Hey Chuck, if you ever want to buy this site, make me an offer! For the mean time, sorry for the lack of posts, there’s simply sooo much going on but it’ll pick up again soon. I’ve been doing thismusic radio podcast as of late called Dandelion Wine Radio.
Be a mensch and check it out!
Also, new bands! I’ve been playing bass in The Buttertarts !… We’ve put up a few demos on myspace.
thebrotheregg have a new batch of finished recordings as well on the horizon. 5, actually.. freshly mastered. We will update thebrotheregg page shortly with details.
be seeing you,
Adam
Yesterday I read the headlines of an article stating essentially that people who over think decisions often go on to make poorer choices than those who act upon their earliest instincts. The idea I take from this is that the more primitive intuitive response often yields a better and healthier result. Following this logic, I feel that I should have stayed the course with my very earliest desire to become a superhero. I realize this now. I shouldn’t have let the world talk me out of it.
For what it’s worth, I did succeed in becoming an astronaut.
This site is now called: *SUCCEED FOR* the Union… Both URLs work, actually… Secede from the union, succeed for the union… Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside just to have both. I surmised that at one point our democratic process may have been broke and the whole ship submerging quickly, but now maybe there is this ray of hope (on a large social scale). A ray of hope is a valuable thing. Revolutions do not actually take place when things are at their worst but rather when there appears a ray of hope. It is at this point that heads begin to roll. A political secessionism ideologically opposes the building that together we must commit to doing and that we must currently do to avoid eminent self-destruction. A political secession right now incubates in the form of a dramatic reinventing. A secessionist movement is a tabula rasa that we can achieve with a little bit of imagination.
As an internal process, secessionism also unbinds us from our static selves and refreshes us. Big idea conflicts define our challenging equilibrium like how unity and multiplicity, uniqueness and anonymity, individuality and collectivity constantly compete for our undoing. Sometimes we dip into ourselves and we get it all wrong, or we live as only one half of something or only a small part of everything. We can delight in the contemplation of darkness and light and how a dim environment reveals the weak looming presence of both.
Anyhow, cynicism is boring, so I’m trying to cut it out of my diet or rather channel healthfully (along with other facets of personal darkness) into more cathartic exorcisms like music and meditative journal rants..
Muy Pequeño
Muy Pequeño was my little man. He was a short fuzzy grey Persian cat; I think 99% pure bread with papers. He lived on this earth from 1992-2008 and he shall be missed.
My friend’s mother started to breed Persians back in the early 90’s and wound up with 20 or so of them, telling me at the time that she was becoming to attached and protective of them to sell them to just anyone. I think she was asking some $300 or so per cat. Well, she realized that I would provide a great home for one of them and then offered me one for free because I guess she trusted me with one, to adopt it and give it care for the duration of its natural life, which we ultimately did.
My father was against getting another cat as we already had one, Creepy Pee-Pee (yes, that was the name I gave him.. When I got him his name was Ducky so in a haze of “madness” I changed it.) Well, I told my father, caring for two cats is not much different than caring for one, and besides she’s giving us this free pure bread cat that looks like it’s from outer space. Well, we went back and forth about this for maybe an hour and it got pretty ugly because I just couldn’t grasp his logic on this and I think the episode ended with me yelling some obscenities and locking myself in my room.
To make a long story short, I walked into the living room maybe two days later and there on the floor was the cutest grey dustball you could ever imagine. Maybe three or four inches long, my father had indeed gone on his own over to my friend’s house and obtained the cat… behind my back! It was beautiful to see my father come around like that and do something that he probably considered senseless and frivolous like the adoption of a cuddly good-fer-nothin. That’s how things usually go between us, and that is a classical example of what I’ve inherited from my father, an arresting stubbornness, followed by a period of contemplation, the embrace of change, and finalized by the possibility of change.
I named the little guy, Muy Pequeño because he was so small and he never really did get that big. One time, there was a power failure and I was sitting on the couch in the living room with some friends regaling the joy of a briefly powerless society, illuminated by candles and quieted of its lack of subliminal cycle hum, when the little fuzzy bugger climbed up my arm, and perched himself right on top of my head. It was the strangest thing and it had never happened before or ever since. He just sat there wobbling to try and stay stable on the very top of my head while everyone laughed.
Pequeño became a great companion to Creepy Pee-Pee, the two would roll around on the floor in this epic combat and Pequeño was obviously learning to be a cat this way, from the example of the other slightly older one. Creepy was a tabby and had a diversity of breeding in his coat and he bore an obvious intelligence and sophistication. As a result, I believe Pequeño inherited quality social skills and learned the value of companionship. As a side note, we later adopted two other Persians from my friend’s mother, both of which my father still cares for, but one of them is a complete A*hole (Molly) and her daughter, “the Fonz” (we thought she was a boy for maybe a year and her protest every time I picked her up made me think of the Fonz saying “Ey, don’t touch the leather.”)
Well, maybe a year or two later I left for the west coast and Muy Pequeño became my father’s companion as he enjoyed his retirement in the Illinois suburb along Lake Michigan. Pequeño lived a long life and slept by my father’s side the whole time. Hearing the news that my dad had to put him down was terrible.
I am often moved by how death tears apart love. When one mate dies and the other is left to fend for herself, exposed to the cruelty of a cold indifferent universe…. Alone. The other depressing side of death exists in the portrait of those left behind here in life. A death or a suicide is like an atomic bomb going off in the middle of the city but the heart of its epicenter is in the family and the community, the impact affects whoever falls within its radius. It leaves a dark mark in our lives like a vortex of non-matter. We are the other side of death, those still living.
I just wanted to take a few minutes to remember my little grey fuzzy friend who was very loyal and kind. He was soft and beautiful, one of the finer expressions of the perfect universe. He will be missed.
Well hello again, true believers! I’m sitting here with another cold, this one hardly a matter of national security, but it’s quite nice to be writing again. With the state of politics seemingly back on track (people are coming to their senses?), it’s ok once again for me to shut down and gear up for another November of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). Yes, we only have a few weeks left before the global writing frenzy is reinvigorated.
A couple of things first. I wanted to say a little this and that regarding political morbid fixation. I’ve been observing the theater of the absurd along with the rest of you, regardless of where you are; you’re probably watching the United States air out our dirty laundry for the entire globe to see. Well, that’s all well and good. Perhaps we are at least enjoying a fantasy in which a certain aspect of the media is engaging in a vulture-like obsession that is nitpicking and over speculating about every aspect of our national elections, and that we are receiving some sort of truth from it all. The ongoing drama, even in its oversimplified depiction, is the information that we all have to go on and is what will ultimately inform our political outlook and our voting decisions. Read the rest of this entry »
Wow, does politics make me and everyone else want to vomit. Lately, I feel that the most unsettling aspect of American politics is not the circus of John McCain this, Hillary Clinton that, it’s the American populous, we’re the ones whom prop these ideas up. Yes, John McCain is an idea, he’s not a real person as far as you and I are concerned. I find myself wading through a whole lot of confusion in my mind about what’s going on and what I’m reading about, because you know, I love to read and I have a morbid fascination with current events. On the bright side, I’m doing my civic duty by reading about trends in politics and the various expressions of the values of America through media and barstool discussion. So, let’s let go of the whole ‘morbid fixation’ mentality and step up to the fact that awareness is utterly crucial and is showing itself as such these days. What they call the “anti-intellectualism” of the current and previous Republican campaigns is culminating in a show of long-term ill effects like a lifetime of chain smoking. Read the rest of this entry »
Yes, Google has labeled this as a troubled site which I didn’t understand at first but have been forced to seriously look into. For that reason I have been withholding any postings until the problem can be fixed and order can be restored. What with the elections coming up and the dark eclipse of American social mediocrity looming over us in the form of future president John Mccain, this site might be able to command some serious cash if I were willing to sell it. For my part, this site transformed itself into something of an “art” site some time ago as I became disinterested in contributing to the sea of idiotic political ramblings, but certainly with president Mccain, a secessionist movement might very well be in order. Read the rest of this entry »
Well, for those of you reading this, I’m glad to say I’m back from a dangerous and expensive safari in Africa where there was no internet access for me to update this section, etc. And for the lack of postings during this time, I apologize. Really, that Safari business is not true, not true at all and so… I apologize again, but this time for speaking falsely of fantasies concerning wild adventures abroad. It was a bit misleading or actually a bit blatantly false. What happened between last post and this one is really “nothing special” as they say in zen. Read the rest of this entry »
I really want to put the word ‘rant’ to rest, for my part. I think I’ll stop using it and it’s rather self-deprecating for me to describe a tangential diatribe as a rant, or rather an exploratory soliloquy (A poem is, after all, a walk). My thought process works as a network of tangents that are tributaries from certain engrained essences. These ‘essences’ are truths that I believe at the core of my being, truths that emanate from some abstract sense of ‘good’. (Tangent #1: mystical/post-modern Biblical interpretation) Some people look to the Ten Commandments for a blueprint of their morality. Those particular laws can be discovered without a biblical decree even. Many people, just through the course of living, realize that they should not kill or steal, etc. My thoughts about that are that one must also be a mystic to consider the implications of ‘thou shall not worship false idols’. What does that mean? Well, I believe that one must align themselves toward the universal essences and not superficial appearances. Should the bible be taken as literal truth? (A question asked during a recent republican debate.) Well, I would argue that a literal interpretation would be the act of worshipping a false idol. Regardless of its holiness, it’s a book! People argue over what it means, people interpret its passages poorly. There is no divine objectivity involved in our interaction with this. How does it pertain to my life and how does it benefit this community?
So, I’ve been collecting arguments and sound bites in my head recently, gathering mostly impressions and interpretations that have been pointing toward what I believe to be a big issue facing us as Americans. We, every one of us, need to contemplate ‘change’ in this same mystical sense. I ranted earlier about how change has t-boned the music industry and how its collapse is a direct result of its shortsightedness. We are seeing health care failure here in
America which is causing many of us to think hard about a lot of issues. What value is our health, politically? Class issues: The rich receive better health care than the poor, it’s an institution in this country and it defines our views on healthcare. I’m not a scholar on health care but allegedly we are suffering from a crisis on healthcare. People who get paid to think about these things really need to step ‘outside of the box’ and embracing a certain artistic approach to solving these problems. Ever hear someone say “I can’t draw, I have no talent”… Well, regarding healthcare, they better start exercising those hidden creative talents, the ones that can conjure up solutions. Allegedly, that’s where the abstract
church of
Barak Obama comes into play. People in this country are realizing collectively that creativity is needed for the bigger picture to correct itself and we sure as hell ain’t gonna get it from these “old farts in office” as my father likes to refer to them as.
The music industry is plagued with these ‘old farts’ and their old antiquated models. Healthcare is bogged down in chaos and injustice. What else? Hmm.. Well, the other day I saw this interview with this major big wig billionaire (who’s name I can’t recall on command) and he said that “American business is losing its edge in the world market”. What he went on to describe perked my interest because it was thematically identical to what I am ‘ranting’ about right this very second. Corporate business being bogged down in ineffectual bureaucracy, waste, and mismanagement. CEOS being rewarded for huge quarterly losses with astronomical bonuses, an old tired system that just means pain for those of us at the bottom who are just trying to maintain and find some glimmering of happiness in our lives. Some of us work for these huge conglomerates and guess what??? DON’T HAVE HEALTHCARE. Yeah, I know that corporations put bacon on the table for masses of people (that would otherwise be savages running amok) and I’m comfortable to admit that such a detail does not go unnoticed and even goes into the plus category. Corporations are about big money and if they have to go to
India to save/make big money, or if they have to systematically degrade the cultures of the world and the health and character of the people with uninspired mediocrity, they most certainly will. Apparently, what I was hearing in this interview with the billionaire guy was that even big big business needs to seriously embrace a creative and new model of thinking or face extinction or maybe even worse: 2nd place.
Lastly, it seems that
America and what they call the
Western Hemisphere needs to evaluate our distinction of good and evil. Something just to ponder as we go about our business. The east has commonly integrated these things, philosophically (see the yin-yang symbol, the duality of the black and white sperm looking things within the unity of the sphere.) I think within the recent decade this has come to an alarming head and should be something worthy of serious re-evaluation. We have a president and commander and chief that is pointing the finger at other nations calling them ‘evil.’ The Governor of New York, a renowned do-gooder, falling into a scandal involving prostitutes. The scandals of pedophilia in the Catholic Church. Absolute power corrupting absolutely and all those irresistible temptations. If you ever read the news, it seems as though our culture is becoming more violent, more detached, more lost, as they days continue. Those yin/yang sperm swimming around amok in everyone’s heads, running into walls drunk. I’m just thinking about balance. It’s 2008 we have allegedly put people on the moon. It’s weird to think about all the things we can’t do and all the crucial things we just can’t organize in our civilization. It’s weird that we don’t prioritize quality of living in our values (for ourselves and others). I’m sorry, I’ve been realizing lately that there’s an anxiety that I’m suffering from. There’s an oil crisis going on (why haven’t we prepared for this?), a housing crisis (I’d in the A!), healthcare crisis (asleep at the wheel), and sorry, an education crisis (is there some economic model somewhere that says we actually benefit from keeping our people stupid?) When I write this stuff, I think to myself that it’s pretty sophomoric. It doesn’t follow grammar all that well, these thoughts have been expressed by folks far more articulate in their delivery and sophisticated in their thinking already well before hand. I think to myself, yes, writing for catharsis, for therapy. But you know, I talk to some people around me to try some basic ideas out and see how they fit together in some possibly futile effort to find a unified field theory that draws it all together and I discover that some times people are dumfounded by these ideas. Like, we really do all live in our own little bubbles and some bubbles are way different than mine and they have other priorities to obsess over. So, it’s never great to assume as the saying goes, and it’s pretty narcissistic to think everyone thinks like the voice one hears inside one’s head. Anyhow, thus concludes today’s passionate idealistic voyage. I do believe that these periodic cathartic passages will yield ultimately to a more focused, intelligent, and poignant critique of what’s going on out there. In the last several years of the Bush paradigm, we have been accustomed to not hearing more of the criticisms of the creative class, the voices that have naively stumbled upon interesting perspectives of tired issues. The whole ’shut up and play’ thing just doesn’t have a place in modern democracy. If you’re paying taxes, you’re an artist, a political satirist, an organizer, a voice. If you’re me, you need a nap. And how!
I must admit that I am fascinated with the discussions going on about the future of music. thebrotheregg just released our recent 7 song ep on a short run of cds and 12” vinyl on our own label and I have been trying for ages to figure out where we stand in the large glut of noise out there. I’ve always loved the cult phenomena of music, that I can embrace something and make it my own and often the really significant things happening are way off radar. More seismic bands don’t possess this self-discovery potential by this theory, the point either way, is for one to find one’s own self reflected in the values of music. Anyhow, I’ve modeled my life after this cult thing. I’ve known others who have, too. But this idea was largely a part of my younger years when identities and allegiances were just forming and I was writing with pen on my jeans and Chucks the perfectly recreated moniker of the Misfits or the Subhumans (UK). Anyhow, with the internet and all this availability of every factoid under the sun, those untarnished discoveries maybe don’t mean as much? I don’t have to make a long pilgrimage to find obscure records any more, so I guess the phenomenon has changed a bit. Likewise, with everyone listening to whatever, kids might not be growing up with this top 40 group think like they once did which has really unified previous generations. Hell, ask anyone my age about Duran Duran or Thriller and they’ll probably have memories and feelings that are shared with everyone of that age. Does that exist anymore? Someone recently was talking about ‘Brass Monkey’ and instantly everyone in the room had the same though about the Beastie Boys because the Beastie Boys taught every seventh grader in
America what it was, but they didn’t necessarily make it sound all that appealing. So, if everyone has an ipod and the internet and are pursuing their own identities through the listening to and identification with music, then the whole shared generational experience has likely gone to hell. Is this true? Well, things are certainly different so let’s just leave it at that. The pursuit of music is an act of giving, or rather a personal investment that makes one an active participant. This is an obvious truth at a live concert because the audience gives and takes, but the gives part is not as acknowledged. The musicians on stage take as well, which again, is not really acknowledged as this process is alchemical in nature. Well, this cult music idea is necessary and I’ve talked to certain people along the road that I felt embodied this idea or at least were outwardly sympathetic to it. One person actually told me that they didn’t even like a band anymore once people started catching on to it (that was in the early 90’s when I remember hearing and remembering that). Public acknowledgement perhaps took away the uniqueness of the unknown band and somehow popularity made the experience diluted, I don’t know. I just found it an interesting point of view, but now one can go on-line and find communities of people who have made the very same isolated discoveries all over the world and so one can readily lose the martyrdom of their unique discovery. That’s the embodiment of my cult musings. It’s not necessarily about the music itself but a person’s connection to it. It’s about the involvement of the listener and different aspects of what one has to gain from the experience of listening. For me and my evolving production knowledge, music often is ones and zeros and if I like something or hate it, it possesses all these characteristics that I observe as I observe additionally my reaction to them. I am personally now somewhere in between that adolescent porous brain with the marked up jeans and the old, unmoving ornery curmudgeon who relies entirely on opinions that have formulated in previous ages. With our own label producing another fine thebrotheregg recording, a lot of questions came to me, and a whole new preoccupation about the state of things was born. When thebrotheregg released its first platter in 1993, the independent arena was wide open for us and we were able to get critical analysis from the top magazines in the industry, etc who generally liked the album but did not wet their pants over it. Sebadoh was big and the Shrimper label was putting out all sorts of cassette releases and so was Daniel Johnson so our
Drag
City obsession fell right in. Things have changed considerably and it seems that anyone with a laptop and a guitar is putting out their own music and that’s what K Records and Pump up the Volume seemed to want in terms of revolutionary decentralization. So what was once sort of a hip trend called ‘lo-fi’ is now just the way of things and the sound of people making do with they have on a global scale, and this brings me to an eventual point. Someone has coined the term to describe the new abyss of creative potential and marketing possibilities: Music 2.0 Actually this article that I stumbled upon by Nate Anderson was entitled “Music exec: “Music 1.0 is dead.” and that’s where I referenced Music 2.0 from because it’s not my idea. So all sorts of music industry people gathered together to discuss the future models of music sales and distribution as they are watching their old command of the market fail and they have made this distinction between 1.0 and 2.0. Sounds fine, I can relate to the idea and all and this falls in line with my latest academic obsession: The future of music. Well, since I devoted myself to pursuing this cult music label (Dandelion Wine) and produce music on vinyl in short run, I wondered where does our cult presence fit into this equation? So, it started off this way but you know, there’s really all sorts of intelligent interesting writing going on about the subject and some of it really is speculative science, some of it daydreaming, some of it analysis of all this new creative marketing, etc. I’m fascinated by it but kind of, as they say, like loitering around a car accident scene. I still haven’t personally caught on to the whole ipod thing because when I’m out and about these days, I really want to enjoy the ambient sounds of the world and take a break from all the mixing and tracking and just plain old trippin’ out to the home hi-fi. People rant about the poor quality of mp3s and all that, but I used to listen to top 40 out of a radio clock and used to hold up a tape recorder to it to record the current hits! Remember ‘Rock It’ by Herbie Handcock? ‘Here Comes the Rain Again’? They both went through that process, and the record companies received nothing from me, except for maybe K-Mart whom produced the crappy blank tapes that these songs went on. Anyhow, I’ve been saying for ages that who gives an F about the music industry. Certainly thebrotheregg doesn’t benefit from it in any way. I’ve generally taken the position of advocating its complete collapse, or at least its decentralization as I mentioned before. I think the industry did its best to kill itself, frankly, so I don’t feel so bad and welcome any new models that favor and respect the fans whom empower this universe. CD prices have been so ridiculous over the last decade that I have certainly turned myself off to it, favoring used items or just downright devious duplications. They expected people to pay $18.99 at Sam Goody for the latest Linkin Park Cd or whatever the hell. No wonder music fans have opted for free sharing. And you know, when the prices are like that, it’s not only cost prohibitive, but it turns people real conservative about the music they purchase. They just can’t budget for the whole freedom to take risks as a consumer and go out-on-a-limb with any music that merely looks interesting or that they’ve heard was cool from someone or some magazine becomes is not fiscally an option. Back when I was younger and had some disposable income, I would buy a record just because it was released on SST records or because the lead singer also appeared on some other record I liked. This sometimes resulted in me discovering the GREATEST THING EVER. I found the Bevis Frond this way which is one of my favorite bands to this day. Because Nick Saloman (front man to the Frond) appeared on a Nurse with Wound record once, I figured “This must be strange, a rocker guitar player whom appeared on a far out industrial, surrealistic, occult, noise project. MUST be interesting.” I always thought these items should be more affordable so that people had maybe a bit of extra cash and could then get a bit crazy, maybe try out that thebrotheregg cd they’ve been eyeing. Shot themselves in the arse, they did. And then they went on TV and everywhere and tried to get our sympathies because they’ve been boarded by pirates who have degraded them and commandeered their vessel. And they have the RIAA thing which show what hostile bastards they really are when they feel as though they’re being threatened. They say that file sharing is “stealing from the artist” and since I heard that mentioned at the Grammy’s some years ago, I thought it was funny because wasn’t it always the major label’s job to steal from the artist? It’s like opposing factions in the Godfather. Really, I don’t care much because I’m not involved in that business but it’s interesting being a speculative philosopher with a Taoist detachment, let it wash over you and then go back to what’s really important. Perhaps it’s know thine enemy or something, like studying about the Holocaust or something. Yes, naturally I’d rather be reading the Amber Spyglass, but I must know about models of propaganda so, as my 7th grade history teacher so ignorantly said, “you don’t make the same mistakes of the past.” I think I mentioned that in a previous entry. Yeah, right! Anyhow, it’s a beautiful day outside and the whole world doesn’t have to be going to poop if I don’t want it to. I’m going outside and then later maybe play a little guitar and drink some fine Deschutes Ale, maybe see what’s what on a realistic level. I must tell you about the tambura that I just bought, but that’ll have to be later. It’s an Indian drone instrument to accompanying vocal ragas. Hopefully from here forward I can spend more quality time posing a spirited inquiry into the Essence. Won’t you please join me?
