Why?

Yesterday I visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium. It was a spectactular collection of marine life. In particular was a visiting exhibition of seahorses. As I navigated from tank to tank, touched by the vast span of shape, color, beauty, and idiosyncracy of our living reality, I couldn't escape the throngs of families who were having their own Sunday outings. Strollers and children abounded. Displays were interspersed with placards and screens advocating for conservation. The aquarium itself names its mission as a means of increasing awareness to protect wild places and wild life.

And for that reason, it was so striking to see a problem visiting a solution. I am convinced that human behavior is the reason so much other life is suffering. Millions of species of plants and animals are threatened, endangered, or extinct. Habitats continue to shrink due to expansion of human residential, agriculture, mining, drilling, and manufacturing needs. And what spaces are left wild are flooded with the waste products of the aforementioned human activities.

That said, I am a consumer. I am not a Luddite. I am not a hippie. I live in the city. I own a TV. I support technology, civilization, and the well being of all that wish to offer me the same. Personally, I am also deeply touched by life in its many forms, and it seems as devastating to me to bulldoze a pristine forest as it does to bulldoze my neighbor's house. Both are places in which what's there would rather be, and both are places that had a lot of time and energy put into being there. But even on a purely selfish basis, can we consider our choices in terms of not shooting ourselves in the foot?

Many sources indicate that in 10 years we will be facing worldwide shortages of fresh water. Think about this. There will not be enough water. Imagine being thirsty, and not having any possible way to relieve that feeling. Imagine being dirty, and having no bath or shower to turn to. This is already a reality for many many people. I'm not fear-mongering, I'm simply describing an apparently elusive cause-and-effect relationship: finite resources divided among more and more consumers. At some point, there will too little, and that point is upon us.

Beyond water, there is of course the overall climate itself. Every person generates their own contribution to this problem, and westerners with much more manufactured goods and travel impact are the worst. So each body makes us hotter, sicker, and less able to survive. Of course, we can all reduce our consumption and our carbon footprint and we do and should. But the equation has two parts. One, the impact of an individual. Two, the number of individuals.

Then there is the complex hierarchy that supports our life. Devastation of insect populations threatens plant populations which threaten animal populations and on and on. Basic 8th grade earth science teaches us the cycles that support us. If we didn't get it then, we should get it now. The breakdown is showing us decisively that our foundation is crumbling. And a foundation that took billions of years to build. Toppling after just 100 years of misbehavior.

It is an atrocity of intellectual debate that population management through individual voluntary family planning is not at the top of our collective mind. I am against any form of mandate that would restrict human population growth. But I cannot advocate enough that those of us who are interested in surviving and being well, and perhaps offering that possibility to others who cannot or will not help, consider why we need to reproduce and how fair it is to all parties involved - including the children.

I see spirituality as why we do what we do. Religion can be spirituality if it advises to this effect. Whether you have religion, or just a personal sense of choice, you must have a framework that includes reality. Otherwise, we're in different worlds and your world doesn't realize it's crushing mine. That makes us, sad to say, foes by design. If we are in agreement that our belief systems, however spun, are to include reality - in the form of observable best effort truth - then we must be willing to overtake our habitual inclinations with our concerted judgment. Because truth currently demands it.

I introduce this topic not as a chastisement for those who've chosen to have children, or as a means of shaming or insulting those who plan to do so. What I really want is an education. Tell me why it makes sense. Tell me why I'm wrong. Tell me how you plan to deal with scarcity of natural resources. I wish it weren't true. If it weren't I'd have three kids. As I've always wanted. To see my legacy live on. To feel incumbent unconditional love. To feel like a parent. To feel part of a long history of life. But I won't. Because it makes no sense to me.

How could I put effort - a LOT of effort - into something that not only is completely unnecessary to me or anyone else, but is in fact going to harm us all. How could I do that?

Even at this point, I recall how I felt looking through aquarium glass into the eyes of a leafy sea dragon, a creature unlike any I've ever seen. So delicate and gentle, a form that could be as much plant as animal, and feeling as though I were a fool at the foot of the wise. There is quiet desperation in the eyes of many of our earthmates. It is a desperation, I believe, drawn from their reality that speaks to surges of insanity - things behaving in ways that make no sense even to themselves. It is the look of fear that has no obvious resolution, and therefore must be accepted. Perhaps I will have that look one day. But for now, I still have hope.

The Dead

I love The Dead. The Dead, the now touring band of former Grateful Dead members plus Warren Haynes and Jeff Chimenti. Their show at Shoreline Amphitheater last night was exceptional. A profoundly memorable event. I am truly grateful to have been a part of it. As a musician, I'm in awe of the skill set. Rhythmically, they were tight, flowing like a surging river of sound, every particle deeply integrated with the movement of the whole. Esthetically, the tones of each instrument blended richly, and presented a flavor of music that combined classic elegance with modern panache. I have spent the last few years trying to learn how to play that way. Last night gave me the chance to really appreciate why I want to be able to do that.

Which brings me to the greater takeaway from The Dead listening experience. And that is its value on the human level. True, recreation is recreation and great fun was certainly had. But what if you had to make sense of it? I can think of a lot of ways to amuse myself. Why am I writing about The Dead, and hoping to convince you to see the value that I see in them? It is because what they offer is rare and precious. And perhaps for that reason, can be difficult to get at. My intent is to help whet the appetite and lower the hurdles.

I completely missed the Deadhead scene during the 80s and 90s when I was immersed in Florida pop radio - Janet Jackson, Madonna, Howard Jones, and Duran Duran. I loved tweaking the Dolby settings on my walkman, and considering the richness of CrO2 cassettes versus normal bias. I loved sound, and songs. But in many ways I wasn't really listening. That is to say, I wasn't fully listening. What were the people making those sounds doing? What were they saying? What motivated them to make the sounds they were making? I often didn't know the lyrics to my favorite songs. I definitely couldn't articulate the rhythm. Even pitch escaped me. But I felt drawn to the music. I could feel something in it, and that feeling has brought me to this point today, where I insist and urge everyone I care about - and even those I don't - to go after more depth. Take my word for it, there's more available, and it's worth the effort to seek it. Late on the Dead scene, it's the answers to these questions that really inspire me to dig in.

The Grateful Dead, and presumably The Dead are encumbered with an image that many people seem to be unable to get past. Not sure if it's the drugs, or the hippies, or the jeans and sneakers regalia in which they appear. But I often find a certain blankness in the people I discuss this music with. There's a sense that I'm being written off for some reason. I must say, the crowd really can be a turnoff. Constant chatter, sometimes stupidly inebriated, many who show up aren't really there. Ignore them as much as you can and focus on the music. If you find yourself unable to connect, I would really challenge you to consider that you're not getting it, and keep trying, instead of deciding its not there. I am only talking about the music here, not the scene, not the image, not any other thing. Just sound and purpose.

I like a lot of different bands with different styles and flavors. The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, Radiohead, Pink Floyd - so many important moments in my life linked to and colored by these epic artists' work. They've helped get through tough situations, inspired some beautifully joyful ones. But let's go a little further. Harmony, I think, is the condition of distinct elements showing their innate relationship through cooperation - when tangible parts line up to suggest their intangible whole. Cycles combine into deeper, richer cycles. I think most of us have experienced situations in which our natural cycles were challenged. Things were less than harmonious. Where pressures were put on us, and we had to deal. For me, this meant choosing to detach from awareness of certain things, creating filters to keep out certain kinds of distress. That translated into a certain kind of silence in the flow of things. And to fill that silence, so many behaviors emerge twisted into a range of disturbed patterns.

Which brings me back to music. Why bother? It's not a requirement for life. Air, food, water, shelter and we exist. But what about a collapsing economy, mercury in the water, priests who rape kids? What about a 50% divorce rate, domestic violence, alcoholism, war, obesity, deforestation? This is the world we live in. What is going on with the people responsible for these situations? My argument in grand summary: they aren't listening. That is to say, something is going on for them that keeps them separate, distant, selfish, embroiled in their own detached existence, unable to find common ground in fellow seekers of life, sympathy and connection. Or maybe they're just pure evil, and can't be helped. Those people should not bother with music. For the rest of us, for the people with good hearts, trying to do what's right, what makes sense, trying to feel their own humanity, I cannot beg you enough to give The Dead a chance. What makes them different from other musicians is a commitment to delivering harmony with magical depth.

Recognizing how we come at things with filters, one thing to consider is how that limits the appreciation and understanding of what's there. So much of what's popular feeds the desire to be surprised - to hear something new and different, or the desire to be accepted - to hear something that fits the prescription of cool and hip. Or music comes from a place of venting, an expression of pain or anger or lust. All of these are okay. But life can be simpler than it seems, and the greatest truths are those things that remain the same. If you try to make sense of these other motivations for music, you find that their impact is limited. They are a kind of short term balm. Their influence doesn't fit with the end game. For The Dead, connection is the focus, and their ability to connect solidly deeply and thoroughly amounts to the kind of listening experience that I have only begun to dream about. The musicians are not only connecting with themselves and the audience, but also with the soul that seeks and delivers music in the first place. This, to me, is the psychedelic experience.

The Dead produce the sounds of getting along. The wall of sound is a place to open up to a feeling of being integrated into a greater whole. To recognize spirituality as a focus on what's important - what really truly matters. To be willing and able to cross the chasm of fear and uncertainty by trusting in some greater cycle in which we fit.

Religion, pedantry, glory, whatever. There are so many distractions. So many places to focus that are dead ends. So many chances for hamsterwheeling through life, spinning unraveling energy into frayed cords, rather than winding them into stable guide ropes. I am suggesting the choice of a deliberate valuable point of focus. For anyone who can listen, I suggest you listen to The Dead. Email me if you need a suggestion. Go to Dead.net and download some shows. Go to archive.org and listen to some shows. Buy their discs. I have seen hundreds of live music shows in my life, and last night had to be one of the finest. Standing on The Moon into Terrapin Station and back in to Moon was so sweet. Estimated Prophet into New Potato Caboose was a musical highlight. And Dear Mr. Fantasy just blew it out in terms of energy and enthusiasm. And I haven't even begun to discuss the details. The intricate stories of each song that reflect on love, loss, conflict, hope, struggle. It is poetry of emotion. Deft and intelligent. The phenomenal writing craft of Robert Hunter articulating the messages of the melodies. These guys are in another league when it comes to storytelling. But I will leave these details to your own discovery.

When I discuss music with people, so much of what goes on involves naming styles and patterns and comparing one thing with another. It's like an exercise in sorting and filing. The interest is in pushing things around, rather than just taking it in and getting something out of it. I say this recognizing my own ongoing struggle to get past this behavior. Part of what I've realized from a lifetime of not fully paying attention is that it's easy to see past the thing you're looking at and therefore miss what it has to offer. Some of this has to do with the limitations of what we're often given to look at.

I have to mention the dancers during Drums. First off, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann are hands down the most solid drummers I can think of. They relate emotionally. That is to say, they're not counting gaps and trying to hit the markers, or worse trying to wow and amaze with rhythmic zingers, but instead appear to be agreeing on a four-dimensional rhythmic form and then spraying its surface with notes like fireworks silhouetting a skyscraper. They give you structure as well as fluidity. That soundtrack against body-painted women gyrating and whirling fire balls was not a bad intermission between songs. So much costumed dance comes across as constricted, cheesy, as though people are hiding in their own uncertainty. Not this one. The art of the dance, and the art of the dancers themselves was so humane - legit on a basic level. For anyone who can appreciate the beauty of Balinese woodcarving, imagine that forged with life and lit with fire. These dancers were enhanced by their decoration, rather than subdued by it. And their craft was passionate and strong - a real treat again to experience among the stodgily empty perfectionism of so much other stage work. Definitely a solid accompaniment to the circus of sound.

In summary, as I see it, popular culture suffers from an overwhelming dearth of real value. People present themselves as entertainers for so many unfulfilling reasons, and their presentations trickle through all the filters of their own pain and confusion. But there are other options, and I submit The Dead as a very good one. I have had great experiences with Ratdog, Dark Star Orchestra, and Phil and Friends - bands with similar intentions. They are worth checking out too. Still, hands down, these guys are the real deal. Along with exceptional talent and top-notch material, they bring to the stage a wisdom of the ages, no doubt honed by their own ongoing struggles that grounds the whole affair in a deep and lasting place. What they offer is not just entertaining, but is in fact enriching, like a searchlight beaconing truth among clouds of delusion. Check them out.

LBAM Scam

Are you healthy? How do you know?

In a few months, agriculture officials in California are planning to begin a series of regular pesticide spraying over various counties in the state, including San Francisco where I live. Their target: the light brown apple moth or LBAM. The whole article is in today's SF Chronicle.

Apparently, this charming little butterfly of the night is responsible for the destruction of millions of dollars of cash crops at various stages in its life cycle. It's a raider of the agribusiness coffers and therefore insecta non grata of the military-industrial complex. The USDA has handed over nearly 80 million to aid the war effort. And the chosen method of controlling the LBAM population is the use of a pheromone that will disorient the moths to prevent them from mating. A number of entomologists and ecologists have stated that there's no evidence this airborne biochemical cockblock will have any effect. At the same time, hundreds of people living in Santa Cruz, where the pheromone has already been deployed have filed health complaints citing headaches, muscle aches, coughing, and wheezing, among other symptoms. Thus, there seems to be at least some worry that the chemical intended to hurt only the moths might actually be only hurting humans.

To verify this, scientists are currently deliberating on six different research projects aimed at assessing the health impact to humans. To do this, they have chosen to monitor how the chemical affects animals. Let's check in: humans who have experienced this chemical say it hurts them. Their comments have been ignored. Instead, animal subjects are being overdosed with pesticide to see how much it will take to kill them, burn their eyes, skin, lungs, etc. This is the science you trust.

In addition, the spraying is meant to start before the tests are complete. That is to say, the question of whether or not the spraying is a safe idea is not going to be answered until months after it's already started. What does that say about the program? Does it even matter at that point how the rats fared? It gets more interesting.

All of the six tests focus on short-term toxicity. That is: are people going to die, start coughing up blood, or have skin lesions. Nobody is even asking whether we might start birthing children with flipper limbs, or trim 20 years off of our retirement years, or become peckish assholes with a sudden inexplicable interest in shuffleboard.

The questions of safety are endless. I'm most interested in this last one.

How could we use science to test the subtle effects of a substance on a person? That is to say, mood, personality, values. All of these are represented in our biology, and are therefore subject to chemical influence. But how could they be tested? The data is all based on subjective experience, something that is tough enough to characterize for oneself, let alone to explain to someone else, let alone to then quantify and tabulate.

The way that experience is represented is through activity, choices, interactions over time. People with alcoholics or other kinds of substance addicts in their circles have witnessed how a chemical can gradually change a person in a way that's hard to separate from the person themself. In these circumstances, our own basic chemical architecture starts to show through. We are a bag of metals and minerals and water, and when other metals and minerals flow through us, we are different, unavoidably and perhaps unwantedly.

You are what you eat. We get it. And what we've eaten/been exposed to has been there for a long time. This is an important point to consider when choosing to eat/be exposed to new things. The most important difference between artificial and natural is that nature is always the most senior chemical engineer. I defer to its seniority.

So back to my original questions: Are you healthy? How do you know?

If you have a cough, you know its a problem because it feels like a problem. Perhaps you were lucky enough to know what it felt like to breathe easy, and therefore you can see the deterioration by comparison. You had ease, and now you have pain. I'd call that one type of health loss.

What about vision loss. There's not necessarily physical pain. But there's a loss of a skill that was once useful to you. Maybe you can't read as well, or have trouble navigating in the dark. Medicine has approaches to assisting here. I'd call this another type of health loss.

But then there's that pesky other kind. The one that involves how we are, more subtley. I used to be a chill guy. Now I'm always grumpy. I take a pill, and I'm back to whistling while I knit. The process seems like one of restoration. I've decided being a certain way is better than another and therefore I associate health with the better one. The world of SSRIs, psychiatry, hypnosis, yoga, spirituality, religion, politics. They all live here. They are the tools of how we characterize our internal experiences and decide which ones are better, and how to have more of those and less of the others.

This is one place I see our current scientific approach lacking. The modern scientific tradition of peer-reviewed repeatedable double-blind controlled lab studies is heavily steeped in analysis and quantification. This makes sense for things that can be analyzed and quantified. But the health of people is not such a thing.

The health of people is what they say it is. Just as their lives are what they feel they are. All we have is our experience. And experience cannot be quantified.

So here I am in San Francisco, the most endearing place I've ever lived. A pinnacle of climate and community, and a haven for so many like myself that just couldn't be comfortable other places - or at least find it easier to be here. And we're about to be test subjects for chronic hormone exposure that may well change how we feel, and how we are. I hope sincerely that something makes this stop. Because I personally don't know what to do to make it so.

But at the very least, those who know me and others who live here, please take note. If we're different, if something changes, this might be the reason. And I might not realize. I'll be changed. Forced to incorporate substances into my body that weren't meant to be there, and that will muck up what was once working well. I might get sick in a way that nobody can measure - and thus nobody can prove. One of the purest truths I can think of about the value of quote-unquote natural living is the idea of time testing. Nature has evolved gradually over billions of years. It is by its nature - excuse the pun - a manifestation of how components of our reality can safely co-exist.

When new variables are introduced into systems whose equilibrium has been stabilizing for eons, then as LeChatelier would predict, a shift is inevitable. If the city were to burst into flames, people would surely notice. But alas, the destruction of the human experience is greatest health crime of our age, and yet because medicine has been taken out of the realm of experience, and into the world of business, symbols mean more than the things which they claim to represent.

I hope that we as people can take the time to devote more of our lives to considering our experience, realizing our shared needs, and appropriating our effort to secure the lot. I believe that love is what life feels like when its allowed to flow. Please join me in learning to love health as a top priority. There is no part of life that can produce more life than life itself.

Love, Crystal, and Choice

We are a seesaw of forward and reverse. Tumbling snowballs of massively interconnected cascades of interactions. And somehow from within the fury, we are able to create enough stillness to convince ourselves what we are. We each, a human body, find ourselves having an experience, and decide how to cope with it. The appetites are there to show us the momentum required to keep alive on basic levels. But consciousness stacks higher than that. At it's peaks, needs trickle into wants like the fine feathered forms at the edge of a crystal. And time serves to bridge the gap between wanting and having. And so our lives become the navigation of courses determined by our wants so that we can have an experience with the things we have. We negotiate obstacles and reinforce motives, leaving ripples of consequence radiating out from our every choice. And either we make it to the next day or we don't.

If we do, we will begin to appreciate ourselves as the center point of larger and wider ripples, as we hold our ground through months and years. And as much past time as it takes to make us realize we can start looking forward, we expend our energies doing whatever is asked of us unless we decide against them.

The beauty is there, in the simple reflexive pattern of a butterfly wing. All things exist as a vibration, an infinitely cycling alternation between polar opposites. And for every thing that cycles with an opposite, there exists and infinity of generations of families that descend from the cycle. So the fractal appears in our minds. We appreciate where what we are fits in.

Cycles compose our framework and, of course, our connections to it. Learning and maturing is a process where the consciousness becomes more articulate with how it it interprets signals from the sense organs. It becomes able to consider what it sees and hears in broader and broader contexts. And in terms of larger periods of time. And as this happens, the work of planning take deeper roots into the realm of meaning. Boredom occurs when cycles of behavior no longer fit rhythmically with motivation. And boredom makes us consider change.

Planning offers us the comfort of conviction. With conviction we can believe that we should stay alive and move forward. And this belief, in however strong a form it occurs, bolsters the level to which we will use what we have to manifest it.

And so we can define ourselves as an awareness of a part of larger system that knows of its own role. In however detailed a way we can perceive the framework, we are able to act on every aspect that becomes apparent. Like the parts of a broccoli stalk as they get smaller but more numerous farther away from the base, our options become more specific and therefore more varied. But the base is the path by which the stuff that becomes the tips gets there. The route must exist from the roots to the tip.

And our roots are anchored in love. That is to say, love for life, being alive, valuing being here over its opposite. To be here requires work. We must tend the nature of our own tumbling, overcome pain, and elaborate joy into meaning. So it's from this base that we draw the details of how we do that tending. The feeling of wanting to live, and its related conviction, force the energies that lead to its manifestation into smaller and smaller bundles. And those bundles flow through us as cycles of our behavior. Our sensations influence or convictions, and our convictions drive our choices. And so we are able to choose as sentient beings, who can communicate and move and be aware of themselves and how their choices make impact. And so it seems then that love as we see it is a feeling that makes us want something, is the root of our existence into the rest of the framework. Because our natures require us to make choices in order to survive, in order to connect roots with flowers, we need to feel love for the ground in which we root and the sky to which we climb.

For the pirouette of cycles that define matter, two set the axes. Size and motion. Size is an assessment of grouping. All cycles are interrelated, and therefore to point at a thing requires including all the cycles which define it, while simultaneously excluding all that don't. Everything is always everything, but a thing is only a thing when its a thing. Motion describes how a thing of size influences its space. Heat is the elemental form of motion.

We characterize states of matter by the characteristics of of molecular activity. Solids cling together and vibrate against their electrochemical bonds. Liquids break free molecularly and flow across each other like rings of dancers switching partners on every beat. Crystals in of molecular elements pattern themselves against the connective natures of their molecules. Plant structures pattern themselves against the connective natures of their cells. Animal structures pattern themselves against the connective nature of theirs. And social groups pattern themselves against the connective nature of their members. The central thread is identical.

Entropy is not so much a function of disorder as it is a reduction of simplicity. Order is still there, just more finely embedded in an individual. Farther from the branches, the tips exist in a less obvious grouping. Particularly when the tips are ideas, ideals and behaviors, deeply intermingled in fashion, architecture, political structures, and ritual. What are the branches that feed us? Why would we think they can be ignored?

Our definitions suit our purposes. We say an animal is alive, but a rock is not because it suits us. We think we're alive, that we think, that we feel, and we draw parallels and use those as substantiation. An animal moves and makes sounds, seems to convey expression, and relation and therefore is obviously alive. To many, plants seem less so, though still we believe in their life. Minerals are alive only to those who see the common denominator - the branching flow of elements into greater and greater detail. And the universe itself, the balls of hot gas and the space between them. These are alive only to the dreamers and hippies.

It was the European scientific tradition of recent times that purported a dead clockwork universe. That somehow things doing what they're doing out of rote mechanistic necessity was something other than living things enacting their nature. Other traditions saw the life in celestial bodies and common forms and characterized their natures as spirits with detail, personality, and subtlety. Our modern societies have nearly eradicated these peoples and their ideas. But still the truth of their understanding lingers, despite the growing adversary of fear which reinforces our tenacity for true primate group agreement. Monkeys which fall out of line get eaten. That is to say, going against the group means you're going it alone, and there is of course some safety in numbers.

Except when the numbers are guiding bad decisions. All natural forms have a growth pattern and a decay pattern, as their cyclic nature would imply and balance is enabled through modulating the rise and fall of each individual. Modern society, driven by greater and greater strength of the few has enabled impossibly permanent growth patterns while eliminating the breakdown step. Plastic for example, is a material that never existed in the universe. It is made quickly and lingers for an extraordinary amount of time, poisoning everything around it with its irregular nature. Corporations, as well, are immortal. As are wealth and legacy, determined by laws which don't resonate with the demeanor of the environment in which they exist.

Yet cycles cannot be stopped. Only pushed in various ways. And as the smaller cycles twist and warble, the larger cycles in which they spin continue to slug along, eventually bringing all the foam back into placid clear calm. So the determination of our choices ought to reflect our orientation in this process. Do we want to contribute to the stable core of life, or disappear briefly into the froth of its warbling progress? The universe is immortal, and living as it lives offers our contributions the same lifespan. Deciding another way will only seem useful within the short-sightedness of those who see it that way.

Diatribe for the Half-Ass

Fucking hippies! I’m fed up with the lack of respect those of us with choices apply toward them. So many suffer impossible inescapable predicaments of health, economics, and social order. But the savvy free that pick at their stables of richness haven’t the sense to bow their heads in gratitude and offer silent thanks with the rigor of their methods.

I’m talking about the “it’s all good” lingering hugs smiling eyes sage burning flower children of the 21st century who fancy in the hodge-podge regalia of absurdity that frees them from their more-likely-than-not privileged origins. These are the folks who spin their minds around pointless realizations of reality and the universe. Those who rape and sodomize sacred traditions with a weekend workshop and a lifetime of Sanskrit namedropping. These are the folks who dwell and nit-pick on the self-righteous scheme that serves their leaky identities while actually contributing nothing. These are the folks who feel their own peace of mind, but do nothing to offer it to those who can’t have it so easily.

It’s always a surprise to me that people choose to read my blog. Most of it is me prodding the ether with my internal heat or momentary pulse of creativity. I never claim that it’s truth or endorse its value as a readable pastime. But perhaps this time there will be an effect. I can only hope.

Listen. Think about what’s going on. Consider how you fit in. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Go deeper than the first twinkling idea that keeps you mesmerized like an optimized monkey. Get the heart of the matter. Understand other peoples’ experience. I assure you it’s not like yours. Suffering exists everywhere. So does truth. Neither one requires a transatlantic flight to find.

Accept that vibration means oscillation and that oscillation means a little of this and a little of that. You’ll never be permanently stable or full of joy. You could be content with what you get. You could aim your efforts at balance. And if you choose to do so, you will no doubt discover that other people are a great part of that balance. And you will strive to respect them.

Once in a while you will meet someone special. Someone learned, experienced, kind and generous. Someone who is willing to teach you their ways. Not someone rubber stamped with the legacy money of an academic marketing firm. But someone with practical know-how - the goods. And when you do, by all means offer them the respect they deserve.

I am lucky to have a phenomenal set of teachers whom I currently study herbal medicine with. Essentially all of them got to where they are by scraping and clawing and pushing against relentless impediment. And still they offer their services with a smile. Yet I’m embarrassed to say how many times I’m the only one who shows up, even though the registry is full of commitment. People wander in 30, 40, 90 minutes late. Or many never show up at all. Of course there are circumstances, emergencies, demands that can’t be averted. But I know for a fact that this is not the primary issue. The issue is a looseness of will. A feeling that softness of the heart means softness of the mind. Fuck that shit and send it back to where it came from.

We are the people who get it. Who feel love and have the fantastically good fortune of being able to do something about it. Wake up goddamn it! Do the right thing, get there on time, take the generosity of those who aim to help you, be grateful, and cut the hippie crap.

Thank you.

Salvia, Pyrethrins, Crush

I have a crush. It’s been blooming for 3 days now. I don’t know the person. I’ve seen her twice. Spoke briefly each time.

The first time went something like this:
Me: “Do carry the Mexican Salvia?”
Her: “ We’ll have that in tomorrow.”

She was wearing a cute hat, the variety I would associate with rice farmers in Vietnam. Her voice was kind and clear, and her eyes beamed along with her dimpled smile. Descartes called the eyes the window to the soul. For me, they’re an imperative. I can’t speak to people wearing dark glasses. I feel like I’m missing on so much expression, like they’re hiding something. The subtle movement of the brow, the flicker of the lids, the level of the gleam. So much is offered there. For me, it was all it took.

This turned out to be her standard MO, as per today’s conversation:
Me: “Do you have any insecticidal soap with pyrethrins?”
Her: “ The one in the bright green bottle on the top shelf there has pyrethrins.”

Ah, we’re destined for a deep love no doubt. Isn’t it the mundane where the real connection happens? This is no seduction. This is Life 101, and here I am living it, buying potted starts and earth-safe insecticide. If it’s not obvious, this hapless stranger in the wily machinations of my deluded drama works in the garden department at a hardware store.

Now it’s true that I was interested in both the Salvia and the soap. But I admit that I might not have made the extra walk today if I didn’t think I might have a second chance at whatever. Clearly I was not on the offensive. It was more like reconnaissance. Or maybe browsing. And I guess that’s really where I stumble. People with service jobs are just doing their job. I can’t get myself to show up to someone’s workplace and steer their attention toward my life, and my interests.

Instead I ask real questions that have no chance of leading them to think of what I have in my mind: that something about the way they are makes me want to ask for more, whatever that means, however it may be. Is that deceptive? Only to myself perhaps.

Okay so I did compliment her hat. Well actually I said I liked it. Which is not necessarily a compliment unless there’s an assumption that I have good taste. She thanked me, so perhaps she thinks I do. After all, she’s the one wearing it, so my taste must be at least as good as hers, unless it’s a work requirement, but I didn’t see anyone else wearing one. What kind of hardware store makes people wear Vietnamese rice farmer hats anyway? Breathe.

She’s probably married, engaged, in love with a decent person who keeps her photo in a small gilded picture frame at his workplace. I wonder if he's a rice farmer. Maybe she’s into women. Maybe she’s into solitude. But the eyes, the glow. I’m not lonely. I’m intrigued.

Well, I’ll need a pot for my Salvia at some point. And probably run out of the soap with pyrethrins. I wonder if I'm out of 5/8" wood screws. And there’s always the possibility of exchanging the dimmer I bought on the first visit for one that matches my other faceplates. Perhaps I should have joined their frequent shopper program as the cashier suggested today when I was leaving.

This is going to be a costly affair.

I live here

It is Sunday night, 7:30 PM. I would have been nervously awaiting my ride, scheduled to be here at 11. My hallway would have been stacked with blue Rubbermaid crates filled neatly with socks and t-shirts, dried fruit, batteries, dust masks, and all variety of other supplies to be carted out the open stretches of Nevada. Instead unpacked clutter lies about, frozen in a state of abrupt reversal. I would have been going to the Burning Man festival in Black Rock City, nearly 7 hours from here. But I’m not. And I’m so relieved.

This year would have been my fourth visit. My first was brief - just a few days - before I had to return home and catch a flight. The next two were the full week. This year, I even had a decent tent. But my feelings have changed since I purchased my ticket in January.

For me Burning Man has provided an environment where irreverence and impropriety prevail. To see adults behaving absurdly, differently, empowered in their own identities, has been rattling. The headspace of dutiful repression appears as a choice in the context of rampant cultural discord. This is a useful thing. Shame becomes much easier to flush away as the taboo becomes the familiar and the awkwardness is dispelled by an economy where everything is free.

But what value is freedom of choice without a context in which to choose? What basis do I have to decide what I want, if and when I am free? I am a proponent of going with what is. That seems like a good starting place to me. The purpose of our experience is up for universal debate. But the experience of our experience is a given. As I open my consideration to broaden what it is I can sense and feel, it becomes apparent that comfort in the longest term requires a dutiful awareness of how short-term actions fit the program. That is, chasing the next step without a clear goal does not release the tightness of fear of mortality. We fear our death, our injury, the pain of what might happen, and we indulge in the escape of self-admiration and general apathy and their false sense of safety. But fitting with the program means the program takes care of that. Something sent me here, this little biological blip riding the pulse of my biography. My cycles tug and swirl to and from other cycles. If I let feeling flow, I recognize the value of my basic needs, lack of pain, comfort of warmth and shelter from the elements. I’m further eased by presence of food and water and the company of an ecosystem in which I can sustain these resources.

Thus, the idea that thousands of humans - some of the most well off on the planet - burn their extra resources to haul excessive amounts of supplies and gear to a location whose nature is entirely inhospitable seems counter to any long term valuable system of method. It may be that the value of the experiences of those involved makes this use of resources worthwhile. For me, it is not.

People all around us are actually suffering, trapped in situations of pain and scarcity driven by distribution of resources that occurs unfairly. It seems to me to be a given that resources that come from the common pool should benefit the common pool. That is only possible if common needs are assessed.

Burning Man is expensive to attend. It costs resources from the real world to make that world work. And the haves and have-nots maintain their positions. It's clear that some folks have cash flow and some don't, even in a gift economy. So what does it prove to build a new innovative equitable commmunity whose potential to work falters against the basic trend of life - to seek and retain resources sustainably - and whose accessibility requires real world wealth? For all that attend, how many wish they could but can't due to cost, health issues, work requirements, and other inescapable obligations? Not to say that none can play while some work. But isn't play more fun when the game is transferrable? When the skills make us better? Isn't play just what animals do to learn and practice behavioral value? Isn't that why it makes us laugh?

I see The Green Man as a disingenuous attack on the environment passing itself off as something different. To suggest that the event can acknowledge the issues relating to pollution and the destruction of natural capital while polluting and destroying that capital makes no sense. The amount of wood alone that gets burned! And the fuel of so many trucks, and RVs, and flights. And the waste generated. And the time and attention that could be placed on existing problems. What a fuck you to the rest of society that those with access to comfort and ease would leave it behind to amuse themselves with a wasteful conquering of inhospitable land. That given the chance to build art and community we would leave the stable present and choose to put our efforts into one smoldering pop of amusement. How can we give up on everything that lasts?

The creativity that is exhibited on the playa is profound. I'm in awe of the coordination and skill with which so much art, culture, performance, and style gets demonstrated. True their are drunk idiots in rubber chicken hats walking around. But there are also marvelous works of steel and fire and paint and sand. These are truly valuable contributions. Yet still, I advocate art as a force of healing to be applied to the wound, not some place distant. To fix society we must stay in tune with society, accept its principles, its restrictions, and push hard with our art and our will to promote strength and joy.

This year I felt dread as I learned of the heavy winds and dust storms that I was meant to face. A present reminder of what I was facing, and with just 3 days to go I questioned my motives. I picked up vinegar and lemon juice and lotion to counter the elements. And as I mulled over the distaste brewing in me, I wondered why I would leave the comfort of my apartment to access an environment where I could act more freely. An environment that is bad for my health, and in which no other form of life chooses to exist.

Isn’t the reason that I have resigned that it’s not available here? Doesn’t leaving society to setup a new society establish the underlying separation of Burning Man from the rest of the world? Is there really any value in having something in isolation that makes no sense in context? It’s the human context that is after all where all of the rest of us live all of the rest of the time.

I have friends going to the event this year, and I truly hope they have life-affirming experiences and pursue their intentions as they see fit. But I also hope that a recognition of the dominance of our own biology stays present in their festivities. I hope the realities of health and suffering and the interdependency of living systems - the ideals of the ecologically aware - shine through their experiences. I hope that people leave the event feeling more aware of their sensations, more grateful for their ease, and more energized to facilitate those conditions for the rest of us who did not attend. And perhaps some value will bleed beyond the harm.

Mia Mia Mia

And so it happened that I noticed an SF show, while checking in with Mia Doi Todd on MySpace. She'd been lurking in my top friends for some time, though I hadn't listened to or thought about her music in months.

The Make Out Room on 22nd is a kitschy bar known for its dance DJs. I'd never seen a live performance there. Bart Davenport had a sweet voice and charming stage presence, though still I managed to distract myself at the bar.

Once again, just as at the last show, I swirled around in my stool and was looking straight into smiling eyes. I - naturally - quickly looked away only to lose that gaze to the stage. Luck resumed with a chair opening up at a front row table, and the show began.

Mia pumped her harmonium with her foot while fingerpicking artfully on a nylon string guitar accompanied by a bookish fellow in orange-button-up on congas, cajon, and other hand percussion. The setup was exceptional. Warm and rich tones, good balance between rhythm and melody. Mia is a good song writer, intellectual yet open hearted, I tried not to stare.

I thanked her and her accompanist more than once, but still yearned to dig in with my will. How could I ask a stranger to join me for something personal? But music, with her. What a communion. Aren't people looking for that? I certainly stand by what I could offer, and yet I don't know her, she's on stage, and this is the kind of mentality that drives people mad. But is it? I mean, continuity is the path of existence, and shouldn't people find ways to interact, and pass along their ways, and wares, and arts?

And so I left quickly, annoyed by my own arrogance or peculiar sense of ambition. I don't know what it's like to be immersed in music as a profession. To create and get by with it. To accept it as your identity and be accepted by a public who offers presence and attention.

Perhaps in that state, musicians abound, and opportunities for collaboration or concert are neverending. But from where I sit, the music swells in me and stretches to grab the next pool of support like droplets combining as they drip along glass. Mia Doi Todd, won't you sing with me. I'll wrap your voice in the sing song clicks of my fingertips and pull at your melodies with the gentle harmony of timidity.

Or maybe I'll just show up for another show the next time you're around. Thanks in advance for the entertainment.

Gibberish

The act of externalizing requires internalizing as I see it, at least as it relates to expression. An authentic message exists before it is sent. And so writing to others, is especially in this context, my truest act of self-exploration.

Today I am heartbroken. Sad at the loss of someone close to me. The inability to find a way to interact in a situation when contact is everything. It’s only through my contact with my environment that I feel my existence. And only through contact with other points of consciousness that I feel its context.

I have good intentions but years of ingrained behaviors. I participate, but still yearn for the chance to step out, put down the load of understanding, and hold still, as it were, in a system whose entire nature is based on motion.

I have made choices which go against my nature. I have seen the value of coordination in the existence of all structure - their nature a coordination of their parts. I see this in structure both physical, emotional, social, political, astrological...

I know that joy is not a defensible position. I know that ease is not the state in which we are to constantly operate. I accept that oscillation between states is the universality of the universe. That my life and my choices are granular instantiations of the basic oscillations that led to me. My lifestyle is a polyrhythm of my matter and my soul, and my ability to cooperate with others - people in this case - is the difference between locking into groove with the band and banging out notes on my own.

Synergy. When you notice it, you’re already there. In an experience that is only credible as an experience, awareness is place. To know of what is, is to be among those things. To realize injustice is to have it there in your world, salient and addressable.

So there you stumble on knowledge, hoping for one thing, finding another, gaining one solution only to realize it opens into an entire realm of unnoticed problems. Hallways that are really doors, but only when you notice their locks.

I am heartbroken, sad and teary. Feeling the loss of structure in my social order. Feeling the burden of choice that I am closer to the beat of a pulse that thumps on me as I jostle against it.

Today is a day to see past the smoke. If an end means a new beginning, then what really must happen is change. The motivations to clarify what wasn’t working, to conflict with peaceful denial, means that I now must not deny the reality I’ve uncovered. Underneath the instability was error. Error that can be dealt with.

Shame is a poor resource for the open hearted. Sensitivity demands respect. Certain things simply cannot be accepted in detail. Too much information is too much.

Every time a thing branches, old branches become roots for new ones. New branches become petals for old branches, and new petals form roots for other petals. This is the reality of what I face. At what point do you address the branch, or the root? How grounded does a thing need to be to take flight? How far can a thing fly without losing touch with the ground?

Gibberish is a distraction and yet verbalizing is the state of internalizing thought. WIthin the chaos is a pattern - more than one - infinity. Today’s pattern is sadness, heartache, a desire to exhaust the smoking pattern of loss.

Tomorrow will be something else. Better or worse. I am your unnoticed pattern. I am your hope and my activity. Now go and act with discretion.

The Corporation

Watch the film. Take a deep breath. Then call me.

Balance

And then there was pain.

The push that balances the pleasure. Motion, perhaps, is a distraction. It is the pressure that is the energy of the act.

Hurt occurs from crudity. Deft pressure balances.

Balance is pleasurable. Balance is the stability that occurs when opposition changes equally.

Grace

It is through dance that I have discovered grace of motion through space, and it
Is through music that I have learned the grace of motion through time
Sound and bodies can coordinate or tumble
The difference between grace and folly is intent

It is the grace of motion through time that allows me to realize my strength of intention
Intention guides our progress through time
And despite the myriad swirling smokestacks of civilization whose billowing winds whisk through our senses
Making forward looking and determined behavior seem impossible, if not just very unfounded
It is the realization that life is nothing more than motion, in space and through time that allows me to
Advocate my grace as a possibility for survival

If not by the clear study of motion through time, then how is it that we are expected to build across this avenue of invisible motion
Its pitfalls occur in its subtlety


It can be seen most easily from a distance - the past or the future
And yet it lives as close as can be, in the invisible suction of change as vacuum is filled -- The articulation of change through space
As the entire contraption hurdles through some unknown place know as time

A place that does not exist in our place
A place where our place exists in its entirety

The basis of human culture, religion, social mores is nothing more than hearsay and fearful mass collusion
Every creed, every dogma, every practice moral, intellectual, or spiritual is a function of someone thinking
And someone doing, and in most cases a separation or at least a magnification of one of these elements

And in the end it is a shouting match among proselytes of their version of the story
Credibility becomes the basis of truth, of guidance, of style of motion
But every claimant has a story, and every defendant an argument
And I am assailed by their highly disputable spasms

Motion, however, is indisputable
And motion with grace is by definition how god moves

Motion means change in some dimension
Dimensions exist with respect to motion

I was born with hunger, with thirst, with a serious oxygen addiction
I was born soft, vulnerable, easily damaged by forced conflict with my space
I was born needy
And in motion

Need is the gravity of time
The singular force that interconnects
Need is the basis of motion
Motion is the basis of existence, awareness, life

In stillness there is no motion
Motion defeats stillness
Need is the suction that robs a vacuum of its stillness

I was born small and as I continued to nurse my needs I became larger
Space was my nemesis
I needed it, I would take up more and more of it
But as I arrived in it, it had all been claimed

The very ground on which I was ejected onto this planet had someone's name on it
The very building which protected my naked wet body from the cold evening wind of the bicentennial Florida summer
Had someone's name on it
The very people whose minds and hearts and bodies had rendered my infant form had someone's name on it
And so it went for all space I would ever come across
Named, sorted, claimed as though it could be

But what did it mean to be born
It meant motion
Motion of my parents bodies to grow to the age they could produce me
Motion of union, motion of gestation, motion of birth

I arrived with the lungy sound of fear
I greeted it all with the only motion I knew then
Writhing and crying as the struggle continued
With me unwittingly occupying a space that had already been claimed

My body is my prison if it always lives in someone else's space
Or is it my mind

As my childhood withered into my adolescence, and those sour fruit began to ripen into early adulthood
I would realize the more sinister undercurrent to all of the claim of space

I would realize that motion describes change over time
Change in the three dimensions that define space,
Or change over the four dimensions that define space and time

By aligning my intentions, focusing my present behavior on the present obstacles
That defeat them
That is to say, becoming aware of the pressures on my motion
The reality that as the land on which I was born and have on every day since lived
Belonged to some other consciousness in motion that claimed it
I now realize the equivalent occupation on my motion in time

Television arrested my intentions
Like a board smack in the face of a running gymnast about to take leap
Mass hypnosis through mercenary culture builders, cold, bleak, uncompassionate sorts
Who never realized they are their own motion, and thus they are their own space and time

Instead they found comfort in taking mine
"Sure, live in my space but pay me for it"
"Don't think for yourself, think for me"
"Surely the result of our collaboration will benefit at least one of us"

As a Christian, a Jew, a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Sikh, or a Muslim
I am a dancer with a troupe
My motion has been arranged for me
And I trample every field I come across with the memorized dance of the ages
To a beat out of sync with my own pulse

Oh yes rhythm, pulse, periodic oscillation
Can I deny that I am a polyrhythm of chemistry?
Could I simply observe my motion?
Could I learn to see what motion I have, where it goes
And perhaps follow it?

Could I decide that god is not found in the dusty pages of old texts
Or the hardened hearts of bead pushers and cronies
But rather in the lust of my own heart
In the passion of my own fingers
In the tears in my own eyes
Could I hear god in the curl of my laughter

Or in the synchronicity of wind from heat from light from stars and earth
The story of creation that examines what is as a sign of what is rather than something else
Could I recognize my worship in the choices of my every action
The compliance of my behavior with my intent
Instead of the rehearsed motions of some detached prayer

Could I define spirituality as the motion of my spirit
The direction of my movement through time

Could I look at and see light
Or must I sculpt a hole in the darkness and hope something good lies beyond its edges?

I am an arrow in flight that dies when it hits the ground
And yet upon me is no mercy from the air in which I move or the
Challengers that wish to rape my momentum

And so I surround myself with drums and things with tune
Dancers, poets, and songstresses
Lovers of aroma and hugs
Kindness and compassion
Plants and humans and stones that make music with light

And I view the environment - the ground and the air and all of its leeches
As a garden to be tended
It is a garden of community, of strength and cooperation
It is a garden of behavior
It is a garden of light and sound
It is a garden of touch and warmth and coolness to stir the still air

All around me I see a garden full of weeds
Plants whose boundaries lie gone or unchecked
I see a garden full of opportunity, full of spaces to fill with
Colors that bring their own bloom, provide their own sustenance
And freely help the needy

And I am so needy
So full of inability to cope
So full of necessity without ability

I can’t make oxygen
I can’t make food
I can’t make water
I don’t even own any space with which to dispose of my own body’s waste

All of it comes from some place else
Some other part of my garden that I’ve never worked
Some part of my field where the memory of persistence lives on
As the struggle for survival spins off looms of wispy fruit
That gets brought to me in boxes and bags via ships and trains and trucks
By weathered faces and chafed cuticles, parts of people I’ll probably never get to know complete

But what is my thanks for the masses that provide
What is my thanks for the ground that wombs the seed I found
What can I make that I need
Or am I destined to the mercy of the anonymous

The decision of what is self and what is not self is the basis of identity
To decide that parts of self are not self is an error
To decide that parts of not self is self is an error

Identity is required for motion
I am in motion
So what is my identity?

I am an instrument and a weapon
I can make ease and suffering
My breath can massage sound
Or rupture safety
My push can find order
Or topple it
My direction can be toward or away from
The light or my shadow

Like the wind that ripped holes in the roof
Of the house where I lived
Like the rain that entered those
New doors
Like Shiva's fungal army that climbed from the earth
To flourish and digest the white chalk
That walled my life's most early years
And reset everything to where it started

I am the soft limestone sand that kept me lifted
In the horseshoe with the screens and the pond
I am the sun faded garden hose that took my grip
I am the wonder that introduced the two
The hope that drove the conversation
The upset that remembers and revisits

I am 12 acres of jungle and cinder block and fear
I am the coward unable to listen to the trees
I am seashells and seabirds and water snakes and game fish
I am the master of yeast and bottles and bees

Stare

Stare at the window
Closed by the dark
Stare at the place
Where no fire was sparked

Stare at the closet with hangers unhung
Stare at the pages of songs never sung
Stare at the future
Like ropes made of salt
Tempting to reach for
Until fear grinds a halt

Stare with dry eyes
In moments when they are
Between spillage of feelings
And closeness gone afar

Stare intently like flames
Ripping through burnable flesh
Stare like you mean to
Disassemble this mess

Stare with deep breaths
Stare behind you as well
Stare with your ears
And see what you smell

Stare at the memories
Unleashed by past staring
Stare neglectfully of
The shame you might well be carrying

Stare in my arms
Pressed neatly to my chest
Stare at me staring
And offer nothing less

Under the Iron Sea

Resolve. Finally. That's the song. And it's on the new album. I've heard it exactly 3 times. Twice today on MySpace. Once in Berkeley, live last year [Brewnote Blog: May 7, 2005: Keane @ Berkeley]. What's been true about each experience is a swell of intense emotional attention that turns me into a windsock for four minutes and thirty-seven seconds. And they didn't studio-ize it. They didn't stuff it with crunch and sizzle to appeal to the dulled senses. Instead they left the silence, and offered me the most stimulation pop has to offer. Like colored flashes of lightning casting brilliant momentary silhouettes of something splendid, intense and wonderful, only to leave me alone and heavy to ponder it in the darkness of the deftly untouched space in the sound. Thank you Keane, I have waited so long for this new album.

Music Has Value

Music has value. Standalone value. Perhaps music's value is obvious, but even what's obvious requires notice. And notice requires perception. I don't mean attention, I mean perception: the clarity of mind such that its daily life is its daily rebirth. Stasis is an illusion created through repeated identical changes. Music has value like protein or calcium or air. We are tumbling bubbles of cloudy water with plenty of assumptions choreographing the tumbles. Life, or consciousness, or fractal animation, is change that guides its past, whereby all future decisions necessarily incorporate all previous decisions. A seed, for example, assumes moisture. A plant assumes light. An animal is born to assume the availability of food it can eat. And an intellect capable of deciding things assumes a basis on which to decide. Music caters to this assumption.

Gurus

Today I shook the hand whose sound has shaken the spirits of humanity. I humble myself against my own egotism. This has nothing to do, I assure you, with ego.

Last night, tabla Ustad Zakir Hussain and his ensemble cast of strings and percussion squeezed tears from dry eyes, and offered rumble and stillness while God was watching.

The classical tradition of music from North (Hindustani) and South (Carnatic) India brings with it a minimum of 800 years of chronological practice. Until the 20th century it was an oral tradition, passed from heart to heart and mind to mind. It's integrity was ensured through rigorous procedure, etiquette, and discipline. And those who devoted their lives to it, whether by their own inclination or the force of their dynastic legacy, became its single embodiment. They were the rare breed of humans who possessed skills and faculties no other could have without a lifetime of change. And they were born into the lap of those most fit to change them. They were a species that required more than 9 months of gestation, spending their post birth lives in the constant womb of their guru-sisya relationship. From here they deliver the stories of our lives in a way only their lives could allow. And they themselves would one day become gurus, offering both discretion and generosity in how, what, and who they might teach their musical ways.

For this reason, celebrity holds no bearing on my impressions. These are not teenagers with an agent and a marketing budget. These are lifelong soldiers, warriors for the human condition, battling with their musical arts and their earthen instruments, while still carrying disciples to carry on their work. It is not the artist that brings the awe, it's the invitation of beauty that only such a gifted artist can enact. And that beauty is what we are, and what we need, and what we hear so clearly in their magnificently respectful hands.

I spit on the floor as I say the name Ryan Adams, and beg forgiveness of my teachers for positing that name in the same space as theirs. But his concert ticket that I regrettably purchased and used last week was on the US capitalist market for just over $40. That, as it happens, was the same price the market would tolerate for last night's showing of the masters. In my mind, that means that those who have money feel that these two events are equivalent, and for that, I weep for the mercy of everything sane left in our future, and pray that the worldwide estheticide done in the name of scalable profits founders against the potency of life.

Ryan Adams was an outrage, unspeakably self-induced, dramatically masochistic, hardly believable, and purely a waste of time and money. True, there are innumerable actors of ego who claim music as their victim, and rape and violate the sanctity of something pure and self-sustaining with someting tainted and parasitic. But Ryan Adams has talent. And his show was as heart-wrenching as the clubbing of a baby fur seal. It was shameless, needless, and should never happen again.

My teacher is Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. Let me say that again so I can be sure it's real. My teacher is Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, the greatest living sarode player and one of the handful of elders of the Hindustani classical tradition, a living spirit forged by the masters before him to teach and deliver what none of us would ever hear without them. Think about this: recorded music has existed for only a century, and in the hands of the common public for half that time. Thus for nearly all time, the musician was the source of music. And the music that lasted a millenium showed its strength in the character and talent of those who embodied it.

Khansahib describes the force by which he took in music, from the age of 3, thousands of hours of practice, tireless unscrupulous criticism from his teachers, and the unwitting role he would inevitably play as one of the sole keepers of something needed by everyone he would ever meet.

I am not qualified to biography Khansahib, nor would I aim to do so here. The reason I mention this is to color the perspective I have regarding the respect I feel for him, my teacher, as well as those like him: men and women who were born into music, lived only music, and generously play and share their magic unique lives.

Today I sat next to Ustad Zakir Hussain, Ustad Sultan Khan, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, and the entire crew of the Masters of Percussion. I felt and realized at some inconspicuous moment during my morning class that the sultry animal of music whose classical form I've been suckling from these past 2 years was suddenly present in multiples. I didn't feel like asking for autographs, or taking photos, or even trying to get the attention of these amazing musicians. I only tried to show in my face and my eyes and my posture how much I am grateful to them for what they have done, and what they have yet to do.

How or why could I tell them my story: that I was so fearful of life that I hid from it and beat it from me when it came too close, until I found music and it convinced me of something completely different. It convinced me that individuals are alone only if they don't communicate, and that we choose to live among others so that we can communicate and thereby pool resources, minimize hardship, and induce mutual strength, and that when we do this we are rewarded by a feeling that we call love. And that love, and its spectrum of nine emotions, can be elaborated and understood, clinically and technically, and that its stories can be remembered and told, gently and artfully, and that because of their sacrifices I was able to learn.

Tomorrow I will audition for Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri, yet another phenomenon of human sacrifice and musical prowess. He may decide to teach me tabla, and if so I will have yet another inconceivable mercy bestowed on me. Having wandered into the Ali Akbar College of Music with nothing but a desire, I had no idea what I would find. The access to the depths of this vital school of study is so available, that I cannot imagine turning away from it. On the contrary, I hope that my future will be lit by its fire, warmed by its sound, and fueled by its teachings. Today I am closer to understanding yet so far away, and I thank my gurus for helping me along.

Just Walk Away

Last night I found myself inflamed with frustration as I was unwittingly defending esthetics from someone clearly without attachment to anything important. There are parts of this city where even the land is not land, and yet those who live on it pride themselves on the fact and compete financially to assure this dubious affiliation. It did not surprise me that my partner in this absurd debate also participated in the aforementioned group hallucination. But this is not about criticism, it's about value. Before a bitter end, I just walked away.

So often over the past years I have found myself lost without a guide, seeking a reality which includes stability and strength but without a knowledge of the origin of such things or a sense of how to choose a path that would lead to them. The "big picture" is commonly associated with a God on a throne, a ruler in the sky, or a message without a justification. I refused to accept a consensus of seizures. That is to say, everyone else seemed to be jostling with acceptance, but if we are to believe what helps us, then there is no help to be found in any of this.

So where to begin? Pragmatism and truth go hand in hand - truth being that thing which is present, which describes what is present, or which in much the same way offers value through benefit.

"Is it raining?" "Yes, it is"

This could be truth, and I can accomodate. This also could be a lie and I would have planned ineffectively. There can be opinions on the subject, but for purposes of deriving benefit in terms of my understanding and my actions I accept that in this case truth is something unequivocal and valuable.

The opportunity for fallacy arrives in the displacement of a truthful description by one that contains no valuable information. Or worse, one that contains harmful information. The negotiation of this difference relies on the intelligence that organizes our senses. It's no accident that we say that something does or does not "make sense." It is in fact simply a higher order overview of visual, auditory, chemical, thermal, electromagnetic, and proprioceptive data that is what we call thought.

As in the example above, it is my senses that verify the truth about rain, and my intellect that uses those sensations to create an emotional position which drives my behavior. Therefore in the state that we seem to find ourselves, I must maintain that a dutiful worship of the senses (where worship means to hold in high regard) is a necessary foundation for clear and rational thought, and the benefit that comes from it.

And so to tell me that a self-made opinion has value despite its complete orthogonality to the data that sensation suggests is an indication that something is gravely awry. And this stubborn attachment to a belief structure that places importance on each person's opinion, regardless of how misguided strikes me as a group therapy session that takes place in every place at once, and has no intention of finding an end.

Of our known 5 senses, only one stems directly from the core of the brain (the other 4 are peripheral adjuncts) in the form of bulbs which scan countless gas molecules for their structure and identify them simultaneously in the form of smell. This behavior is common in many animals and its heritage spans back to the time when single-celled organisms alone colonized this planet, and arguably was the foundation of their ability to detect, adjust, and organize for their survival.

Food, drink, partners, and environments seethe with airborne chemistry, and our ability to inhale it, decipher its codes, incorporate its stories, and adjust our actions for benefit is the backbone of solid intellectualism. There is no rift between art and science, if art simply means worship of esthetics, and science means methodologies for such worship. This is how I take it.

Music, coffee, fresh bread, wild flowers, earthworms, maple sap, sandalwood each have distinct codes mapped to their textures, flavors, and vibrations in light and air pressure. When we detect their codes, we learn something of them, and what we learn becomes a utility. We are after all a dependency in the ecosystem as well as a dependent. And the links must be valid to offer structure.

When a man in a lab coat creates a scent, it is a real scent no doubt. But what does it tell you of the thing its been associated with? In my assessment nothing that can be trusted. Wheat has a scent. But scentless mass-produced wheat held for months in storage silos grown in depleted soil and processed with low attention per unit volume, and then scented by said lab coat aims to hide the truth of the story. Why should old wheat smell new? Shouldn't I be allowed to decide that I'd rather eat new wheat by being given the chance to detect the difference? Any way you look at it, the scenting and flavoring of food amounts to bold faced lying. And its impact on my health and well being is by design suboptimal. For just like things with quick energy tasting sweet and things with rich abundant energy tasting fatty and thick, it is these signs that we use to feed ourselves, interact with others, and build a reliable framework in which to operate.

It is therfore entirely relevant that I avoid lies which harm me. Starbuck's is a lie. McDonald's is a lie. Everything cosmetic is in some form a lie. Why would you eat ugly food wearing makeup, when beautiful food exists? Particulary when ugly often means unhealthy, unsafe, or undesirable and someone is choosing to bring this to you while covering up their tracks to avoid notice.

*sigh* There is a simple answer to complex questions, but the glut of misinformation makes sifting through it taxing to say the least. Starting with the basics is a valuable way to restabilize the foundation, and eventually lift the topmost intellect to a useful and dominant position.

If this is not a valuable thing to worship, then may someone's God help us all.

Swirl

I am the swirling behind a burrowing animal, neither the animal nor the dust, I am the animation of their confluence. And I accept my parts.

Behind Dumpsters

You were born in Bakersfield, California not long after the end of the second World War, when peace was meant to be suddenly available to all. You never heard that story because your father kept most of the control of the tv, and wasn't a big current events buff, to start with. His pastimes included being chronically drunk, beating your mother, and once in a while raping your younger sister. He beat you too when he was feeling more bold.

You listened to music a lot: country, folk, and some bluegrass, and kept friendships only with those you'd never meet.

For some inexplicable reason you chose to endure this and call it life, and smile when other people told you about their lives, and wonder, and be confused, and forget, and accept. And then one day, the sound of your mother screaming was too much to take, and the soft blankness that had taken over your sister's once beaming young face drove into you an argument that was so clear it became an action before it was called up for review. And though you never actually fired your father's gun at him, you did stir in him a fear that you would, and those who were meant to protect and serve you, once again failed.

Jail proved to be a tougher-than-expected experience, and you rarely spoke about it to anyone. As a more mature young man you still cherished the gifts of support music had offered you and like a baton needing to be passed you learned how to play the guitar so that you could comfort your selves in the warmth of others and excuse yourself from stopping the flow of what had come your way.

Music helped you find joy, and then calm, and then eventually love in the arms of a woman. You had food, and pleasure and protection, and most of all hope. You lived together for the years that you would later reflect on as the best of your life.

Today you live behind two dumpsters in the alley between an apartment building and the back of a strip mall. Once in a while someone pours a bottle of bleach all over your spot to make it tougher for you to live there. Your eyes burn. You're not sure if it's the bleach.

You feel dirty most of the time. You are dirty. Water is hard to come by, and your own waste follows you around unless you can think of what to do with it. You are ashamed to urinate on the street, or anywhere in public for that matter, but most establishments with public restrooms don't even let you in their parking lots, let alone their facilities. You cringe when you think about your bowels.

You're dirty and you wish you could get clean. And as you consider this, you are embarrassed by the choking odor of your own sweat and the layers of grime you've absorbed from the street on which you spend most of your time. And you wonder why people sneer at you, as though you've chosen this condition. Sometimes you want to shout, "I'll get clean if you can give me some water, or at least give me somewhere to put my dirt!" But you don't shout. You sit quietly, eyes low, avoiding a connection with everyone, especially yourself.

You try to remember the moment when people began to look down at you. You can't. You try to forget the moment that you agreed with them. You can't. You plan to stand up, get a job, and go back to a life of stability and peace that you once imagined. You can't.

You have grown children, but they come looking for you only when they fear you might be at your worst, and even then their alms prove contrived and short-lived. Love is not a word you use in common parlance, though a part of you hangs motionless, too frozen to adjust. You're 50. You're sick. Your skin is rough and weather beaten. You get beaten up for no reason. Stabbed even. Sometimes people give you blankets or money. Both are gone before it's over, stolen or spent, you aren't sure what you're paying for.

And then one day, you see a young man in a business suit walking by your spot to get to his garage. And he looks at you as though you could teach him something. And you do, and he learns. And when for the first time in so long, someone asks you what you have to say. This is what comes to your mind:

Click on photo to download AAC audio (11:36/16MB)...

History Search and Replace

I'm confused so perhaps I should destroy you.
I didn't understand, so I think I should ignore you.

What is that? Speaking again?
Surprising me with the unknown?

Now I have to banish what
I'm too afraid to be shown.

There are witches in the forest,
and in the mountains,
and on the sand.

Witches will come to get you
unless you crush them on their land.

Excuse me but didn't you hear?
We want none of what you have to say.
Just because you've been there
doesn't mean you get to stay.

Oh shit, what's this,
behind two lurk four more.
Tighten up those windows,
lock up your heavy doors.

Sharpen up your knives,
stock up food, and masks, and fuel.
I'm about to let you know that
you've been neighbors with a ghoul.

There are witches in the forest,
and in the mountains,
and on the sand.

Witches will come to get you
unless you crush them on their land.

I'll burn you down to ashes.
Plucking out dissent leaves flowers grown my way
-- in polished semi-circles for me not you to play.

And in their centers we'll tell stories
through smiles we took from God.
And be sure to laugh and join us
Or we'll clip you with a nod.

There are witches in the forest,
and in the mountains,
and on the sand.

Witches will come to get you,
unless you crush them on their land.

Coffee Ritual

Today was a very good day. And for me it's still morning.

The sadhus speak of clarity and invigoration that arrives with the sight of holiness. In my mind, this is a physiological effect, an evolutionarily-sound augmentation to the fitness of the self-aware that induces us to align with those things closest to perfection. These interwined asymptotes of biological competition form the guideliness for the rich space of visual, auditory, and olfactory esthetics. Nonetheless, on Valencia street accompanied by a mug and a scone, I made darshan.

I noticed, for the first time, Ritual Coffee Roasters through my car window last night, and it's faux-arabic logo and inviting subtle decor installed an interest. Primarily I just hoped to end the disappointment.

Taking BART to 16th in the dawn of my wakefulness, I walked a few blocks south on Valencia and found the storefront.

I was greeted by bustle. It looked a bit like the St*rb*ck's on Bundy and Santa Monica, with more laptops and less Hugo Boss. "Oh god no, please, please, please..." My heart sank, as memories of screaming milk and bitterness swept through me. I'd never go back, it's just not worth it.

Eileen greeted me and we discussed my order. Her knowledge of her work was evident. She answered my questions soundly, and taught me a few things about the de-gas process.

"Small coffee."

It was my standard order. Every good coffee house must base their business on that drink. It's the atomic unit of coffee aromatics. Give me as much as I need, with the most straightforward process. It captures every aspect of the intention. The small coffee is the keystone.

As I walked to my table, I carried a medium mug. Somehow Eileen delivered what I was asking for. It was the same size mug I used at home, their small being the size of my tea cups. Fair enough, they just need to adjust their nomenclature.

I sat down, looked into the drink and took a deep inhale. It was french pressed (as are all of Ritual's brewed drinks) and I could see the smoothness of the silt freckling the glossy surface. I walked back to the counter to reach for the half-and-half, then paused, then sipped then sat back down.

It was the best coffee I'd had in memory. It was the best coffee I'd had in San Francisco no doubt. And it was the only coffee that had ever talked me out of changing it.

The bean was an Ethopian Sidamo, medium roast with a mild almost sweet disposition. It tasted of the highlands, cool and inviting with a calm but brooding understanding of something worth exploring.

Barely 15 minutes after leaving the place, I returned with whole beans in hand to stand in line for the 3rd time to finish off my coverage. I'd dealt with retail drip and wholesale bean. Now it was time to sample the espresso.

"One espresso one capuccino, one shot each."

Eileen smiled, amused by my caffeine binging. At the counter I dropped back the espresso, taking a moment to note its warm amber crema before I mouthed the lot of it. It was most certainly an 8. Texturally pleasant, it had a minimal sourness, a full body, and just a bit of smoke.

I asked Eileen if she was looking for investors. Two drinks and I wanted to join the cause.

She looked slightly offended, as though she couldn't imagine such a thing. I credited her motivations, and sat down with my cap. I was just a bit disappointed that my foam was sub-par for what I'd been expecting. So far these guys were a shoo in to displace my Roman coffee allegiance, and them being so much closer... Well, I'd still be happy to go to the Cafe D'San Eustachio, but so long as I'm in the bay Ritual would be my top recommendation.

The foam was just a bit too airy, though nicely steamed otherwise with a clean not too milky flavor and just a touch of caramel. The preparation was visually attractive, and the espresso (as I'd just tasted) was well homogenized as it should be.

It turns out Eileen is one of the owners along with her partner Jeremy. They aren't actually roasting yet but will be soon, under the apprenticeship of Duane, owner of Stumptown roasters in Portland, the current source of their bean inventory. Stumptown, as I've since learned is a like-minded organization that will surely receive more of my business.

Fruit Dispute

I had my first fruit dispute today.

It was just after 9. I was on my way back from my Wednesday evening voice class, when I decided the Whole Foods Market at California and Franklin was due to receive my feedback. They closed at 10, and even from the bridge I was confident I could make it.

Minutes later, I marched into the produce section, sides barrelled, and one fist raised waist high. "There's mold in all the fruit!" I snarled with intensity. It was an intensity wrapped in the poignant memory of raspberries fed to the trash, as I watched dolefully with an empty belly. Just hours after those very raspberries, organic as they may be, were sold to me by the rascals I was about to upturn.

"Whole Foods says mold is organic!," this time I ended with a little hiss, as if I was saying "organiss". I don't know why that happened.

By this point, I'd gotten the attention of only one customer, a slight older lady in long maroon gown, with a purse as large as her handbasket, and nothing of interest in either one I'd have assumed. But I had no claim with her - in fact I was slightly embarrased because of her presence there - nonetheless, I had work to do.

I approached aisle 6. "You there, mold merchant," I hooted in my best Charlton Heston. A 40-something hispanic man with a neatly trimmed mustache, and skin a shade very close to my own turned his head as his hands continued to scan irregular chunks of hard cheese.

"I demand justice!" I soared. The man behind the conveyor belt, who I was now able to identify as "Rolfo" had a momentary eye exchange with the brunette working aisle 5. It appears they were just going to wait for security to show.

I needed traction. Suddenly, without an instant of decision magazines were flying in every direction. Yoga Today, San Francisco Magazine, 12 copies airborne. Vegan Monthly, Eco News, splayed like drunk ballerinas in every direction. "Ha ha," I yielded.

It was only as the second guard hyperextended my shoulder that my vengeance began to abate. The automatic doors were barely closed behind me as I felt the evacuated stillness of defeat. Damn those raspberries. Damn that mold.

Today not tomorrow

Jai Hind.

Bajan

Stemware martini
Attacks stemware wine
Pens take note

Coffee beans rain down
Through bolts of glass
As tablas thunder

Dha Ga Dhi Ga Dha
Ta Ka Ti Ka Ta
Dha Ga Dhi Ga Dha Te Te Te Te Te Te Te Te

Shirtless skin boasts
Invincibly
Unconvinced it was him

Silver coil throbs
Against its broken spiral

Safety cowers in a stained wood box
With a bag of green cardamom
Some books
And a tape

Dha Ga Dhi Ga Dha
Ta Ka Ti Ka Ta

And a minefield moves into the womb

Dha Ga Dhi Ga Dha Ka Te Te Ka Te Te Ka Ta

Olm

It is with great pleasure that I reckon how much human infrastructure it has required over the generations so that I may be sent the following automated message: "Hey!", from Indecisiveness L. Olmstead.

Resentment 1984-2005

R.I.P.

Sticky Rat

Sticky rat needs corn flakes for his syrup spot. Selfish rat. Selfish sticky rat.

Napkins

Shame intervened with the rough gravel cold of cracked ice, smiting my forearms with blue as even my own blood would draw back from its onslaught. My knees are long numbed, bare and indented, twin foundations fading into imperceptibility. The weight of my spine, twisting forward under the slothful drag of my torso, and the gentle warmth of my heaving abdomen spreading like a welcome breeze across arid land, both fade unnoticed into the paralysis in which I kneel.

Too loud, too loud, sirens and crashing, a space so full of sound nothing else could fill it, yet I was there, overflowing an empty hall of despair with my presence that forced me to take in my place.

There is a vacuum inside my nose and the harder I inhale the more it smothers me. My upper respiratory tract yearns to implode, its soft nurturing membranes clinging to their homeland, like rebel zealots scorning the end of conflict.

Too loud, too loud, the quiet would come just too late, but realized enough.

Dust - now mud - blackened my corneas so that momentary rapids emerged along the flowing silt in my tears. If I could see, there would be nothing where I was looking - inside, away from the source.
There would be safety. Eventually. And forever.

Headache - Part 1

Life in the post-industrial consciousness seems to be nothing more than a series of unfortunate misunderstandings. Progress of the aggregate is assumed from the progress of a decreasing number of its constituents. And the progress of each of those constituents is a faded litmus of what benefit used to mean.

From Aristotle, to Schweitzer, to John Lennon the image has been present, but so smeared with disbelief that it can't be seen through all the hateful graffiti. Everything that can happen does, until it can't. And as the threads of intersecting possibilities wrap around each other, so form the twine of cascading events we call life. And so it has goes without beginning or end, just ever blooming middle. Time, as physicist Julian Barbour explains, is a metric not a concept. It's a derivative of the state of being of a set of things, and useful to represent the pace at which things change in comparison to each other. Even a child knows that night and day occur more often than summer and winter. This is the frame we've built and we teach each other to live in it.

But in 2005, busy is the mandate. Voice mails communicate with voice mails, and even sometimes breed with email, instant messages, SMS, or Post-its. And as each new avenue heralds mankind with a new way to etch into the memories of their peers - a human instinct manifest since cerebral development allowed - the condition in which the message makers exist places them behind so many layers of blanketing that nothing more then a restrained squirm gets through.

Walk to your nearest gathering of Bay area teenagers for example, and you'll hear something that goes like this: "I might have seen something. It might have been common adjective." "I might have seen something too. It might have been same common adjective."

I've deciphered this theme as it was encoded in a sea of likes and hellas. What is immediately obvious is the lack of any mutually beneficial information exchange, and a decisive end to the backing of ideas, should any crop up. Everything is conditional. Fundamentally we've become the petri dish for a culture that speaks advertising pidgin consisting of obfuscated gibberish that even those speaking it aren't willing to back.

But there's no time for such metaphysical babble. Put out that incense and get a job.

Ah right, capital the great equalizer. The invention of the universe that allows me to acquire and trade expectation, thereby giving me access to the bounty of the world I would otherwise live without. But what aim would I have for such bounty before I think about acquiring it?

Who cares, let's get it and find out. I see lots of smiling people around all the pictures. It must be the elixir they've been keeping from me all these years. Look at those smiles. Look at those breasts. I can feel that way too. How could I know they feel the same way I do. I just have to keep saving and...

An expectation that never materializes into an event was simply a waste of time and energy. And yet promissary notes of the expectation of strangers are what drives the modern world.

If I start with a clean head, it won't take long to realize that delight is the best I can get. Obviously, there are various characters and flavors of this human expression of stability, but fundamentally, when something bangs the gong of survival and we resonate with a genuine addition to our survival strength, we experience delight. Life has a way of rewarding its allies.

And where do I find delight? In activation of the senses, of the mind that interprets them, and of the identity that is custodian of its means. There is a grammar in all of our senses, not just hearing. This grammar allows us to identify harmonies and phrases within that sense. By doing so, we provide our mind with greater depth of understanding for each of our sensory inputs, and therefore a greater overall sense of attachment and depth in our interface to the world. We can taste with greater precision, use our fingertips to detect subtle differences in texture or temperature, but we have to allow them to take their shape, by offering them time to develop. An identity that is our own will foster this.

Wherein I assume that all things unrelated to one thing are unimportant, I inadvertantly take on the job of custodian of that thing. I have attributed my priority one to an identity whose defense takes something different than my own, and may even violate my own. And I accept that my own identity therefore, is subordinate to the identity which I now defend with my every waking moment of attention.

And so I pay $4 for a terrible cup of coffee. The good news is, 100 million units were shipped this week, and that's 14% more than the same week last year. And because I can never be where I want to be, it's good they're everywhere. My tongue is blue with disappointment. My olfactory bulbs, a direct extension of my brain, representing millions of years of life-saving understanding left scorned by a simulacrum of what used to be good.

And yet I'm at the throne of progress. So high up I can't reach anyone or anything I'd care to have. So much thinking. So little thought.

Speechless

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so."
- Mohandas Gandhi

"I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act."
- Buddha

"We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final".
- US Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson

Tuesday Afternoon Snack

Umiji, dhekye main theek se kharoun:

Mia Doi Todd @ SF

Last night I found myself face to face with Mia Doi Todd. I didn't realize this until she took stage later, as I'd never actually seen her. She's much smaller than I imagined. Though she seemed to enlarge behind her guitar.

I had come to her show at Cafe DuNord after listening to her album (ordered a few months back from the small LA label that published it), which I did after watching a video clip online for her song My Room is White. As it happens, my room is white (something I've always found relaxing to wake to, and less distracting to sleep in) which I mentioned to the friend who recommended me the link. She didn't think it was nearly as interesting as I did. The song was enticing nonetheless.

Music, as I relate to it, is fully conceptual and in some sense unattainable. Our brains allow us to receive and store information by discerning patterns of greater and greater scope. This intelligence spawned language, first in the form of simple constructs encoded in tone and time, and then in more complex articulations involving sophisticated technique derived from our human language skills. Music is an example of such a pattern that we're able to process and then discern emotional messaging.

The goal of the musician, thus, is to imply the music in as clear and accurate a way as possible, and in essence become invisible. The goal of the listener is to discern the music from the sounds produced by the musician. The better each of them are, the more salient the music will be.

And so with attention piqued, I could not have predicted my emotion as I heard French a capella. I was enraptured. The implication of music occurs for me most easily when the least amount of sound gets in its way. It's for this reason that I've stayed attached to compositions with strong vocals with simple acoustic accompaniment. There is so much music that can be swept into the swells and folds of a rare vocal talent. And as this magic went down, it lit up my left frontal lobe with high bandwidth emotion. Miss Todd completed her show with various songs from the album Manzanita (which I own) and several I'd not heard. She was accompanied only by her Taylor.

I closed my eyes once in a while, and thought about my own unlikely musicianship. I'd been whining about not getting a violin when I was 9, well into my 20s. All the while I poured energy into self-destructive behaviors, feeling anger and envy around musicians of every kind. They were the chosen few, and I wasn't happy about it.

And then several years ago, my friend Jason Sugg scolded me on the phone: "Go get a guitar now." He had heard enough of my whining. I'd earned the nickname BIM years before for being a Bitter Indian Man. The bitter malaise seemed to have no end.

I did go get a guitar that day. But it sat dusty for nearly 4 years until someone I met named Farah Kidwai (an accomplished opera singer and now dear friend) suggested I take voice lessons. I didn't really like the guitar because it seemed too detached (at least at the time). Voice was always my most personal sense of expression. The years of looking down instead of forward left me with a suite of terrible habits including massive self doubt, shame, self sabotage, the works. So it was something more of a complete spiritual turnaround to find out the hopelessness was just a gimmick I'd learned from too much t.v., and that there were instructions available for how to use my diaphragm and my larynx. The realization opened new doors, got me to actually start using my guitar, and was inevitably the reason I was standing in...

And suddenly I was back at Cafe DuNord, and taking in an honest performance, I felt comfort. That despite the somber intervals and austere lyrics, Miss Todd had allowed me to see a clearer picture of my own love for things lost, and things hopeful, through musicianship so beautifully transparent.

Keane @ Berkeley

I am not a gusher. I have never been a gusher. I am about to gush.

Keane played a shockingly impressive set last night at what is now my favorite Bay area venue. There are few bands I have seen who can consistently write songs that dissolve straight into the joyful center of my head. The first time I heard We Might as Well Be Strangers, that happened. Last night, Keane played a sprinkling of their new songs, and once again, squish, I am hooked. It's unprecedented. There is no chance that I won't buy their new album.

It doesn't hurt that the band members are endearing English boys who lavish their mature performances with heartfelt appreciation, genuine human interest, and enthusiasm. Keane is currently the only mainstream pop band that I trust. Chris Martin should take notes on how not to be a sweltering buffoon.

The final stroke was a visually satisfying blend of smooth search lights in soft colors, stroking fingers across the ornate and majestic surfaces of the Berkeley Community Theater. The standard rock-and-roll pomp that makes me want to squeeze one of my eyeballs was left out, drama finding its own outlet in Keane's thoughtful, evocative songwriting and aforementioned salient charm.

Do you feel the gushing yet?

To be completely objective, mood certainly has an impact on the concert experience, and I was in a good one. Good because I was feeling optimism and peace tinged with a bit of second-hand self-pity, as I looked at the pair of empty seats I had brought along to join me. I had gotten over the fact that the 3 people I was expecting to go with couldn't make it, and that the two people I had asked to go in their place had flaked out, but when after 15 minutes of running around like a monkey in front of the will call window proved unsuccessful at selling more than one of my tickets for clearance prices, I decided to donate the two to a friend I'd made in the process.

On a completely unrelated note, it's interesting to see who joins in when you're being loud and foolish in a public place. I found myself descending into low grade standup just to get attention, begging people to take my tickets, offering hugs and other stupid incentives. Within a few minutes there were 5 people standing next to me with various states of tickets to be sold, looking for some sales support. There were also several sitting and standing in various places laughing and smiling and making suggestions. Ah, the deprived masses.

In any case, one of my friends-by-colocation who claimed love for the band offered to trade my remaining pair of seats (which were destined for trash heaven) for theirs since mine were better. In hopes for some kind of company and charitability toward a fan... as you can infer, they didn't show up either.

So my advice: If you're going to see a band, see Keane. If you're going to see Keane, see them by yourself. And if you go by yourself, make sure you invite as many people as possible who won't show. And if they don't show, make sure you invite other people who won't show either. And if they don't show either, try to give their seats away to people who you think might just enjoy the concert, and if they don't show either, then you'll have the best show of your life.

Introduction

The first time the words world wide and web crossed my ears in that combined sequence, it was in the voice of Ernst Smith, my roommate for my freshman year at MIT in 1993. Ernst was a brilliant technologist with a passion for detail, as well as a generally nice guy. His casual lecturing built my foundation in networking, operating systems, and helped set my initial outlook as technology the tool, the helper, the thing we want.

Within months Ernst had me setup with Linux and a web server on my Gateway 486-66DX2 (my recent upgrade from the Apple IIGS that took me through high school) and I'd spend an embarassing number of hours paging through log files interested in who was looking at my scant web offerings which included things like my class schedule and some pictures of Cindy Crawford in a bikini. I was 17, I have no apologies. I'd get up to a few hundred hits a day if I recall -- not bad for just 3 or 4 pages of hand-typed HTML, though it was Cindy and friends that always drew the traffic. I liked seeing hits from IBM, or NIH, or Croatia.

My web server was called synergy.mit.edu and my very first IP address was 18.239.2.102. I know this because Ernst also helped me get my first job as a Residential Computing Consultant for my dorm where I was able to bill 10 bucks an hour for what DHCP now does for free. It was called Resnet, and started up toward the end of my first year. To this day, I miss having 10Mbps in my bedroom.

Jumping forward 12 years, I've just ended 4 years at a company called Akamai, teaching distributed computing technology to people our sales people would then get to sign contracts. It was an extremely useful experience, for various reasons, not the least of which is that it gave me a chance to interact with IT project managers from a huge range of interesting clients all over the western US. I met with companies as diverse as Nissan, Suzuki, Honda, Fox Sports, Warner Music Group, eHarmony.com, Ticketmaster, and Google.

I mention all of this to make this following point. From Ernst Smith who called himself a hacker and loved to revel at the elegance of competent technical architecture well at the dawn of the dot com era, to the CIOs and middle managers of late who have accepted the web as just another new place to cultivate revenue, the idea of the web has gone through my mind and spirit more times than I could ever have imagined in the fall of 1993.

And now it is the eve of May 2005, and I am about to begin my first blog -- my first homecoming to the world of completely pointless web content whose existence implies someone would want to read it. I shut down Synergy ages ago and only started up Brewnote as a necessary way to distribute audition samples and info. Between the two I never felt I was missing much. I had seen the rise and fall of the visionary fruit, and then spent years blanding myself to the juices.

But now I am possessed to emerge again, motivated by a combination of intentions. This blog will be governed only by taste and truth, and the rest can get parsed out by whatever method you prefer.

On that note, welcome to Brewnote Blog.