December 2012 - TheTranscendenceDiaries

Selling Out or Buying In? Or How I Lost My Soul And Made a Fortune in the Process

December 29, 2012

I just listened to the last but unreleased Broken Spectacles album, the one called Aftermath. The one that took us two years to make, a year and half of which was building the recording studio. Recording the album probably only took us a few months at the most. I hadn’t heard it in 15 years. The Grey Wolf just sent it to me. All I could do was cry cry cry… I had totally forgotten how quirky weird and special we were. Broken Spectacles is the real name of the band that I have been referring to as Shattered for the last fifteen years in these Transcendence Diaries and other places.

What a sad beautiful trip that just was. Grey Wolf aka Donnie J Groovemaster Jam, has just recently unearthed a treasure trove of master tapes from those six years and had them digitally remastered. He sent me one CD of the “old stuff” and one CD of the never released last album we recorded called Aftermath. We may need to change that title since it’s a Stones album already. I don’t believe we knew that at the time. Grey Wolf burned the CDs all wrong so it’s just ONE big hour long song per CD, which is classic Groover. He’s going to do it over again he tells me. That I assume will take another fifteen years. I have a lot of the old songs already mastered and ready to go, but only the ones that I wrote, for the Spectacularly Broken compilation album… But now I am rethinking the idea and wanting to do a WHOLE Spectacles compilation instead of just Ed Hale songs… Would take all four guys agreeing to that… That’s the problem. Bands are tricky.

Today I only listened to Aftermath… The first song that came on was called “LOVE”. Fans won’t even know the song because Aftermath was never released and unlike most of the songs on the album, we never played the song “Love” live, not even once. That one was a Toad song. We all contributed to each others songs, adding various instruments as we saw fit and vocal harmonies along with background vox. By the time we got to Aftermath we had been together for five years. So Toad and I were still working together very closely, but not writing together as much as did in the beginning. More like coming in with completed songs and then just assisting each other with suggestions and musical additions. There are some horn and string parts I added to this one along with my usual backgrounds and harmonies, but for the most part it was all Toad. And it was utterly transcendent. I couldn’t believe it. What i was hearing. Now. Fifteen years later. It felt like a different life. A lifetime ago. Truly.

Vintage Eddie Darling aka Ed Hale and Matthew Sabatella

Ed Hale aka Eddie Darling and Matthew Sabatella on stage at Churchill’s Hideaway in Miami, FL

In that moment it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. Reminded me of George Harrison. I didn’t remember it at first. Couldn’t place it. I didn’t understand why it was there. It wasn’t part of the album was it? Wouldn’t I remember that? Turns out that it was. I had just suppressed the memory I assume. And for good reason. There was always a tense and bitter but beneficial competitiveness between Toad and I by the time we got to the recording of this album. Who was the better writer? Who was the better singer? Who got more girls? Who got more press? Who got more positive reviews? Who knew more? Who played their instrument the best? Who played the most instruments? Who wrote more songs? Who was deeper? Who sang more like John Lennon? Who was as multi-talented as Paul? On and on. (Funny right? I know… But bands are like that when they first start out… It’s cute when you think about it…)

I cannot help but think that one of the reasons why Broken Spectacles was so good was due to this very intense but loving competitiveness between the two of us. Always pushing ourselves more, to be the best we could be in order to outdo the other. But we were also best friends, beyond brothers. With an infinite love between us, one that I have still not to this day experienced with any other man, perhaps not even any other human being. A lot of water has passed under that bridge.

Listening to it this time, anew, I was flabbergasted by its beauty. Astounded. Couldn’t stop crying. And then in comes Coon’s “KALEIDOSCOPE” with the most amazing triple lead guitar harmonies “Freebird” style ending. And on and on it went… “AINT IT HARD”!!! Another masterpiece. “Nature Boy”, “Wrong Again”, “I Want Blood”, “Going Nowhere”, “Aftermath”, “Your Face Ain’t That Pretty”… Every guy was doing such a good job at what they were trying to do. I was so impressed with the musicality of it all. Couldn’t shake the feeling that perhaps I had somehow sold my soul over the last fifteen years since those days… Just to get more success and make more money. We now don’t make anything like this kind of music I was hearing from this strange glorious mess of an album.

Princess Little Tree couldn’t believe that it was us she was hearing. She had never heard the band before. Only knew the Transcendence and the Ed Hale solo stuff. Had only heard me talk about Broken Spectacles. All the stories… She was impressed by the variety of vocals. Had never heard Toad or Coon sing. Never heard all three of us sing together before, one of the things that really stood out about that band, three lead singers, oftentimes singing at the same time in all the songs. It was special. But here’s the coup de grace… the last song Grey Wolf put on the album for some reason was “AND I GO”. A mega monstrous masterpiece, an epic anthemic musical gift from God the likes of which I’d never heard before or since. Like a thunder bolt straight out of heaven into your ears and your soul. I could not believe what I was hearing. What a freaking masterpiece. Of course it’s a Toad song too. I always hated being in a band with him. As much as I loved it. (to be fair he claims the same thing and for the same reasons… just goes to show…) I was such a shite singer back then compared to now (which isn’t saying much I know). But holy crap what a monstrously gorgeous song that is. Toad could die tomorrow and his legacy will forever remain top tier due to the four songs he contributed to this album. Same with Coon. His are equally epic and brilliant.

I could not stop crying. First just sobs like with the other songs… Little baby tears. And then by the time we get to the “I want you to go deep…” breakdown of this song, I was full on sobbing like a baby, like a mental patient, face all scrunched up. Tears shooting out of my eyes. I seriously don’t think I can ever listen to that song again. It’s just too good. It’s frightening how good it is. I have no idea what happened to me, but it was one of the most cathartic events of my life. Cathartic in how emotional I felt, how completely moved in so many ways… Up, down, sad, happy, amazed, traumatized, relieved, proud, regretful… over the top emotion anguish and expression. I couldn’t help but feel this deep sadness and fear that over the last few years I had just completely sold out as an artist. Compared to what I was hearing on this album, recorded when we were just kids, but so unique and special.

I so wish I could post this song for everyone to hear… the whole album. But it’s all up to Grey Wolf at this point. And getting an agreement from all the members of the band. I don’t actually have a real copy of this album. Haven’t had one in over 15 years. If ANY of YOU have a copy of THAT album in any form let me know. Perhaps we can speed this process up. Also — if ANY of YOU have high quality PHOTOS to use as artwork for the release, let someone know. Once we schedule this, we can commission someone to do the artwork. We will need REAL PHOTOS to scan. I have no idea if I have any pro-grade or high quality ones really. Just scanned in low quality ones. But that’s what we need here to take it to the next phase.

I believe that more than anything what affected me most about hearing this album from start to finish like this for the first time in so many years was that number one, what I was listening to was old. I hadn’t heard it in a long time, so like seeing someone you love, like a family member, for the first time in over a decade, that’s just going to get to you regardless. Number two though, as a work of art it’s absolutely BRILLIANT. It’s big brash experimental avant garde. Epic and all over the place stylistically… And yet it has a very distinct sound all its own due to the fact that the same four guys recorded it in the same six month period using all the same gear and in the same two rooms. It has a mythic quality to it. We were peaking artistically as individuals and as a group when we recorded it (but then again when are we NOT peaking. I have yet to experience “writer’s block” or any “down time” as an artist… I guess that’s lucky. Or maybe that’s just how it is for all artists…) What it’s not is commercial. It’s entirely NOT commercial.

Ed Hale aka Eddie Darling and Matthew Sabatella in Broken Spectacles

Ed Hale aka Eddie Darling and Matthew Sabatella of Broken Spectacles in the recording studio

Moving as all hell. But just not commercial in any way. And see that’s the thing… We used to not give a shit about being commercial. That was never our aim. Never the goal. I mean, I honestly don’t think we even thought about it. And the music shows that. It’s extraordinarily amateurish in many ways. But you can’t help but be blown away by how mammoth and ambitious it sounds as well. Walls of noise really in some parts… On the one hand Broken Spectacles had some of the most exciting and advanced musicianship you could hear anywhere. On the other hand it had a very weak sort of chock full of mistakes sound to it as well… go figure. But that was us.

A few years after The Specs broke up I reverted to my real name, Ed Hale, laid Eddie Darling down for good and formed the band Transcendence with Infinito; first time I played with anyone besides the other three guys in the Specs in seven or eight years. We’ve recorded and released nine albums since then. Right out of the gate we experienced a ton more press, airplay, sales and critical acclaim than we ever did back in The Specs. For many reasons. Older, wiser, more experience, more money. But more than anything else I think it was because I understood that making music for me at least couldn’t just be about doing whatever the hell I wanted anymore. It had to include a measure of financial return to it or I was going to be forced to stop doing it full time. Besides, I wanted to make money with it. I wanted to experience what we call success, in the traditional sense. And we did. Thank God. I haven’t sat down and counted, but off the top of my head we’ve charted about ten songs on one chart or another over the last ten years. Sold a hell of lot of albums. That number would be triple that if I weren’t always trying to reach so much artistically… I know that. But still, we do make music that is commercially viable for the most part, at least compared to what we were doing in Broken Spectacles.

What I notice from a lot of my peers from that original music scene down in Miami when we all started out as teenagers and others I connect with all over the world still is that they’re all still making the same kind of music that they made way back when. They do what they do and they don’t change. And that’s a big problem. They expect that the industry is going to come to them. That the listeners are going to come to them. But it doesn’t work that way. Not even a little. Sure you can innovate here and there. But it has to be within the confines of what is happening within the music business and what is happening in pop culture now. There is a flow to it all. A flow of what’s hip cool popular modern happening. That’s popular culture.

Every now and then we get lucky and we may happen to be at the front end of that curve when the music is about to take a hard right or left… The way Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains and Smashing Pumpkins were when hair metal was at it’s peak and everyone was desperate for it to die. Or the way that Radiohead and Muse and Travis and Ours and Mercury Rev were when we were all looking for grunge to die off. But hell, who can really say that Nirvana innovated that sound when we all know they really didn’t? They became the poster child for it for a while. (which sucked for some of the better bands, no need to name names…) But it wasn’t just ONE band or artist that did it. It was a wave of them.

And what I find today amongst many of my peers in rock is that they aren’t on the cusp of any wave at all. They aren’t even riding a wave. They’re just making the same old music that they’ve always made. Expecting people to like it. That’s music making as a hobby. Not music making to be a professional. You try to explain to them that they need to focus on using sounds that are modern or current or contemporary, their drum sounds, their guitar sounds, the way their voice is recorded… even the arrangement of the song itself… and they either argue the merits of what they’re doing or they just go blank and don’t understand. And yet we can’t argue with reality. With results. If you’re not experiencing the kind of success and popularity that you desire, then SOMETHING is wrong, or at least “not right” about what you’re currently doing.

Rise and Shine – the first Ed Hale and the Transcendence album

I can’t sit here and say that I completely changed spots and switched to totally making commercial music all of a sudden once we formed Transcendence. I didn’t. Especially considering that the original idea for the group was to create a world music meets modern rock sound that no one had ever heard before and have me sing in four or five different languages sometimes within the same song. That first album, Rise and Shine, was phenomenally eccentric. I know that. And hell, most of the guys in Transcendence are still pissed at me for how much I’ve switched genres over the years with the release of every new album, and how much I’ve focused on “creating art” or making artistic statements over the years. In fact, The ex Norwegian sent me a Fb post TODAY admonishing me to “PLEASE not worry about creating art” and just this once try to make all these songs commercially viable so we can make some money. He’s referring to real money. Big money. Not $1 or 200,000 a year money. But $1 to 10,000,000 a year money. I want the same thing. We all do.

We came damn close on the last solo album. But then I flipped it all around with the next two releases that we did with the group, All Your Heroes Become Villains and The Great Mistake. Both evidently were on the extreme and eccentric side compared to the solo album. At least that’s what we were told. But to everyone’s defense, I have to admit if backed into a corner that I did have major concepts and agendas when making the All Your Heroes album. Super focused. Hyper-focused. I mean, it was meant to be a giant concept… high art… an amalgam of statements all tied together to create one bigger statement. Something final and permanent. A mark. A sculpture. Solid and lasting like a castle or a mansion. ONE big piece. NOT merely a collection of songs. There’s a difference.

Contrast that with what constitutes hit songs in today’s market, or in any age’s market… What happens in those cases? The hit songs end up eventually losing their original home, whatever album they happened to be released on, people forget, and that album goes out of print. The song may last forever, eventually gaining the moniker of “classic”. But the album that it came from is lost forever to most people. THAT is exactly the opposite of what we’ve set out to do in Transcendence. Every album (except perhaps for The Great Mistake, which really is just a collection of songs…) was created as one cohesive work of art, to stay together and last forever. Pink Floyd is a great example of this. Animals, Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall… albums. Permanent cohesive entities in their own right over and above the hit singles they may or may not have had. Zeppelin, same thing. People say the album is dead ALL the time. They’re wrong. (To a certain degree anyway. Save for another post…)

I can’t complain that All Your Heroes wasn’t accepted as a huge commercial success compared to our previous one. It is dark and moody and insanely complex, wildy emotive and overly noisy in some areas, and more than anything it’s entirely dependent on being an ALBUM. It’s not really singles based at all. Hell, all the songs ram into each other and then flow into another song. I don’t think there’s ANY empty space on the whole album. I know. I think we all know. It wasn’t created to be a commercial thing… But the important thing is that I can die happy with it as an artist. Over the last two years since the release of that album I have felt very very good about it. I will die with a smile on my face when remembering it, when contemplating what we intended versus the final result.

And therein lies the eternal struggle. There’s a balance there that we constantly have to be considering when creating. Do we sell out with a song or two? And still try to preserve a great album in the process? Do we sell out entirely, just create the whole album as one sixty minute collection of unrelated mainstream pleasing current sounding tasty pieces of ear candy? How far can we swim out into the popular music sea once we jump overboard before we get lost and are unable to ever return to the comfort and safety of the artists’ artist boat?

And vice versa, how far off into left field can we ride that beast of innovation and experimentation and doing whatever the hell we want to before we are lost forever to the popular music loving masses? Some say it’s ALL selling out as soon as you begin to contemplate such matters. I say bullshit. If you don’t ever think about your art, about what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, the possibilities, the various different styles and arrangements and directions you’ve got before you, then you’re just winging it. I’ve been there before, when you’re young you think you’re just going to wing it. I know that terrain well. Did it for years in the Specs. Refused to think about what we were doing. It ALL had to come spontaneously, like magic. No thought about the expression. It had to flow out naturally. It’s an artistic mindset. But it’s only ONE mindset. In a world where there are infinite mindsets one can occupy. One day I just decided to deliberately occupy a different mindset and see what would come of it.

Ballad On Third Avenue by Ed Hale

Ballad On Third Avenue was not the most successful album we ever released contrary to what most people believe. Sleep With You was a much bigger seller (so too in fact was Nothing Is Cohesive — which also still to date is by far the most critically acclaimed album any of us have ever been associated with) and had several big hits at Alternative Rock radio. But Ballad did have one thing that none of the other albums had up to that point: a verifiable Billboard Top30 hit song. Two of them. All the other hits were on different charts or specialty charts or college radio charts or made it to the Top 100 but just never got into Billboard’s Top40, let alone the Top25 like “Scene in San Francisco” and “New Orleans Dreams” did. That was something different. And it made a HUGE difference. Worlds of difference. In many different areas of our lives. For one thing we made a lot of money. And that was a very good thing. The songs still bring in a lot of money.

But it also had its challenges. The cons. Creating those songs was not just “hey let’s just create whatever we want to and see how people like it” as in times past. The songs were run by a seemingly endless string of consultants and then remixed and remixed again until every last one of them at every level of the industry was satisfied with how each song sounded. See, this is something that I NEVER would have done fifteen years ago when we were in Broken Spectacles. We were offered it sooooo many times. And every time we fought it and instead just created total chaos and confusion. I’ll never forget Toad telling the head of A&R at Island Records to “fuck off! We don’t need your advice about OUR music!” That’s how we did things…. We thought we held the whole world in our hands. And to a certain degree we did. Creatively we were an amazing unit. But we were young and green and stupid. We’d make sure we were always tripping on something whenever we had a meeting or a showcase with any major record label executives. Just to show them how little we cared. We weren’t going to change anything for anyone regardless how “big” or wealthy they were.

We had the opportunity to work with two of the biggest producers in the business. No need to name them here because it’s common knowledge. But in both cases, looking back, these were men who absolutely dwarfed us in terms of their experience and achievements in the music business. And in their abilities as musicians. And in both cases we played the fool every day we showed up. We KNEW what we wanted to do, knew what we wanted to sound like; we knew what was best. Or so we thought. So… why bother to have producers then? Well that’s the million dollar question isn’t it? We’d get excited to be working with a big name… And then when push came to shove and we got in the studio we always thought we knew best and fought with them. We were real shits.

Ed Hale as Eddie Darling, Matthew Sabatella and Donnie J in Broken Spectacles on their way into Brendan O’Brien’s recording studio in Atlanta, GA

Those were big mistakes. Looking back I can see WHY we did what we did. Why we acted the way we did. Our biggest fear –though at the time it was probably unconscious to any of us — was to ever consider that we were sell outs or selling out in any way. Pandering to the mainstream masses for money or fame or popularity. It just wasn’t who we were> in fact it was the exact opposite of who we were. We knew that. Being in that band, at that time in music history, at that point in our lives, at that age, the mentality and the sentiment and the statement was as important as the music.

The reason you made music and the kind of music you created or DIDN”T create was as important as the music… It was an elitist purist idealist state of mindfulness. Beyond arrogant. With pride in that arrogance. Very similar to what Vancouver is expressing now. Poor bastard. His “I’ll only play with acoustic drums and never drum loops or samples or synth beats” when everyone in the industry does it for very specific reasons — they sound badass — is precisely what makes his music sound so dated and local. And he SO wants to be liked and wonders why he isn’t. It’s curious, intriguing, perplexing really.

But I can relate. Because I suffered the same mental illness back in the days of The Specs. Granted, in our defense, we were 18 years old at the time. Vancouver is like thirty-something so he really has no excuse. But still, I can relate. The key for me, what changed, was that eventually I realized that I really did want to make popular music. And money. And if it was “I” who was making it, in the end, I would still probably like it in the end. Or so I hoped. On top of that, when you make popular music, you can generate enough money that you can then afford to make more avant garde or eccentric music in addition to the more popular music that you’re also making.

If I was to be honest with myself I think that underneath it all, at least for me personally, was just a fear that perhaps I really couldn’t create popular music… I was so focused on innovating all the time… But innovating is easy. you’re not going up against anyone when you’re always innovating. You’re only competing with yourself. Against whatever YOU consider your last great work of art. And that’s a really groovy place to be. Honestly that’s the world I’d like to live in as an artist ALL the time… But I also recognize the benefits of competing for commercial viability too. They both have their merits. It’s fun to popular and famous and successful and have money. And the competitive nature of it compels us to higher levels of greatness.

In any case, after all I’ve been through as an artist over the last ten years, all the hard work to create great works of art that were also somehow commercial and popular, listening back to this simple yet profoundly complex and beautiful Broken Spectacles album Aftermath really got me. I haven’t cried like that in years. Decades. That was a different world back then. We hadn’t a care. We were happy to be one of the “most popular local bands in our town”. That seemed like a big deal at the time. Our eyes and our dreams were bigger than our potential perhaps, or bigger than our willingness to stretch and grow…. I was happy to hear what we had created back then. To hear how incredibly good and ambitious it was. Nope, it would never yield the kind of commercial success we’ve experienced over the last ten years as Ed Hale and the Transcendence. It would never be played on commercial radio stations. But we were very very proud. We walked around like roosters on ‘roids, heads cocked high. And for good reason. We were fucking great and we knew it. Just not commercially successful great. But there’s something to be said about that kind of attitude.

Unlike a lot of artists in popular music, I personally have no big dream to dominate in the realm of most chart toppers or most #1 records or hit albums, nor that nagging fear that I am losing my grip as a key player in the pop world who is always on the Hot 100 with a Top 40 song. I see that kind of success and the money from it as a tool that can be used to allow me to do both: create popular hit music AND more eccentric and innovative works of art. THAT is where my dreams and fantasies of domination lay. How deep, how relevant, how innovative, how prolific, how intelligent, how thought provoking, how moving, how much new ground can I break… That’s what keeps me up at night and gets me up in the morning. Not the stats or the numbers. But the hearts and souls and minds that are deeply moved, called to act. Like that. So it’s a balancing act. These next six to twelve months, recording these new albums… It’s going to be fun. Tricky, but in a fun way.

Alright, I’m out. 4800 words with no break. My fingers are killing me. More on this topic later for sure.

Implementing Plan B – Take Two

December 29, 2012

It’s time to implement Plan B. But first a little background…

Yesterday I spent a little over an hour studying Farsi using Rosetta Stone. Though I am constantly learning the language from being married to Princess Little Tree now, this was the first time I had opened my Rosetta Stone Farsi pack in almost two years. One would think that once a purchase that expensive is made there would be no stopping you from making full use of it. But such is human nature. In business it is common knowledge that nearly 90% of all purchases are impulse buys (all except the very basic necessities) — which makes it easy to sell almost anything to anyone (this is the key to success in sales); and furthermore that most people do not purchase things to use them half as much as they purchase them for the initial rush they get out of the purchasing process (another key to success in sales). Another well known fact in the world of business, sales and consumerism studies is that less than 10% of people who purchase any kind of non-essential luxury items, these might could include educational or improvement courses, books, magazine subscriptions, timeshare resorts, clothes and shoes, etc, actually use the items purchased; less than 1% make use of them more than once. No matter how much they spend. The cost of the item is never a factor.

I heard these statistics early on in life and made a promise to myself that I would never fall into that 99% group who buy things and never use them. I’ve purchased every course Anthony Robbins has ever released (and countless others) and completed every course several times from start to finish. Some of those babies are 30 day courses. Not necessarily easy. At the age of 25 I set out to learn how to speak and understand as many languages as I could until I felt satisfied. When pressed, I consider the practical application of how many would be truly necessary or useful and a rough estimate for me personally usually comes to about ten when I consider every language that I currently am aware of and how many I have a desire to learn. As many already know (this is contextual), presently I am moderately proficient in five, including my native English. The reason? Because once I decide to take on learning a new language I continue with all of the steps in the system I designed many years ago to learn any foreign language proficiently. It’s a simple system, but contains many steps, and usually take about one solid year, or two. It isn’t easy. But I enjoy it. And that’s what really counts.

People who say they “can speak a foreign language” and then only know a few words is one of the few things I find un-pleasurable in my fellow human brethren. There is also that pesky habit some people have of jumping in at any opportunity they get when a foreign language is mentioned in casual conversation among a group of people just to announce that they “used to be able to speak that language” or “lived in that country and spoke that language” but they’ve “since forgotten it all now”. Hey, we all have our pet peeves. That just happens to be one of mine. The reason I bring it up is because having learned these statistics about impulse consumerism early in life, I have always made it a habit to master as much of everything I set out to do, or at the very least attempt to. Unless upon further examination I decide to abort the mission because it no longer interests me or I decide it to be no longer useful. With learning foreign languages, once I established that goal, I created an efficient system with numerous steps based on research and studying the various methods that people have used throughout history. That system I have already written about and mapped out here in the Diaries. No need to go into it again here. But suffice it to say, it takes a lot of commitment, dedication, effort and hours; as anyone who has pursued the same goal can corroborate. At times in the past I have found it excruciatingly tedious to keep on once I commit. But I do it anyway.

That is until the last two years. I have failed miserably in my quest to learn Farsi. I decided and committed to learning Farsi seven years ago. It is the first foreign language I ventured to learn that did not use what we commonly call the English alphabet. I put a few years into learning Hebrew as well, but never approached it wholeheartedly using my system. With Farsi, the process was going to be much more difficult than any other language I have attempted to learn thus far. Learning to speak and understand it is one thing. Learning to read and write in it is another entirely. The former being my goal, not the latter.

Purchasing the Farsi set of language packs through Rosetta Stone I felt would offer considerable help in my goal — normally I use Pimsleur’s system in terms of the audio portion of it. I also make sure to take at least one-hundred and twenty hours in sit down classes with a teacher. That’s how I usually begin. (Again, I’ve already written about all of this in prior posts years ago.) Being married to Princess Little Tree enables me to get the classes portion in on a 24/7/365 basis. And for the last seven years I have been attempting to slowly learn the language through audio and books and studying as I always do. But over the last three years I have fallen behind in many different pursuits I have committed to. Not just in my goal to learn Farsi. I almost completely stopped writing any and all the books I have been working on over the last twenty years. I stopped blogging daily in the Transcendence Diaries. I stopped going to the gym and working out. I don’t even check email anymore. Which people still find impossible to believe. But on and on it goes.

I have been pondering this odd shift in my behavior a lot over the last few months. Wondering why all of a sudden I became such a muggle, or slug, or buffer… terms that perhaps only a few might be familiar with. In other words, where the hell did my relentless ability to commit and follow-through beyond normal-human go? Well for one thing I got married. And in the process I not only adopted a wife and all the accompanying responsibilities that go with that, but two step daughters as well; in addition to the fact that I have way too many jobs and twice as many hobbies. We’ve also been living bi-coastally for three years (something I don’t recommend unless you have the money to afford a decent sized full time staff to help with the sheer giant sized quantity of extra work involved in that sort of lifestyle), and along with all of that we’ve been actively trying to have children of our own.

Making babies may be easy for some, especially when you’re young, which is part of the problem with the rampant pandemic of unwanted pregnancies among the world’s young people. But as women get older it becomes more and more difficult to accomplish such a seemingly natural task. Without getting too personal (one of the reasons I have not been regularly posting in the Transcendence Diaries on a daily basis as I used to do since I started it in 2002), let me just say that baby making turned into a full time job for us very soon after we made the decision to start our own family; it has included numerous doctors all over the country, more “procedures” than I can count, and more heartbreak than anyone should permit themselves to endure in one lifetime. Needless to say we have still not achieved success in our quest to have beaucoup offspring, but we’ve also not given up. I am still very confident that one day we will be proud parents and grandparents of a large brood of little Ambassadors and Little Trees.

To get back to the point, I can now clearly see and understand why I have fallen behind in so many of the things that in times past used to be daily routine for me, such as blogging, writing, exercising and learning foreign languages. But that’s just the “reason”. Discovering the potential reason for something does not necessarily mean that one has to succumb to it. For me personally this just might be one of the single most important keys to success that I have learned. There may be a very good and valid reason why we are not able to do something; but that doesn’t mean that we have to succumb to the limitations of that reason. We may just need to re-engineer our systems and shift a few things around.

Welcome to Plan B. Once I felt comfortable that I had discovered the real foundational reasons behind my sudden lack of being able to accomplish as much as I was used to in the past, i.e. I inadvertently took on a variety of numerous other new duties and responsibilities, I spent the last two months analyzing what possible solutions there might be available to me to still be able to maintain my current lifestyle and all of its itinerant jobs and duties AND add the usual number of extracurricular activities I am normally accustomed to being able to accomplish. I’ve been thinking about the year I spent in military school. Greenwich Military Academy (not the real name for obvious reasons) taught me plenty. The majority of the stories and lessons from those days are in The Adventures of Fishy book. That one, though it was the very first book I started, is presently in position number 5 or 6 on the conveyor belt in terms of completing and releasing the books. For multiple reasons. Just an fyi for me as well as you whoever you are.

The aspect of military school that I have found most useful over the last few months in attempting to find a solution to my current quandary was how regimented and disciplined every moment of every day was. We may have had a few hours off on Sundays; I don’t remember now. But other than that, from 5 am all the way through till lights out at 10 pm during the other six days of the week, every single minute of every single hour was accounted for with a very set and specific task or duty. No, it did not suit the lifestyle of an artistic personality type such as mine, hence my only spending a year there; but it did show me the potential for how much we could accomplish in a day if we set our minds to it or were forced to. In my current case, I both desire to and thus have set my mind to it, AND am being forced to, for a variety of reasons. Not the least of which is because if I don’t, I am never going to continue to grow into the person I have always hoped I would be and always known I could be. This is a change that needs to be implemented.

From my current vantage point, how I see it is that I need to made a conscious decision what my top priorities are both short and long term and set aside time to partake in activities that will lead me towards achieving those goals on a regular basis, either daily, weekly, bi-weekly, three times a week perhaps, etc. We spend much of our time during each day doing things that are not necessary to our general advancement, nor that lead us towards any specific goal. Casual conversations. Group dynamic activities for the sake of the group. Herd activities so to speak. Some of it is sheer laziness. Some of it is resistance to change; or resistance to the seeming enormity of a project, i.e a project seems so damn big that we don’t see how we’ll ever complete it, so we never start it; or perhaps resistance to learning or attempting something new that we’ve never done before. There are a variety of reasons why we do things that don’t serve our bigger picture goals, or don’t do things that would. The key is to just START. Start to make the change.

For me that change is two-fold: limiting the amount of time I spend doing things that do not serve, and this is most easily accomplished by filling our time up with doing things that do serve. If as soon as I wake up each day I jump right into 30 to 60 minutes of studying Farsi, I will eliminate the usual hour or so I spend drinking coffee and chatting or checking social networks etc. From there a work out. Then a shower. Then work. People have no idea how much work-work is now involved in being a rockstar/recording artist. It isn’t like the old days, all sex drugs and rock’n’roll. Lord knows I wish it were. But it just isn’t. Our job has changed tremendously. There is a huge amount of what one might call office work involved in the job now. There is still every bit the need for song writing, practicing your instrument, recording, rehearsing with the band, fashion and styling, making music videos, album production, schmoozing marketing and promotion, etc. etc. There are just a boatload of other jobs and duties that have been added to our plate.

Let us say we spend the better part of the work day — post morning activities — doing actual work-work. We can then take a break. For me a break, preferably in the form of a 30 minute nap, is imperative to my mental and emotional sanity. No sense in fighting it. If I push my way through, by jacking myself up on something to minimize the tired feeling, I still end up feeling like a nervous wreck by 6 or 7 pm. So I have come to honor my own body’s need for dark quiet time to do nothing but relax and recharge.

Just after break time, we jump to either a few hours of writing and working on one of the books, or blogging. Then a limited amount of family quality time. Limited being the operating word there. The need for quality family time is essential when you’re an active member of a healthy functioning family. There’s no getting around it. Dinner time and an hour or two after that should suffice. But if the fam wants to watch Glee or X-Factor, there should be absolutely no reason you (or I in this case) should feel obligated to do so too. It’s an activity that does not serve. Perhaps the key is to make the family time we do spend with our loved ones as fulfilling and high quality as possible, limiting the hours, but not the quality. That still leaves plenty of hours left in the evening for studying and learning, reading or watching things that are both enjoyable and educational. If you dig learning, then anything educational is going to be enjoyable anyway. So that part is easy. And then once everyone goes to bed I find to be the best time to blog and/or write. That midnight to six am time period when all is quiet and the whole world is covered in darkness.

Today is my second day on this new schedule. I am still working it out, working the kinks out. I spent a bit too much time learning Farsi and a bit too much time on this blog post. But that’s okay. The key is that Plan B has officially started. Time for a work out and shower. I’ll keep you posted.

Seeking a Silver Lining

December 27, 2012

It took a while but it finally happened. IT happened. Maybe it’s a good thing… When it happens to us it often hurts… So we resist it. We often label it “bad” and thus put it off, or even when it does happen we continue to label it bad, which then prevents us from seeing the good in it. A little backstory…

Last night we saw the film Silver Linings Playbook. I had no idea what the film was about, but was sucked in from the very first minute. See it. It’s better than good. Due to this new trend of infinite potential greatness in art all happening simultaneously, I found it easy to exclaim that Silver Linings was the best movie of the year, beating out even Speilberg’s Lincoln, before settling back down into recognizing that we are now in an age when it’s possible for there to be MANY “best movies of the year” all at the same time.

[This is a fairly new and exciting trend, due to many factors; globalization being one, another being the continued decline of the cost of the tools and technologies of all the various fields of art. Whether filmmaking or music making or just about anything else, the cost of entering, the entry fee, has come down to a price point making it possible for anyone to make a movie or an album or whatever else the heart and mind can imagine. It’s one of the Signatures of the Personal Expression Age and has both good and bad ramifications. It’s not the purpose of this particular post, but in the book I’ve been working on for the last six years, we elaborate on it in much more detail. Suffice it to say that this Signature has created a world where there is more “Best Of the Year” projects being released simultaneously than any one consumer could possibly take in — unless you make being a consumer of art your career.]

So towards the end of the film, during the end credits roll actually, we hear this song, an amazing song, an incredible song, sounded like the Stone, or the Faces, maybe Chris Robinson’s new band. As always I waited till the very end of the movie to see who the artist was. It turned out to be a group called Alabama Shakes. The song was called “Always Alright.” I took a note of it in my phone in the usual file where I note music that I plan on purchasing later. The film ended. We exited the theatre, talking idly about how great the film was, how believable, how real, how moving; our dialogue occasionally interspersed with my excited exclamations of “how fucking great that song was, wow!”

In the men’s room a few minutes later I was still thinking about that song, fantasizing about that moment when I would be able to go home and buy it and listen to it over and over. And then it hit me, just standing there in front of the urinal. I didn’t need to wait till I got home. I could pull out my phone right there while still taking a piss and download the song using iTunes and listen to it immediately. So i reached into my pocket to grab my phone. But then another realization. I didn’t need to go to iTunes. I could probably just go to YouTube and do a Search for it. So i did. Sure enough, ten to twenty different versions of this particular songs came up and I began to listen to each one until I found the one I was looking for. (I never did. Instead I listened to a few live versions of the song, never finding the actual recording of the song itself.) But that was enough. I got my fill of it. At least for the moment.

When we got in the car to drive home, I took it further and plugged my phone into a little quarter inch jack we’ve rigged into our car stereo so we can listen to our iPods and iPhones through the car’s stereo system. I didn’t think much about this experience truth be told. For whatever reason, IT didn’t happen then. But it did this morning.

This morning I woke up with the song “This Guys’s in Love with You”, the Herb Albert version, in my head while I was dreaming. With eyes still closed I fumbled my hands around the bed seeking my phone so I could check my iTunes library to see if i had already downloaded the song. I wanted to hear it. Right then and there, before I woke up fully and the day started. And THAT’S when IT hit me. I didn’t need to check my iTunes library to listen to the song. Who cares if i had already downloaded the song. All i had to do was go to YouTube. Sure enough, there it was. In hundreds of different forms, uploaded by hundreds of different people. Within less than a minute I was listening to this haunting and beautiful Burt Bacharach song over and over again and not paying a dime for it. And THIS is when it really hit me.

For the last six months I have been struggling like a mother fucker to make ends meet for my family. My last big hit was in May of this year. The checks from sales and royalty checks roll in eventually and that’s always a great thing. But they aren’t what they used to be. Not even close. Something has changed. Many things have changed. You can have a song that goes to #1 in cities all over America and even jump up into the Top 30 on Billboard and still not be able to support yourself as a working musician. It’s not something we talk about. Call it denial. No one wants to talk about it. But it’s happening. Access to music has become so easy for all of us as consumers that it’s become impossible for those of us who make music for a living to make an actual living at it. It’s no one’s fault per se. It’s just the way the industry has shifted.

Sure we make money every time someone downloads one of our songs or albums. We do. And it’s good money. If it’s done in the traditional legal and above board fashion, ala going through amazon.com or iTunes, we get paid for that. So the first thing is just to continue to encourage friends and fans to buy our songs and albums. Because that is still our primary means of making a living. But this morning I watched it happen with my own eyes. Not as a working musician, but as a consumer and lover of music. I just wanted my fix in that moment of this song. And I went to the fastest way i knew how to get it. YouTube. And the sad truth of the matter is that we as artists don’t get paid when people listen to our music on YouTube. It doesn’t matter that “Gangam Style” has become the most viewed video on YouTube in terms of the artist making any money from it. He doesn’t. It might feel good. And yes, surely it leads to other potential money making opportunities. Maybe. But the act itself does not make any money. Nor did it help Herb Alpert or Burt Bacharach when I listened to “This Guy’s in Love With You” ten times in a row this morning on YouTube. Hell, I even Shared the song on Facebook and Twitter to spread the joy with my friends and fans. And that led to more people listening to the song on YouTube. For free.

And that’s the operating word now in our industry. Free. People that like having easy access to music and listening to music for free will jump at this point in the discussion to point out that artists DO get paid if people listen to our music on Pandora or Spotify. But let’s yank that cat out of the bag once and for all so the whole world can feel the shock and pain of it as much as we who make the music do. You ever wonder how much we get paid each time someone listens to one of our songs on Pandora or Spotify? It looks like this: $00.0001. That’s what it looks like. On the statements we receive each month or quarter from the various different companies who collect and distribute the data and money to us. Hundreds of pages comprise these statements. And we do get to see each and every time someone listens to (streams) or downloads one of our songs or albums.

Sometimes it’s in the millions. Or even tens of millions. “Scene in San Francisco” has been streamed more times than I can count at this point. But at that rate of pay, it amounts to less than enough to make your mortgage payment. Which is why most working musicians rent. And worse, that’s ONLY if people are listening through very firmly established music services, like MOG or turntable.fm or Spotify or Pandora. Most of the places people go online to listen to music, like YouTube for example, don’t offer a way for the artist to make even one-one-hundredth of a cent from that experience. Not a penny. Not half a penny. Not a tenth or even a hundredth of a penny. Zero. Combine that with the fact that most people have stopped buying music — why WOULD you BUY music when you can listen to it for free anytime you want to from a device that is literally in your hands 23 out of every 24 hours in a day? — and what you end up with is an industry where 99% of the people working in it aren’t able to make a living from it.

This was a huge realization for me this morning. For months I have been struggling to decide what to do about this. I have never seen anything as heart breaking as my poor new wife crying her eyes out in fear that we are already broke and penniless because my well ran dry so fast after having two Top 30 hits this year. I’ve never seen anyone so frightened. “I’m not used to this like you are,” she scream-mumbled in between big sobs and moans… “What are we going to do???” she asked me. I had no answer. Only, “I’ll think of something honey. I promise. Our new album just came out. We’ll get money from the sales of that.”

But i knew I was kidding myself, being delusional. Those days of big sales numbers from a new album release for most of us started drying up in ’05. Sooner than that for some people. Adele’s last album, 21, just topped the 10 million mark I believe, making it one of the few albums in decades to sell that many. Albums that now sell a million, what we call Platinum, are few and far between. It’s a small earthquake in our industry when it happens. Selling half a million, what we call Gold, happen a bit more, but we are talking about maybe five to ten artists a year now. For the most part, the large majority of working music makers sell in the thousands. The last stat I read was disarmingly sad and sobering. It showed that out of the 5,000 albums a month that are released each year, less than one-thousand of them sell a thousand copies or more. Most of those are in the classical music genre. That’s 60,000 albums a year that get released, with less than 1000 of them selling even one-thousand copies. Don’t bother doing the math. It’s so far below the poverty line that it isn’t even worth considering how much those artists make. It certainly isn’t enough to support a family.

For me the big realization happened towards the end of this year. We were convinced that with all the hype and sales and radio airplay and Billboard hit making that we were doing earlier in the year that it would lead to bigger and better things, i.e. more money. At least enough to live comfortably. Or live, period. But it happened fast. The money comes and the money goes. Whatever you make usually goes right back into either making more music or marketing and promoting the music you’ve already made in an attempt to reach more people and make a bigger splash. It’s throwing money after money is what it is. It used to work. And for a very few it still does. But they’re few and far between.

We are supposed to make money every time our songs get played on the radio. This is true. So with a song like “Scene in San Francisco” where it received tens of thousands of spins on radio stations all over America and eventually the world, you would think we would have received tens of thousands of dollars from it. But it doesn’t work that way. There are three companies in the entire world that collect all that money for every musician on planet earth. ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. And they collect hundreds of billions of dollars each year from our music being played on the radio. But their systems are crooked. They don’t pay per spin. They claim to have a proprietary system that they can’t reveal to anyone. Not even Congress, who has been breathing down their backs for nearly a century to try to get them to conduct a more honest and transparent business.

So big hit or not, two big hits or not, what ASCAP wanted to pay me personally came to less than $3,000. I went into a bloody apoplectic seizure when I found out. See, it isn’t that they didn’t collect the money. They collected the money alright. From every single radio station in America and beyond they collect plenty of money. And it’s not that they cannot see how many times each song has been played. They can. The system is all computerized now. It’s easy to discover how many millions of times your song has been played on radio each year. That’s not the issue. The issue is that they “cannot reveal their proprietary system” to the artists that shows how they calculate how much money they are going to pay out for all your radio spins. It’s a fucking nightmare. They’re the mafia of the music industry. Pirates. Raking in huge sums of money on behalf of every working musician in the world with no intention of paying it out.

That’s radio airplay. Sales is a different matter. Coldplay’s record label spent five million dollars just on promotion of their last album (the one before this latest one) in their attempt to get the sales they needed to pay for the recording of the album. I never bothered to check to see if they made the money back. I just couldn’t believe that they spent five million dollars on marketing and promotion alone. It was an astounding figure. A huge risk. But for a very established act.

Most artists don’t have that kind of established reputation in the industry, nor access to a record label with enough liquidity to be able to afford to do something like that. For their last album, just a few short years had gone by, but by this point their record label had gone bankrupt, gotten divided up and all the little pieces sold off to a variety of different other players, and so the money for marketing and promotion wasn’t there. Instead of throwing five million dollars around for marketing and promotion, they chose a different path. They teamed up with Google Music and put the new album up for sale for .99 cents to try to market it. They sold an 250,000 units through that stunt. Which was considerably more than they had sold up until that point. And that’s a huge artist.

But again do the math. If the artist only receives ten percent of the net proceeds…. Yikes. Split that 25 grand four ways if you’re in a band and you better be married to Gwyneth Paltrow, because you aren’t eating if you aren’t. Personally speaking, I’m not. So I need to come up with a different plan of action to make a living and support my family. And fast. It doesn’t mean I don’t love making music. I do. I’ve already written a few thousand songs. So for me the whole mission is to just try to record and release as many of the songs I’ve written over the last thirty years as I can before I die. The fans I do have deserve it. I know that. And I deserve it. I want to. There is nothing more painful than having thousands of songs sitting in notebooks unrecorded. Nothing I can think of. At least not for an artist. But I also need to make a living.

After this morning’s experience, after watching how easy it was for me, me, a working musician myself, someone who has always resisted the trends of accessing music or free for fear it might jeopardize the livelihood of the musicians I love the most, even I found myself taking advantage of this new system and simply heading to YouTube to spin a few songs I love five to ten times, knowing full well that the men and women who created that music that I love so much wouldn’t make a cent from it. It’s just not the same industry anymore. For all of us. Yes, something CAN be done about it. YouTube could enforce a law that ALL music that gets uploaded to their servers MUST go through a database that tracks the airplay, the spins, the views, that somehow cycles back to the musicians themselves. But who knows when that will happen.

In the meantime, the Ambassador is going to have to find another way to make a living that permits me to still be able to make music at the same time. It won’t be easy. The trick with being a musician is that every cent you make from whatever it is you do you want to take all that money and put it back into recording and production and marketing more music. So one needs a job that pays you twice as much as you need to live. Either that or you starve as you spend every cent you make from your job on making music. I did that all through my teens and twenties. As everyone already knows. You get used to living without a car or a phone or electricity or even food. Your teeth fall out one by one because you can’t afford to go to doctors or dentists. But you’re making music. You’re fulfilling your life’s purpose. You’re happy. You have fans who love what you do and it makes you happy thinking about how your music makes them happy.

But things are different now. And I know it. I finally took the big leap I had both dreaded and wished for my entire life. I got married. I have a wife that I love. I have step daughters that I love. We’ve been trying to have children of our own for years. Eventually we’ll achieve that goal, either naturally or through adoption (which I have started to see only recently is a very cool thing). And children are expensive. I have to stop trying to change the music industry to go back to the way it used to be. I also have to stop living in denial. I either need a HUGE break, as in times past, one that propels me to a place where a backflip into poverty once more could never happen again; or I have to invent or devise or discover some new way to make a fortune from continuing to make music for a living.

Or i need to choose another way entirely to support myself and the family. I’ve been meditating and praying about it incessantly. And miraculously money has been flying in from all over the place. Loads of it. So as we gratefully and graciously have been able to pay the bills as of late all of a sudden, I’ve been scrambling to try to figure out what the hell I’m going to do. Perhaps that big break will come. Perhaps it won’t. Maybe the industry will change and musicians will begin to get compensated commensurate with how much their music is enjoyed. But until then… I cannot help but feel that somewhere around the bend is this silver lining. There always is. Perhaps this waking up and recognizing how the music business really is now was a good thing, even though it felt like a bad thing. Perhaps it’s one step closer. I hope so.

America’s Telling Untold History

December 12, 2012

A slow starter, Oliver Stone’s 12 part Showtime series entitled The Untold History of The United States should nonetheless be mandatory viewing for all American citizens young and old, especially those who enthusiastically wave patriotic flags right or left, or speak of American exceptionalsim.

When cast under a bright truthful light, the only thing exceptional about the last sixty years of America’s history is its brazen imperialistic tendencies and broad sweeping deceptions in order to support dictatorships around the globe for its own heartless self interests.

By series installment 5, Stone and crew are waist deep in uncovering and revealing one of the cruelest ruthless and deceptive empires the world has ever known. For history buffs there may not be truckloads of unknown facts to be found, but compiled into one tightly knit narrative, the series does what it ostensibly sets out to do succinctly and more than adequately. It reveals a nation sheepled with citizens so blind to the true intentions and evil machinations of it’s own government that their very history can indeed be said to be untold — no matter how much media access and “news” they’re surrounded and suffocated by.

Anyone with an ounce of nationalistic pride or love of country will find themselves feeling shocked and embittered, especially considering that the series, being limited by time constraints, only touches the surface of some of the most egregious crimes of the 20th century perpetrated by the world’s alleged “global leader of freedom and democracy.” The looming question boiling through every hot-blooded American who dares to watch the entire 12 part series is surely to be “what now can be done to save our once great democratic republic?” and further “how can we ever make amends to the rest of the world for the atrocities committed in our names and right under our noses over the last sixty years?”

Facts and Anomalies Regarding the Speed of Light

December 7, 2012

– Light travels at a speed of 186,000 miles per second — it circles the earth 7 times in one second. Explains thunder following lightening by a few seconds. A light year is 6 trillion miles (6,000,000,000,000), the distance light travels in one year.

– Because light does not travel instantaneously but st a precise constant we can ascertain how old a star or galaxy is or was when we are looking at it based on how far away it is. Allowing us to look far back into the past. We see the crab nebula as it was 6500 years ago. The galactic core of our own milky way galaxy 26,000 years ago. The Andromeda Galaxy our closest neighbor 2.5 million years ago. In other words we have no idea what these objects look like NOW. Only what they looked like back then. Because of how long it takes light to travel. Its a catch 22. Though it’s fast, the speed of light still limits our ability to see things in the universe as they actually appear now.

– Moving at the light speed time slows down time compared to regular earth speed. So a person ages much slower if traveling at rhe speed lf light. And what may seem like four days to a light speed traveler may indeed be 40 years to someone on earth. But the closer to light speed we travel the more mass is needed to get to that energy till the mass reached is infinite– making it impossible.

– Two alternatives have been posed. One would be creating a worm hole by zapping a large amount of energy using lasers into an exact point in space to break a hole in it and then going to a diff place in the universe. Also we may be able to travel at warp drive– using the warping of space-time, space expanded behind the ship and contracted in front of it, creating a bubble around the ship propelling it faster than the speed of light in order to get to remote places in far away space.

– Communication between earth and Neil Armstrong on the moon took 2.6 seconds between each transmission because it takes the radio signals traveling at the speed of light 1.3 seconds between earth and the moon. – Light from the sun takes more than 8 minutes to reach earth. – 44 minutes for the probes that are exploring Mars. -2 hours to talk to the Cassini probe at Saturn. -Over 29 hours to talk to voyager 1 now heading out of the solar system which is 10 billion miles away.

– We’ve recently learned that Light is not in fact the fastest thing in the universe. Space now is. Because we know that space itself is expanding, space in the outermost reaches of the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light. Mind boggling.

– Our light horizon or limit — the farthest

we can see light in the universe due to how far things r that we can not see the light of is 13.5 billion light years. So that’s the farthest we can see in the universe though it might be bigger than that. Way bigger.

– In fact some theorize that the universe may be ten to one hundred times larger than current estimates; other theories postulate that there may be more than one universe, that the current model that we now believe we live in may be just one out of many. The simple truth of the matter is that due to our current technological limitations in seeing beyond light that is too far away from the earth for us to ever see, no matter how old it may be, at present we can never know how large the universe really is nor have a definitive knowledge of how many other stars or galaxies may exist in the universe besides the ones we are already aware of.

What the Mayans Are Saying Today About 2012

December 1, 2012

Yes there are still Mayans living and breathing among us. And Mayan elders too. Most of us have heard by now that “ancient Mayan calendars predict that the world will end on December 21st 2012″. That’s not too far off now. In fact it’s right around the corner. Perhaps we should think twice before we bother heading out to buy this year’s Christmas tree.

I’ve come to trust my intuition now as much as my ability to eat or breathe. The proper term in the paranormal science community for what I’m specifically referring to here in relation to being able to feel or know something ahead of time is called precognition; but I prefer the word intuition because as a quasi sixth sense that all of us are born with, intuition can readily account for more than just precognition. It can also serve to refer to an all encompassing sense that implies all the other so called paranormal abilities scientists have observed in sentient beings: telepathy (or mind reading), clairvoyance, ESP, psychicism, remote viewing, etc. along with precognition (or future telling to be precise). One day science will discover the biological (and perhaps cosmological) mechanisms behind these heretofore labeled “paranormal” abilities of humankind and, as with all things science dissects to the point of discovery, everyone will eventually take these abilities for granted as natural extensions of our innate potential and realize that there is nothing “paranormal” about them at all.

[For reference: though there are literally thousands of scientific studies and clinical trials being conducted all over the world on a daily basis by psychologists studying the paranormal and these abilities, it’s the physicists who have made the most progress in our endeavor to learn just how and why they function — thus the cosmological cause mentioned above. In a nutshell these mysterious abilities observed in millions of people throughout recorded history are easily possible based on a combination of several radically new theories and discoveries like super string theory — the idea that all matter is actually sub-atomically comprised of energy, not matter, and the fact that space is not empty as believed before but in itself is actually a form of matter. As in: if the stuff of you and me is made up of the same stuff that makes up what we now see as empty space then we are not separate from anyone or anything, even if hundreds of miles away. Throw in quantum entanglement theory, and then the fact that thoughts travel faster than the speed of light — combined with relativity theory, and before you know it it becomes almost obvious that all of these so called paranormal abilities of humankind are not only plausible but should be readily available to any and every one who lives and breathes on planet earth or anywhere else in the universe.]

OK then so where were we… Oh right, intuition and the end of the world. We now have a sound reference point for what one might mean when using the term intuition. Which is important in this context, speaking of what we might expect in the coming weeks leading up to the proposed end of the world. I believe that as a whole we as a species can feel the general vibration of our present moment, whether it is calm or tense for example — just as a pack of antelope can feel when there is a predator nearby, and just beyond the present moment as well. How far ‘past’ the present moment — or into the future — one can feel or see we can say is a measure of how advanced their sense of intuition is. Collectively this sense is heightened, compared to any one being; this is an idea that science has proved through the study of pack theory, flocks of birds or schools of fish, etc.

This is an important point to consider, because as a collective species for all our recent obsessing with the end of the world, the end of days, the rapture, doomsday predictions, preppers, etc. there is still a sense that most of humanity does not really believe that our world and our lives on planet earth are going to end any time soon. Intuitively I sincerely do not believe it myself. And I’ve spent a considerable amount of time feeling into it. But for the life of me i just do not have a sense that anything earth shattering (forgive the pun) will transpire on December 21st of this year. And for all the hype and money being made exploiting society’s recent obsession with the subject I get the sense that most people feel the same way.

There is certainly cause for alarm; social and political unrest all over the globe, climate changes that have created a new more dangerous normal in the earth’s weather patterns. But one could easily point to any number of other moments in recorded history where conditions on earth were much more intense and severe. Take the plague as just one instance.

One thing that has always puzzled me about the whole Mayan calendar prediction of the end of the world theory is that the idea is always being proposed by non-Mayans, pseudo scientists and new age preacher profiteer types. Since direct descendants of the Mayan people still exist, why not ask some of them what they think rather than some white guy living in a bunker in the middle of nowhereville Nebraska who happens to run an end of the world website? In the article below, that’s precisely what someone did. The results unfortunately for those who have already packed their bags for the afterlife are not supportive of this en of the world theory. But they are still interesting. Hence my posting the link below.

One note about what these “elders” speak of that will help: they are not scientists. And based on the tone and tenor of their ideas it is apparent that they are probably not up on the latest discoveries of modern Western science. When they speak of “ether” or spirit it may be tempting to dismiss their whole ideology as a bunch of old fashioned pseudo-spiritual mumbo-jumbo. But before we do we must remind ourselves that our current science supports what they are speaking about. We just happen to use different words and terminology. We’ve already discussed that we now believe that the space around us is not actually empty nor made of nothing as it appears. This is a huge discovery, bigger in scope and implication than can be explored here. There are also the recent discoveries of dark matter and anti-matter to contend with. Again, very mathematically and scientifically real phenomena and equally mind boggling and impactfull in their implications. With these ideas in mind the article below takes on a more relevant and viable nature. The key to getting the most out of it is to apply modern science to the ideas being presented; to recognize that the WAY they are saying things may not sound very scientifically rational or plausible, but that doesn’t make it not so. It just makes it a set of ideas presented in a more simple, child like or primitive non-scientific format that could be better understood and believed by Westerners, and easily verified by scientific facts, if transposed into modern scientific jargon. Perhaps not all of it. Not every sentence. But a good portion of it. Try reading the general ideas through a more scientific filter in real time as you read it.

Of course no one has a monopoly on “what’s going to happen next” in the world. If we ever met someone who did we’d quickly call them God and kill them I suspect. So the study and exploration continues. And hopefully, if intuition serves, we all have plenty of time left for that.

What Do the Mayans Say About The End of the World Today:

http://www.seri-worldwide.org/id435.html

To Moliere or Not to Moliere, That is the Question

December 1, 2012

Last Screening: Moliere

A French film from a few years ago. A period piece, full costume and all. If you’re already a fan of the great French playwright and actor, then this is a gimme. If you love dry witty 17th Century salon repartee’ and double entendre — where one’s brain garnered more merit in society than mere beauty, or Shakespearean comedy’s twists and turns then you’ll easily find this film a feast for your ears as well as eyes.

For me it was a bittersweet experience throughout. A dualistic reaction swirled within me, on the one hand pure enjoyment as an observer, and on the other a subtle gnawing at my insides by the loss of the libertine lifestyle i so enjoyed as a single man playing the part of artist above all else in a free world. I am not one to believe in platitudes, let alone recite them, but there is something to ponder about the idea that for every path toward one form of happiness another must be forsaken. Though I do not wholeheartedly believe it to be true, I get the feeling that it’s an idea with merit.

The irony seeps so heavy from even these very thoughts like maple from a sapling, for it is true, even here, in these Diaries where I have spent more than ten years pouring out every thought and feeling I’ve ever had — that I now feel a strong reluctance to do so any longer. Talk about double entendre. This grand irony perching its head above ground through the very format I am using to explore it. Truth be told this has been the case for a few years now. Being married it is nearly impossible. More than that, it would be unfit, unfair, inappropriate. And that’s just the matter of these Diaries. I now understand why as a writer, as artists, we must find other ways to get our truths across without such blatancy that these Diary posts once afforded me. The truths that we are compelled to communicate, to let out, to unleash, still exist; they are in that regard existential. It is an existential need, as vital to the living organism of artistry within as blood or clean air is to the body that houses it.

So rather than lay it bare out on the line as was once so easy here, these Diaries have had to transform into a more innocuous form of prose, less revealing, less personal, hopefully no less engaging or powerful; but more worldly and culturally relevant. The real meat of the personal nature of things must be delivered through other means artistic, such as song or works of fiction or poetry. And indeed we are already in the process of that. It will obviously not be as readily or easily available for consumption as the Diaries once were, but I don’t believe that I am capable of ridding myself of the need to let loose with the truths that illuminate our life while here, the very stuff that gives us cause to remain here, any more than I am capable of living without food or water.

There is much to be gained from a life well contented in marriage and family. More so at least for me than I believe I would have gleaned from continuing the life of a bachelor any longer. But perhaps I say that only because I allowed myself decades to enjoy bachelorhood, an enjoyment I would recommend anyone partake with gusto and all their will and might and relish wholeheartedly before succumbing to that next stage of nuptials and commitment, fidelity and trust beyond measure with another. But if one thinks that they can at the same time walk through the world and among the masses naked open and sincere, baring all and more, and still keep said marriage content, they are kidding themselves. It It would be a cruel practice and require a slow letting go of all respect to even attempt. One that would quickly suck the love out of the heart of the other and leave in its place a profound bitterness.

Think Woody Allen and how he never stopped to consider how his showing his cards to the entire world, every nuanced passing whim of his heart and mind, with no regard for his girlfriends or wives. The joke I always observed was that if you are married to Woody Allen and find him uncommunicative, wondering how he feels about you, don’t ask him, just watch his next movie. He’s telling you how he feels right there. He just never possessed the courage, nor respect or chivalry, to tell you himself and in person. I observed this heartless cruelty in the lives of artists since I was a boy, a cold willingness to put their art above the feelings and trust of their lovers. And for a long time, before I matured, I was under the illusion that this was just a necessary component of being a true artist, a truly great artist. But as with many things we play with in our imagination as children this was an illusion, and an unnecessary one.

Any one who uses art or being an artist to treat those who love and trust them the most poorly has simply failed to grow up. They are no more or less an artist because of it. Their art will never be the better for it, their heart will never allow it. The heart longs for only one thing: truth. Which is why we believe that love is the primary thing we long for the most, for love is the most truthful thing we can experience here. Love feels good. But underneath that good feeling is the purity and purpose that only truth can provide. Raw vulnerable untouched unstoried unscathed untainted just free. The closer we get to it, the more pure we become, a never ending and always evolving metamorphosis into something more pure, more truthful and honest. A freedom like no other. And from that place real art can be created like no other, one that can truly transcend, not just the man himself, or the time and place from which he creates, but from the common temporality of human beingness itself. Timeless art is truth in its purest form, even in fiction.

So it takes a subtle discretion, at least for an artist, to pull it off, bridging the life of the contented with the life of restlessness angst and passion. The art must be disguised, though still be true. It must take on a life of its own, one that is separate from its creator, so the artist is free to live the life he or she is equally entitled to (besides that of an artist), a simple normal contented life of ease and struggle, pleasure and pain, challenges and accomplishments, as any other on earth is. We may not get to play Moliere forever, but I dare say life would be boring if we did; and if we are lucky, we allowed ourselves plenty of years in our youth to do so. There is more to being human than reckless abandon for the sake of the genius of creation. Nobler goals. There is the challenge to master the art of living. Most artists never get a chance to experience that side of the coin. Giving into the myths and illusions we begin to harbor in our youth. But I for one am going to try, while at the same time producing some of the best art and works, in whatever shape or form they happen to come at me in, of my life.

TheTranscendenceDiaries

Month: December 2012

Selling Out or Buying In? Or How I Lost My Soul And Made a Fortune in the Process

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Implementing Plan B – Take Two

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Seeking a Silver Lining

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America’s Telling Untold History

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Facts and Anomalies Regarding the Speed of Light

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What the Mayans Are Saying Today About 2012

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To Moliere or Not to Moliere, That is the Question

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