Go South...Go North...Go East...Go West...

Why is it that when I want to escape I wanna go South? And when I wanna find something within myself I wanna go North? I go East to find the past and I go West to find the future. I am a product of movies. Too many damn movies. My life compass. The "Wild Bunch", "Jeremiah Johnson", "King Solomon's Mines", "Tarzan", "The Man Who Would Be King", "How the West Was Won", any of those really bad Genghis Khan or Marco Polo movies...yea too many damn movies.

I better head south and cross the Rio Grande into Mexico to out run the posse that's after me from robbing that bank in San Rafael, Texas only to find out the gold was only bags of steel washers...ugh.

I'm gonna head due North to the Rocky Mountains and grow a big ass beard, live on my own in a log cabin I just made with my knife and my .50 caliber Hawken rifle...and learn the ways of the mountain. "You can't cheat the mountain pilgrim! Mountain's got a way...shhh! Ya here that?!"

I'll head East to where the world began...Africa...the Old Mother going down the river in a small steamboat meeting up in Mogambo to capture gorillas, crossing the Nefud Desert with Lawrence through the great Mesopotamia, then to the far, far East on the Mongolian tundra plains to where the struggle for life happened every second of everyday in battles and taking wild Tartan women because my "blood wills it". *laughing*

West...I'll go west...ummmm...no...I'm already there. I came here for a future hope...a dream I had of divine providence...telling me to go here to make my way...to become a man. Not like Zeb Rawlings but my version of it.

I better get a compass. Oh wait...I have GPS on my phone...oh wait...that'll mean real service everywhere. Yea...I better get a compass and hope the Earth doesn't switch magnetic poles on me and screw up this stupidly fun way of thinking of the world and which direction I go to get there...

Where's my paper back book I used to carry around with me all the time... "How To Survive In the Wilderness"? It's a good read...especially if you plan on getting lost in Northern Canada. Yea...getting lost to find yourself. Kinda sounds like a movie or something...

Sent from the Black Forest...

The Magic Shuffle...

I have an iPod. Like all old-schoolers I resisted for a while. Then I thought the stupidest thing is to resist the new age. The Digital Age. The Analog Age is dead and anything on that analog vine is gonna die eventually. Vinyl will die too. I love vinyl. But it only lives through nostalgia...and nostalgia is made from a generation of people who romanticize "how it used to be". When this generation is gone, so will be the nostalgia for it.

Now enough of the old days. What's going on now? The same thing that was always going on. Portability and convenience. That's right, the same old stuff. First you had to see live musicians or make music yourself. Then came cylinders and records. You could play that band or orchestra in your house! Then came the radio. You play in your house, outside, or in your car. Then 8-tracks and cassettes, smaller and even more portable and convenient. Sound? Who cares? Nobody minded AM radio in mono versus a real band when you could listen to it anywhere. Walkman and small crappy headphones were the newest best thing. You could jog to AC/DC! The came CD's, the lie of better sound, but really it was convenience again. It lasted longer, took less space. Then came digital files like mp3's. Again, much more portable, worse in sound but the trade off? Thousands of songs in the palm of your hand.

I have my entire record collection in my iPod except for my out of print vinyl. I can even put that on there if I want to spend the time. I have the old 160 gigabyte model. I have all my songs on the mp3 highest quality of 320kbps. Over 10,000 songs and movies, tv shows, cartoons, language books, all my lyrics in case I forget them on tour...*laughing* everything.

Do I hear a difference? Yes. I'm an engineer and producer. Do I care? Yes, but convenience wins and 320kbps sounds pretty darn good, at least better than a radio station going in and out and all those crappy commercials. When storage becomes even smaller, we won't even need to compress all the data, and eventually we'll be able to expand to 24bit sound rather than 16bit. It's all gonna happen in its sweet ol' time.

Now here's my favorite part of the portable player. "Shuffle". Having 10,000 songs doesn't mean you listen to all of them. We are habitual creatures. We play favorites. Shuffle/random play means anything goes. The Minutemen to Russian Orthodox Vespers by Rachmaninov to Loretta Lynn singing duets with Conway Twitty to Slayer to Captain Beefheart to Blondie to Bernard Herrmann to King Tubby to Serge Gainsbourg to The Stranglers to Candi Staton to Deerhoof to Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass to Sonny Boy Williamson to Ice-T to Neil Diamond to...you get my point. I hear songs I might never hear if I was left to pick 'em. Some songs honestly I've never even heard, or remember. Amazing gems that make me go "Who the heck is that?! Awesome!!" Some songs that make me go..."Okay...when I get home I'm deleting that awful song!" In time, my music collection will just get better and better, finding beautiful obscurities like Les Baxter or odd happenings like a Bukowski reading a poem.

Yes! Everyone let's do the Shuffle! Skip the song if you don't want to hear it, but you might be surprised what you will want to hear. It might not be in your favorites. *smile*

Sent from the Black Forest...

Get Off My Lawn!!!!

"Get off my lawn!!!" Remember that? You know the grumpy old neighbor that would yell at you for running across his lawn? That sad mean old bastard. Now. Now I occasionally have that same inclination. Damn. I'm turning into that mean old man all of us kids used to despise. Damn his eyes! *laughing* I say this knowing full well I'm not him, but I understand him now. The whole "empathy requires understanding" thing.

Kids lack the much more complex theme of respect. They confuse fear with respect. We adults still do. They immediately level the playing field and make everyone equal. The lines of property blur. Awareness of others feelings are drowned out by their own selves yelling out to the world "I'm here! Look at me!" This is being a kid. Self discovery. Triple underline the word "self".

It's not really about others until the teenage years. Then we become hyper aware of how others see us and having the conflicting feeling of wanting to be approved and assimilated by our peers and yet needing to rebel at authority to assert our individuality and our specialness. A balancing act hard to achieve with many stumbles along the way.

It was wondrous Hell being a kid. I couldn't wait to grow up. Getting control of my life. Or so I thought. Finding for myself that control is just an illusion to make us feel safer in this beautiful and sometimes cruel world.

I want my inner kid to live and thrive. I want my inner adult to lighten-up but still rule. Growing up diminishes the selfish tendencies and adds the understanding of others, re-enforcing the true reality of our connectedness with everything. To hurt someone or some thing hurts ourselves too. That we are not alone, nor can we every truly be alone, even though our bodies and physical reality seems to deem it so.

Yep. I want to hold on to the magical discovery and wide-eyed wonder of a child, and the wisdom and understanding of being a part of something much greater than ourselves.

Sent from the Black Forest...

September, Yucca Street, and Tree Living Punkers...

Sitting here sweltering at my computer transports me to 1985 Hollywood, Dire Straits - "Money For Nothing" came out, I'm seventeen years old, and my first studio apartment. It was hot like this, hovering around 100 degrees, my air-conditioning unit would ice up and I would have to chisel away the ice to get the cooled air out an into my 300 square foot room. In these "olden" times, Hollywood was much skankier on the strip. The day I moved in, there were all these women at my apartment complex. Lots of smiles and stare-downs headed my way like arrows at Little Bighorn, while I was unloading everything I owned in Chevy S-10 pickup. I thought to myself "Wow! I haven't even moved in yet and adventure is already swirling around me!" I started to talking to one girl, we were laughing and getting along pretty good, when more women came into the complex...then it hit me...internal dialogue-"Hookers!" Oh Hell...this isn't the adventure I thought it was. Embarrassed and feeling really dumb, young, and full of...I quickly unpacked my truck and stayed inside. Alone. You have to understand, that up to this point in my life, I stayed in my room playing guitar and never left but to eat, take out the garbage and mow the lawn. My social skills and worldly knowledge were of the pre-school age. *laughing*

Living in Hollywood at this time I grew up quickly, someone was mistakenly killed at my front door by a gang. It could have been me. My life threatened on two occasions by drugged out psychos, and someone else pulled a knife to take my candy apple red Gibson Flying V Heritage guitar from me. You know how many lawns I mowed to get that guitar? "Fuck you! You're gonna have to take it from me!" I pulled out my own knife that I always had cupped in my hand when walking the streets for this very occasion. Fortunately the guy found it to be too much work, so he just walked away cursing. Yes...I know...a Gibson Flying V...it was the 80's. I was in a metal band. I had just played the Rainbow Bar, I was underage, so when I to played, I had to wait outside most of the time except when and only when I was on stage. It was the time of Depeche Mode vs. Megadeth. You were on one side or the other. This is very funny to think about now. It was also when I saw the movie "This Is Spinal Tap" and when I seriously thought about jumping the metal ship and going to blues. Teenagers...

When you're seventeen, you think that because maybe you're smart, you know everything sans experience. It is in experience that life reminds you that you don't know shit no matter how many books you've read. I was humbled in Hollywood. Watching dumpster diving for food, drugs take over people's minds, whores puking up their job they just finished 5 minutes ago. Humbled.

One morning I went to my truck to go to the grocery store and my truck hood was all dented in and scratched up. There was a small group of punkers who practically lived in the tree above my parking spot. One of them apparently fell asleep and fell out of the tree and on to my truck. They were really sorry about it and they pooled their money together and bought me a case of Keystone beer. I was really mad, but I couldn't be mad for longer than a minute. I realised these guys had nothing. Not even a place to live. If you take the money they spent on the beer for me, it probably was 60% of what they had. Damn. That's a lot. In my mind that case of Keystone was one of the biggest offers of restitution and compensation from someone in my life.

I still think about those guys every time I see a parking lot and a big tree looming above the spaces. You never know what might drop out and change the way you look at things forever...

Sent from the Black Forest...

The Grand Illusion...

Art and Money. The grand illusion, and the great mind fuck. We need to stop trying to put them together. Money is made by a lot of things, but art isn't one of them. It's by demand. You wanna chance at making money? Be popular. Of course you can't decide to be popular. You are chosen. Popularity by itself does not even guarantee financial gain. Hence, the mind fuck. Artists should just try to make good art, art from within, truth or anti-truth, make their own way, and acknowledge art is for people. Money may or may never come. That is the true fact.

The idea that good art will bring you money is wrong. We all know a lot of bad art makes huge amounts of money. The idea that hard work will bring you money is wrong. Full time artists and coal miners can attest to this fact. Pure popularity alone will not bring you money, but it helps. The reality is that when the light shown upon an artist making him or her known to the populous, them being accepted and demanded by others increases the artist's worth in the monetary sense. Demand. Build demand and they will come. Pure economics.

Economics tell us that too much supply makes a lower demand and short supply makes a higher demand. If we go further...it's not just the amount of demand but the amount people are willing to pay. That's why some people see subscription service as the future. Small amount to pay but huge amount of people. Verses the other model of high amounts sold to fewer people.

However you wanna play it, it comes down to demand. That is the mysterious quotient, the hidden ingredient, the mystical mumbo-jumbo that is just what it is, like Nature, we don't have any control over it. Some people say you can, but these are the same people who will tell you about it for $39.99. *laughing*

If we as artists can just accept this like we do about many other things in life, we can get back to doing what we do, let the people decide what they want, and finally see who the "man is from behind the curtain".

You'll find it's your Uncle Vito, your niece Petunia, your neighbor Mrs. Feldman, and that damn asshole who almost hit you when you were crossing the street.

Sent from the Black Forest...