs. I’ll just keep proceeding with an open and self-trusting mind and see what feels right and also yields the results that maintain my survival. And are aligned with my spirit, like I was saying, and a certain amount of responsibility that I feel I have for myself and others.
Tell me about that, your sense of responsibility.
Like I was saying, it’s a certain responsibility of the morale of myself and others. To…to be life-affirmative. To give hope to people. To let people know they’re loved. Whether it’s in an abstract way, if you’re a big believer that all we have is around you [laughs], you know, visually and according to the senses. Whatever it is.
You’re talking about, like, your reality is the things around you, your reality is your experience. Like your “being” is your experience, your sensory experience.
Right, we just think you’re this insular little ego trapped in a mind, and that’s all you are. The idea of “You.” I at least hope in some way I can connect with that. And possibly other people that might be a little more outside of that. Like, no, the ego’s just a facet of the mind and the being, and we’re all connected to a much larger network and universe. Life and death are all just part of a big cycle.
Sure, and how does “Have A Great Day” and the online thing relate to that philosophy? Because I think it resonates, and I’m just curious what you think about that.
Well, huh. I guess what I’ve done over the past couple years was just the first steps, I suppose, of going down that path. Because I know for a fact that one of my skills is getting people in a comfortable space to be able to receive a message. With that comes a lot of responsibility, though! Because you know if you have the gift of gab…a lot of people in history have had the gift of gab, for better or for worse.
Sure. That’s not a value-neutral gift.
And it takes time. For example, when all this shit…it takes time for things to manifest naturally and for you to be able to receive them. When this first happened, obviously I didn’t get sick, when the quarantine first happened. I didn’t get sick till a week into it. And I was thinking, “Oh, I’ll make these kinds of videos, and I’ll make this and that, and I know how to make money! And yadda yadda yadda.” But now that I’ve been sick for three weeks, it’s just like, “Lose it. You don’t know where you are. You’ve never been here. You don’t even have a map [laughs]. So just relax and listen. You have time. There’s so much time now, especially for an artist.” My dad’s not working right now because he’s a chiropractor and his office is shut down in Miami. Miami is shut down. But my uncle owns this really big staffing company. So, you can only imagine how much business is going on there. All these other businesses that are on file with them that have to cut all their employees. My cousin who works for the business is working like eighteen-hour workdays. It’s insane.
Wow.
So, going back to being artists on the outside, on the fringe, we’re the yin to that yang right now. We have so much time. There’s really no need to keep acting like we’re capitalists. If anything, it’s just time to listen.
Listen to…listen to everything? Listen to who? Listen to each other?
Anything. Silence [laughs]. More of a meditative kind of existence. I’m very preachy now, and I’ll tell you that my iPhone screen time is at like ten hours a day [laughs].
Sure.
I’m a hypocrite, in a way, but also, I’m keeping in touch with family — this, that, and the other. My hope is to be in more a receiving state. For inspiration. Because there’s no service to society for what I’m going to do, to rush what I’m doing.
This concept of artists being on the fringe and having a lot of extra time right now. When you say, “There’s no reason to act like capitalists,” does that mean there’s no reason to be scheming about how to make money right now?
For me. I’m talking in projection right now. Everyone can do whatever the fuck they want. Livestream with the crappy sound and put the Venmo up, and you’ll make a few hundred bucks — it’s great. I don’t know what your economic situation is; perhaps you need to do it, whatever it is… …[But] if we can get more in line with our spirit, we can create things that tap more into our society. It depends where you are. Perhaps the motivation of what you do needs to be money right now; there’s nothing wrong with that. But if you have enough support at least for a couple months, I recommend just be with yourself. Get to know yourself better in a very slow time.
I have a feeling what you’re talking about, that is something people are experiencing. Part of the reason I wanted to have this conversation in the first place was because I think people have time to listen. But we all need something to listen to. You can listen to silence, you can meditate, you can listen to yourself and the beating of your own heart, but I think people like to listen to each other.
Yeah, totally, the only person I’ve talked to face-to-face with in the past three weeks is my landlady and she’s terrified of me. The plague is in her backyard, dude; she’s sixty years old. I don’t blame her! So yeah, people are looking for a connection. How do we connect at a time when we can’t be together in a physical space? That’s where messages come in. It’s very important.
So, what to do when…I don’t want to say, “When this is all over” because I don’t know if it’s something that can be “over.”
Over compared to what? Over and then we’re back to 2020 January? [laughs]
Where do we go next? What happens next for artists in New Orleans? For artists in general? I hear taking the time to in-line with your spirit and tapping into society, but what does that look like?
Right, well, this is a dynamic question because you’re talking about a number of things. You got to make money, right? Physical places of work don’t exist anymore. If we’re talking about musicians in New Orleans, all of our places to work are done. This virus is going to come back again. It comes in phases. Pandemics come in phases. Especially because the United States has had a very bad response. The last state to declare a state of emergency thus making all states in a state of emergency, which is the first time in the history of our country, happened today, which is Wyoming.
Wow.
But not all the states are shut down, you can still travel. And people don’t take this shit seriously. People don’t want to just stay the fuck inside. Because, you know, you could be asymptomatic and breathe it all over the place.
Anyway, back to your point, I think we got to use the tools available as musicians and creators. Technology man. And for what I was doing, I was just breaking the surface. There are people who are so much further down that rabbit hole, who know how to use all these services online to get their followers to create an income stream. But then also just having the skill to create something captivating. Not every artist is going to be that way because not everyone is like that. Everyone is different. Life is a dynamic thing. Personalities and skill sets. They’re very dynamic things. I don’t even think that technology will be able to account for everybody, on a creative level. It’s just those who are going to be able to figure out and put their personality into it and not give up and just believe in themselves. Because actually believing in yourself is the thing that rubs off the most.
And you feel clubs are just done for a while.
Uhhhh, yeah [laughs]. Yeah. Even if they opened them up again, I would be apprehensive to play in them. Unless I got an antibody test because I don’t know for certain if I’ve had it or not. I need to rule it out. I don’t want to be an example of “Yeah, come out!” and bring people around each other to spread it again. That doesn’t seem smart or responsible. Yeah, we like good times here, but you got to be alive to have a good time.
You’re not wrong.
You got to be alive to work. That’s why we’re not going back to work on Easter like our genius president wanted us to, fucking moron.
No doubt.
So, what do we do? We have technology. It’s a very interesting sci-fi novel because we have all these ways of communicating and seeing each other, of getting messages across or entertainment, and we have the currency tapped into all of it too — it’s in the cloud. So how do we figure out ways to keep people paid? Honestly, I think, like I was saying before, the discrepancy between success online as being a creative and not…it will have to be covered…and this goes for all kinds of people who can’t work…because if you’re an Uber driver, [if] you’re not even a creative who can find ways to work online, it’s fine: you’re loved, you don’t have to…you still don’t have fucking work! There’s a lot more people like that than there are creative types, musicians, artists. There has to be an expansion of welfare on all fronts. Unless there’s pretty big concessions and progress made on that front, there’s going to a whole lot more reckoning between the public and the corporate-and-government. There’s going to be a huge rub. How do you quell the masses? $1200? One month? Mm-mm. No. How do you keep funding it? You keep printing money. What happens to the money? The value of it becomes inherently less. Does that mean that there’s going to be more inflation? Will my unemployment check a year from now, six months from now, if I’m still on it, will it have the same buying power? Who knows? We have fiat currency; it’s not based on anything; it’s based on trust and liquidity. That’s why I’m putting small amounts into bitcoin every week because it’s not debased. They have some scam problems from time to time, but it can’t be inflated. There’s scarcity. I don’t have enough money for gold…apparently that’s getting really expensive. And guns [laughs]. I don’t have a gun. I feel like it attracts shit.
Yeah, maybe you don’t need a gun. People buy them, though!
People buy them! I heard you can’t buy ammo now.
Really, they ran out?
It’s hard to find. Yeah.
Talk about currency…
So, here’s a lot of the things I’ve been thinking about living in my small room behind Max Moran’s mom’s house.
Playing any music?
JS: Yeah, I’ve been learning some standards and singing a lot. Also singing is really good for the lungs and for the release of healthy, happy chemicals in the body, as long as you don’t judge yourself.
