ericavery

2011-01-28T17:46:00.000-08:00

56 second flick starring our fascinating neighbor we like to call the Sun (or, if youre religious you can call him the god Ra) from the friendly folks over at nasa. i made the soundtrack here in my hovel.

2011-01-16T15:02:00.000-08:00

figuratively speaking, every year the holidays make me at least a little sick, but this year it was also in the literal sense. whilst mostly lying around on the couch, watching mostly bad english tv shows and generally feeling sorry for myself i was only able to get in a little musical tinkering. not nearly as much as i wanted and my record did not get finished by the end of the year, as i had hoped, but so it goes sometimes.

this isnt technically a momentary music because that would be a misnomer. i did not do it in one day. i did it over a few. it started as a one day thing but then i got caught up in trying a bunch of technical things. eq-ing and compression blah dee blah. i was trying a few different things with a drum machine with ultrabeat, synths with basses etc. and this astonishing line came to mind from an anne sexton poem " my father lives in a machine built by my mother and well oiled by his job". i misremembered it and the actual lines are better still. from the poem "the touch":

"my father wont do it.
he comes with the house and even at night
he lives in a machine made by my mother
and well oiled by his job, his job."

'he comes with the house...' fuck. how good is that. anyway, overall this musical number has an eighties feel to me. the vocal sound reminded me of gibby haynes ala early 1990's. a man who will always make me feel sort of tingly all over. so have at it. one minute and forty seconds of listening joy. another free hit single to add to your collection for your next sleep over dance party.

Lemonade (momentary 4...sort of) by ericavery

2010-11-07T19:18:00.000-08:00

anyone get to either xenakis performances in la this weekend? if so can you give me a report? im bothered that i missed both the downtown recreation of persepolis and this afternoons performance of oresteia. let me know.

2010-10-26T00:17:00.000-07:00

thought i would make some noise with alessandros little module. his suonoio. thought for this momentary music i would limit my self to only this module. so for those keeping score at home, i recorded only this module into ableton live wherein i used two plugins, one instance of soundtoys echoboy and one audio damage eos reverb. that is all. i was going to dig into the mix but i got tired and tinkering too long undoes the spirit of what im trying to do with 'momentary' music anyway.

its a cool gadget. dont judge its capabilities only on what i did here. i am currently a synth dilettante. in better qualified hands it could do a great deal more. but i did what i did. here is a few minutes of noise to bounce your pigtails to. momentary music 3- suonoio.

Momentary 3 - SuonoIo by ericavery

2010-10-16T08:04:00.000-07:00

i have great affection for janes addiction 1.0. not only the music but all it represented and all it has done for me personally. i owe it a great deal. i have never been one to say, like musicians often do, that i didnt want to talk about it because i had moved on. ive been happy to answer questions about my experience in interviews or conversations with folks or friends. but i have always tried to stay on my own side of street, so to speak. i tried, not always successfully, not to just talk shit. but in so doing i think that the truth has at times gotten an incomplete presentation. so this time around, as i left, i decided not to let all the half truths, mischaracterizations and misunderstandings to go unaddressed. i decided that i wanted to create a small record of my story while dispensing with concerns about stepping on toes, hurting feelings, disillusioning, disparaging etc. i just wanted to answer some questions candidly as if i was just talking privately to a friend. i wanted it to be on camera so that anyone interested could have access to the source material. no editing. no quotes taken out of context. i reached out to sonny at xiola.org. an unofficial janes addiction site that has maintained the conversation about all things janes for many years. because of the net i was able to directly read/hear the feelings of people like them and i carried those voices with me throughout the past couple of years. in most ways i failed creatively this time around. but i take small solace in the fact that i know i made all my decisions based on what i thought would produce the best quality work, that would challenge and best represent the wild spirit of janes 1.0. living is a messy business. we do what we can. so be it.

so i now take a large step, personally, toward placing janes back into a box and putting it back onto its shelf in the hall closet. now i need my coffee. sonny has posted the first installment here. he will be dropping more. each week i believe.

2010-10-10T15:44:00.000-07:00

yesterday i had an interesting conversation with chris kallmyer at the little william theater. i generally do. he said something thats been resonating with me. he said that he thought contemporary composing was beginning to cycle back to the days when composers like mozart not only wrote the music but they brought it all the way through to production and finally also conducted and performed the work. we were talking at the time about "classical" contemporary (whatever that really means) but i think that the same thing applies to music in general. through the confluence of a few different things, artists do alot more these days than just write or perform music. and this applies to bands and djs and solo artists et cetera. the rise in frequency of the multi instrumentalists, the rise of home studio recording, the increased quality of the affordable home studio, the drop in available recording budgets large enough to live and produce on with the accompanying drop in royalty monies; the list goes on. whether or not that is a good thing i dont know. thats a discussion topic for another day but i do think we can all agree that artists are increasingly more involved in most parts of the process. there will of course still be big acts, christina aguilera or some other mouseketeer types, that are performers in the previous sense. but the rest of us in the creative middle and lower classes are clearly wearing many more hats. personally, it was a conscious decision, a few years ago, to learn more about the technical side of music making. i couldnt make mortgage payments waiting for bands in need of a bass player to come calling. i had a really good run of that but it was neither interesting nor sustainable. then more recently my goal became even more refined and ambitious, i wanted to see if i could get to the point that i could record my work well enough to drop it directly onto the net. i think it was survival instinct that brought this about but thankfully i have ultimately found it fascinating and inspiring. it intersects nicely between my interests in science, tech, design and art. so in summation, i have no summation. i will disregard the dictates of formal essay form and just end a damn post. thats what i was thinking about. have a nice day.

2010-09-06T18:56:00.000-07:00

todays labor. did some synth homework this afternoon. im learning. i give you momentary music number two:

Momentary2 by ericavery

2010-08-29T15:29:00.000-07:00

this weeks micro concert featured pieces written for two tuba. pretty amazing sitting in a little cloak room with two of those going. but it was interesting as a bass player, hearing composers writing for two bass instruments. it was decidedly different from the previous three weeks; two violins, two accordions and a day with mostly supercollider on a mac with trumpet. those other instruments are obviously instruments that produce mostly higher notes. higher than basses and tubas. most of the works for tuba were decidedly less dissonant than the works written for those other instruments. i wonder if the composers found it difficult, as i have, to do more challenging chordal stuff with bass. higher dissonant notes can more easily sound interesting. whereas dissonant bass notes tend to just sound bad. wont bore you non-musician types with why that is but it does seem, to our ears to be so.

highlight for me was a piece by jacob sudol. managed to do some of that low dissonance with musicality and had a nice balance between being challenging and just being pleasurable to hear. my favorite musical balancing act. actually i think that balancing act applies to art and culture writ large as well.

have a good sunday. did you know that god took this day off because he was beat after creating the universe. all-powerful but he got tuckered out. who knew.

2010-08-23T17:37:00.000-07:00

today i was thinking about my adolescent contempt for authority. i think that by and large, it was then mostly just about my wanting to be left alone to do what i pleased. mostly. i found fault in those with positions of authority basically because i wanted just cause to challenge their authority when they tried to get me to do something i did not want to do. again i will say mostly because i am not cynical or shallow enough to believe that it was my only motivation. there was a good amount of hypocritical nonsense that needed policing as well. which brings me to today. that spirit is still alive in me today. my instinct is still to bristle when i perceive, correctly or not, that someone is telling me what to do. a silly blend of adolescence with middle age, i know, but it is so. but i think that the true questioning of authority is something akin to that impulse but certainly not limited by it. i have learned over my lifetime that there exist many fewer authorities in the world than one expects to find when looking at the world from childhood. good mundane case in point. i am in a bicycle shop trying to buy a bike for and with my wife. as usual i am full of questions. i really enjoy asking people questions on topics about which i know very little and they know a great deal. learning. its a good thing. so im asking about old classic schwinn beach cruisers, how often one should grease a chain, when did the sort of low rider bicycle culture get started etc. and at a point i realized that he was just making shit up to fill in the gaps in his knowledge. he never once said that he just did not know. therefore he is entirely unreliable. this is a common strategy for people assuming positions of authority. they fear that if you see that they dont know everything then you wont believe anything and most importantly wont believe in the validity of their authority. of course no one knows everything. when someone does not ever say that they simply do not know, that is a good indication that you should definitely begin questioning their authority. when one begins to develop the ability to ask good questions of the world, and to reason well with the answers given, then one finds a considerably smaller amount of authorities. but then again who the fuck am i to say?

oh and for further reading i recommend christopher hitchens book "letters to a young contrarian". thats all for today.

2010-08-11T17:36:00.000-07:00

dismiss this as looking for silver linings around dark clouds (it might be dismissable anyway because i have done no fact checking) but i was remarking to belle that someone had tweeted that arcade fire is the number one record in america. maybe it was pitchfork. not sure. either way, she thought it remarkable that a band of obvious quality had the top spot. that is remarkable, i believe. but i also wondered if that wasnt a symptom of the fact that less people are buying records these days. one might think that the quality of bestsellers would rise as sales dropped. dont know if they have or even how you could measure that but...i figured that if less people are buying, then a larger proportion of them will be real music fans. those of us left are really here because we love music. are we distilling better taste out of smaller quantities of buyers? separating the wheat from the musical chaff? i dont know. does it matter? it might. i dont know that either but thats what i was wondering as i was waiting in line for my afternoon caffeine bump.

2010-08-01T00:22:00.000-07:00

so...you might have thought that i had finally, after numerous threats, really quit this blog thing. i do remain unconvinced that the directly connected blog tweet facebook thing is right for me. might be. just not sure. but for now i remain. and i have a new, at least temporarily, convincing reason to be here. i thought i would periodically upload some music i create here at home. no studio. no engineer. not even another musician (at least for now). i want to devote a day every couple of weeks to doing what my wife anabelle and i have been referring to as 'momentary music'. i have terrible trouble tinkering and overthinking things to death. with my momentary musics i will not do that. i will devote no more time than a day to any of them and i will then post them here; warts and all. these things will probably be all over the map stylistically because that is how my mind works and that is how i stay interested. i am not an engineer so the recording quality will be scruffy at best. so be it. so without further ado, i give you moment 1. a short piece put together with bits of weberns spare masterpiece called 'five pieces for orchestra', ives' 'trio for violin,cello and piano', george benjamins 'ringed by the flat horizon' a couple of snippets from david lynchs film 'mulholland dr.' plus a little of my own nonsense.

so make of it what you will. there will be more. this one was a small joy for me to make and is a homely little beast that i ultimately find charming. it is a little droplet to add to the unrelenting firehose of media that comes at you all the time these days.

one more thing. this doesnt mean i will stop making solo records. but for that i need near endless hours of tinkering,obsessing, rewriting and, of course, overthinking. i will also be involving other folks and engineers, mixers, etc. and they cost money so i will be asking you to buy something to help me pay them. but for now its on the house. see you again soon.

Moment1 Take2 by ericavery

2010-04-11T16:44:00.000-07:00

william gibson. my affection for this mans writing has run hot and cold from book to book over the years but i am consistently astonished by the man himself. i heard him say once, at a book reading, that he considered illegal copying of his work as an 'organic tax on his celebrity'. simple and brilliant. here is some more simple brilliance i read at his blog thanks to a boingboing tweet:

Q Creator's block. If ever: how long, when/why it happened; or how was it avoided, palliated?
A "Creator's block" sounds like something afflicting a divinity, but writer's block is my default setting. Its opposite is miraculous. The process of learning to write fiction, for me, was one of learning to almost continually be doing it *through* the block, in spite of the block, the block becoming the accustomed place from which to work. Our traditional cultural models of creativity tend to involve the wrong sort of heroism, for me. "It sprang whole and perfect from my brow" as opposed to "I saw it mispelled, in mauve Krylon, on the side of a dumpster, and it haunted me". I was much encouraged, when I began to write, by Manny Farber's idea of "termite art".

2010-03-21T13:30:00.000-07:00

alright. you win. i surrender. i wanted to keep the blog filter free but it seems thats not possible. i am happy to allow negative opinions of myself and others to exist. nice thing about being a big boy is that name calling has no emotional effect on me. in fact, i find good honest criticism helpful. i certainly learn much more from criticism than from accolades. might not be as easy on the ears and heart but so be it. like i said, i enjoy being a grownup. which brings me nicely to the matter at hand. everyone has the right to publicly embarrass themselves in any way they feel. for our purposes here thats actually a serviceable definition of free speech. i have even enjoyed some of the middle school taunts aimed at me. but unfortunately it all gets beyond tedious when the 'smell my finger' comments begin to outnumber the rest of us. so i am being forced to delete comments and forced to change some of the settings on this blog. i am dubious that this is a fix. but i will see how it goes. this is a work in progress. feedback appreciated.

...oh yeah. to the guy who calls me herman i say: i know you are but what am i. youre gay. suck my dick. neener neener.

2010-03-13T19:14:00.000-08:00

alright. for fuck sake. i am going to post here again. take a run at this regular...er..semi-regular blogging thing. janes sort of stopped me up for a while but i no longer have that problem. still got all my others but...

so ive broken the proverbial ice here again and i must now go to dinner.

2009-10-07T09:08:00.000-07:00

the thom yorke solo show at the orpheum sunday night is still resonating for me. it was a really exciting event to be a part of. if i had to choose only one criticism of our current musical climate it would be that there doesnt seem to be alot of special musical events anymore. bands are either doing the verizon-something-or-other-theater or they are doing some contrived performance, in some contrived space, in some forced attempt at being different or unusual. these events often end up so 'artistic' that it seems more like marketing. in contrast, the orpheum show was a timeless display of the power of a really great musical experience. there was an electricity to the darkness before the band came out. we were then witness to a really pure experience of music. music. it was about the intrinsic substance of bands and musicianship. there was obvious great virtuosity but was not jammy, showy or particularly well polished; mistakes were made and unfinished song sketches were performed by yorke with just vocal and guitar or vocal and piano. a friend put it well saying that it was an unusual combination of being a really artistic evening without being at all pretentious.

it was a really impressive lineup of musicians. for purposes of full disclosure i must admit that flea is my friend and i am admittedly biased in favor of him but still...he is such an amazing player now. he continues to inspire me to become a better musician. but everyone on stage was an accomplished musician. some famous, some not. in an age when people are mixing and matching different celebrities for marketing reasons, or to combine catalogs, it was really nice to see a 'supergroup' built by shared virtuosity and musicianship.

if a listing music industry wants a new generation to care about supporting a music industry. create musical experiences that deserve their support. these evenings are timeless, transcending not only time, but also current musical styles and taste. i know. i saw flipper club lingerie and x at the whisky-a-go-go over two decades ago. i will now add thom yorke at the orpheum amongst all the others on that list.

2009-07-30T16:48:00.000-07:00

stole over to the hammer museum this afternoon while i waited for belle (who was reclining in a dentists chair). show was missable but i spent the hour browsing their bookstore. i struck by how many great ideas are contained in any collection of books like that one. i was also reminded of just how important it is that we make things that are totally unnecessary. there have been years, even before the years of gw bush and friends, where mostly conservative folk have had contempt for art that, according to them, has no 'purpose'. they believe that the marketplace, not tax dollars, should fund art. but i would argue that that by definiton is a market. it creates commodities and the exchange of commodities. that is fine as well but its different. it is in the moments when we contemplate unnecessary things that we transcend our daily lives. i believe we, especially americans, need more of this kind of time. and personally, for a believer in truth, reality, and rationality that sort of time is the closest experience i have to magic.

2009-06-06T13:26:00.000-07:00

last night during the show in camden nj, i had a moment that is the type of inner experience of performance that no one sees, but that is interesting to me internally. we were playing the song "then she did". one of my favorites, entirely created by perry. we began playing it and i closed my eyes. i often close my eyes to help focus more singly on what is happening in my ears. so i had closed my eyes at the beginning of the song and when i opened them again i had been engulfed entirely by smoke, dry ice. so much so that i could see nothing but the swirling clouds of smoke with one small single bright light in the distance. it turned out that the light was a light out at the soundboard in the middle of the audience. didnt know this at the time. so im cloaked in my cloud of smoke with my distant point of light and i thought that it sort of poetically represented my death. "then she did" is a song of death and it all seemed very comfortable conceptually. i could feel that the light was patient and id eventually get there, but that tonight i was a good distance from it, that all that really existed for me was my time here and, in particular, my extraordinary spot in the spectrum of human experience. namely, being on stage for the ritual of performance in front of thousands of people. this is the sort of internal experience i seek out to enrich my experience of performance, and thereby keep it interesting to me and by extension hopefully to you all.

2009-05-20T13:39:00.000-07:00

most of the moments of most of my days on this janes gig, are about getting to the work at hand. working hard throughout the set. focus. jane says has been a different experience. i sit on a stool and i am given time to reflect on the enormous effect that jane bainters tiny story has had on all of us. i have at times been almost emotionally overwhelmed by the scope of all our struggles that is so eloquently and plainly spoken about by perry in that song. but that aside, like i said, it has been mostly about doing the best job i can to make this tour as good as it can be. today feels a little different though. it feels like a return to the beginning. janes obviously didnt begin here but in retrospect it was a big moment in the story. playing irvine seems like the beginning of the really big, and ultimately final, part of our success. it felt like we had arrived home as conquering heroes. lollapalooza was working (i had been skeptical) and we were therefore playing to crowds so much larger than we had up to that point. i am curious going into today, with this historical mindset, how i will end up feeling having come full circle. the car just arrived to take belle and i down to soundcheck. its good to be interested in ones life.

2009-05-03T09:26:00.001-07:00

there are some days, and i hope you have all have as many as possible, that are entirely unlike the rest. my problem has never been that life got too dramatic for me; bad or good. it is that sometimes i let life get uneventful for long enough that it no longer seems important. that life doesnt seem important. therefore time just quietly tics by. this is not one of those days and this is about to be a time that doesnt do anything quietly. must finish packing. let it begin...

2009-03-16T16:57:00.000-07:00

cant tell who to thank for the link; either, tr, rob sheridan or meantambourine. all three? whoever it is, thanks for the heads up on this beautiful short film. check it.

2009-03-15T11:02:00.000-07:00

we in janes have made several phone calls, both individually and collectively, trying to find out why nin/ja ticket prices have wound up so much higher than the agreed upon price. it has been confusing and frustrating trying to get a straight, consistent and clear answer. a few weeks ago, trent told me about a ticket reselling phenomena that i hadnt understood before. i didnt understand at the time just how insidious this system is until ive had to watch it play out in real time. he wrote a really good concise and understandable explanation here. its a good read. have coffee first.

2009-03-13T15:14:00.000-07:00

sorry. left the house for rehearsal without posting anything about austin. so to expedite things ive just copied and pasted a blurb by dave from the ja.com site:

We have been rehearsing all week for an upcoming private
show in Austin, Texas. We have set aside a number of tickets for those
of you who have signed up to the site. Stay tuned for more details
on how to attend this specific event and clear your schedule
the evening of the 19th.

2009-03-05T17:14:00.000-08:00

its official. our friend tom morellos new project 'streetsweeper' is going to join us for the tour. you can hear some of his new grooves here at streetsweepermusic.com. sounds like cool stuff. its on.

2009-03-03T22:55:00.000-08:00

Hot off the presses at nin.com, the story so far:

Fri-May-08 West Palm Beach, FL [Cruzan Amphitheatre]
Sat-May-09 Tampa, FL [Ford Amphitheatre]
Sun-May-10 Atlanta, GA [Lakewood Amphitheatre]
Thu-May-14 Albuquerque, NM [Journal Pavilion]
Fri-May-15 Phoenix, AZ [Cricket Wireless Pavilion]
Sat-May-16 Chula Vista, CA [Cricket Wireless Amphitheater]
Mon-May-18 Las Vegas, NV [The Pearl]
Wed-May-20 Irvine, CA [Verizon Wireless Amphitheater – Irvine Meadows]
Fri-May-22 Mountain View, CA [Shoreline Amphitheatre]
Tue-May-26 Englewood, CO [Fiddler’s Green Amphitheatre]
Wed-May-27 Kansas City, MO [Starlight Theatre]
Sat-May-30 Noblesville, IN [Verizon Wireless Music Center]
Sun-May-31 Clarkston, MI [DTE Energy Music Theatre]
Tue-Jun-02 Toronto, ON [Molson Amphitheatre]
Wed-Jun-03 Darien Lake, NY [Darien Lake Amphitheatre]
Fri-Jun-05 Camden, NJ [Tweeter Center At The Waterfront]
Sat-Jun-06 Holmdel, NJ [PNC Bank Arts Center]
Sun-Jun-07 Wantagh, NY [Nikon at Jones Beach Music Theater]
Tue-Jun-09 Columbia, MD [Merriweather Post Pavilion]
Wed-Jun-10 Burgettstown, PA [Post-Gazette Pavilion]
Fri-Jun-12 Charlotte, NC [Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre]

2009-03-01T10:59:00.000-08:00

there is a whole lot of cross-platforming going on these days; actor/musican/model/artist/dj/novelist. a direct symptom of the confluence of the easy one to one distribution of internet technology/culture combined with our myopic obsession with celebrity. in other words, we are easily interested in everything done by someone we are interested in. mouthful. but last night belle and i walked away from bergamot station talking about how impressed we were with the quality of the artistic work by the musicians in this show. gibby haynes works were our personal favorites but we began speaking specifically about the folks from sonic youth; lee ranaldo, kim gordon, and thurston moore. unlike my crazy admiration of gibby and the butthole surfers, i was never as fond of sonic youth as i always knew i should be. not to say i didnt like them, i did, but i think i admired them more than i listened to them. after all, sonic youth were undoubtedly one of the most influential and artistic bands during my lifetime. to see that at least the three of them obviously qualified as visual artists in their own right was, not a surprise but, an affirmation of the creative power that can be brought to bear when you put together a band of folks that are, in a way, sort of creatively overqualified for their positions.

2009-02-20T23:11:00.000-08:00

i think i bought my first computer in 1991. i have always known that it would be wise to habitually backup my hard drives. but i can safely say that i have not done a hard drive backup more than three or four times over all those years. it has never been an issue. last night it became an issue. the hard drive, that i had recorded the last years work to, bit it. i mean BIT. maybe a few thousand dollars later i might be able to get some of it back. bit. belle and my friend john (a computer tech over trying to help) were pretty mortified. i was not. not really. and today i have some excitement in my stomach about music, about writing. i still see music as a process of learning. all the music i wrote this year hasnt gone away. only the songs have. ive learned alot this year and that continues to inform me and my work now. in that sense it will exist in my work upcoming. living is a process that involves alot of loss and in the last year ive had a bigger than normal portion. and of course i wouldnt choose loss, or choose to have my work erased, but losses create spaces and i have to fill those spaces with something and in so doing i am defining my life; the space i fill. if the tibetan sand mandala makers are the model, then the sand is dispersed and it is time to begin work again. i might setup an automatic backup system this time.

2009-02-16T11:16:00.000-08:00

fyi, my friend josh klinghoffer is a brilliant musician and his band 'Dot' is the opening act tonight. last minute addition. this is their second show. anabelle and i saw their first at the troubadour a few weeks ago. im really looking forward to the chance to see them again tonight. so if you need a good reason to get there early tonight and get out of the rain, they have the 9:30-10:15 slot tonight. im stoked.

bring your ten bucks. we will bring the janes addiction.

2009-02-11T18:41:00.000-08:00

echoplex monday night at 11. this one is 18+ age limit. first 500 folks that register here get on a list that enables you to walk up and pay 10 bucks at the door. we wanted to do something in a proper club this time with a proper pa, stage and reasonably large room. and yes this is the largest amount of warning time that was possible. i wanted you all to know as soon as i knew. just home from rehearsal, really fucking hungry, so i want to go get me some chow, but i did want you all to know. see you there.

2009-02-06T21:23:00.000-08:00

fuck. im really sorry but the show i briefly blogged about, then pulled, is postponed. it seems we cant seem to put together one of these shows without some major malfunction. we will be doing something over the next few weeks. will of course let you know. as the blog post mentioned this was a last minute thing. here is the proof of just how last minute it was. will keep you all posted. again please accept my heart felt apology.

2009-02-06T19:21:00.000-08:00

2009-01-20T09:35:00.000-08:00

America is a better place today.

2008-11-22T12:08:00.000-08:00

show was really good. it worked. small doesnt necessarily mean intimate but on this night it did. everyone was hanging out before the set watching a really charming burlesque show (which is, by the way, a regular happening at the el cid). perry, his wife and kids, our friends, our crew, my folks, and all the people who waited outside in line all day were mixing in the crowd. there was no 'us and them'. just us hanging. vibe.

i generally judge shows on two levels; one being the public general show level and two being my selfish personal internal experience. they are often unrelated. the set on a macro level was great. everyone was into it. perry was on fire. we even had a crowd surfer. very proud of him. on the personal level, how do i put this, i am looking forward to having more room onstage. i find it difficult to get lost in the physicality of performance when i am constrained spatially; when i cant move around freely. if the analogy is sex (i know, i know, a worn analogy but i think effective still) it is when you are having sex with a beautiful woman; you are feeling it; she is feeling it; but, your pet is on the corner of the bed staring at you. so great. really great. but not all the way lost in it.

perry told a story from the stage about janes playing club lingerie back in the day. i wanted to add something that he didnt mention. it was a 21 and over club. so before we started playing i went to the back door and let in my friends who werent old enough to get in legally. the club caught me and kicked my friends out. i then told the club that i wasnt going to play. so perry took me outside and we walked down sunset blvd and he tried to talk me down. finally he said that if i would play the show, he would do a bar run. i was convinced. as we neared the end of the last song, he left the mic, jumped onto a table, a railing and onto the bar without touching the floor. he then ran down the bar kicking over everything for the entire length of the bar and disappeared backstage. heroic.

so la cita and el cid; two for two.

2008-11-14T17:16:00.000-08:00

gag is off. we are playing at the "el cid" in silverlake. you cant buy advance tickets. its $9 at the door. doors open at 10 and we are on around 11. it is not a big place. i know i said a couple of posts ago that we would eventually make room for you all. i still believe that is the case. but i think 'eventually' is the operative word there. there will only be room for a couple of hundred of you all this time. i will post a more precise capacity when i get the number. rehearsals have been sounding really solid. should be a good night.

2008-11-04T08:27:00.000-08:00

"Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing...after they have exhausted all other possibilities." -- Winston Churchill

this quote came to mind this morning as i considered going out to participate in history today. id be voting anyway but today feels different. the fact that i get to vote for a man with, what colin powell perfectly described as, "intellectual curiosity" is a gift. and this of course coming after eight years of being forced to watch a man, who takes pride in his ignorance, preside over the greatest unrelenting catastrofuck of a presidency of my entire lifetime. anabelle and i are off to queue up and cast a vote toward a better nation.

2008-10-25T09:58:00.000-07:00

i think that most of the time, there is less evill in the world than just plain messiness. i apologize to those who waited forever and did not get in. contrary to some posts i do not believe there is any particular bad guy. there was a confluence of things that created that situation; some good intentions some not. there was always going to be some overflow. that was a given. actually that was a given once we decided to let the public in. it was initially going to be unannounced and therefore a show for only friends and family. after giving it some thought, i didnt like the idea of it being exclusive like that because of the fact that the only other thing we had done, the nme, had been very exclusive. we agreed that we would sort of split the crowd into equal thirds, shepards people, our personal people, and people. i think that our management were looking out for our friends and family as a priority. i dont think that anyone would fault them for that. but that did mean that when the capacity cutoff was reached, that left more of you outside than i would have liked. which brings me to the question of capacity and the fire marshal. more on the fire marshal in a second. the room we played in is small. there is an outside patio that increases the total size considerably. but we did not want to fill the entire place with people that were technically inside the venue but could not possibly see the band. so the actual capacity and the functional capacity for that night were two different numbers. the two different numbers also meant that we had a rough number to work with but that there was some wiggle room and i think that was one of the ways we began to have trouble. at least, i know that my personal guest list grew beyond what i had agreed to because of this. now the fire marshal. the bane of every show you try to do something different at. if it hadnt been for the hustle of the la cita and our management team, there would have been no show. in that way it was very different than it would have been back in the day. back in the day we would have been shut down. the fire mashal needed the stage to be moved over one foot. done. he needed an electrician on site. three arrived in half an hour. he needed two new exit signs. done. he needed four new fire extinguishers. done. et cetera. et cetera .and of course he conservatively capped the capacity. end of story. so the world continues to be an imperfect place. i again apologize to those who had a realistic expectation of getting in, waited, and were disappointed.

of course, now its a little uncomfortable for me to say anything really about the show. to those of you who got in. you know. the band made me proud. confirmed my suspicion that there is more story to be told and eventually we will make room for you all.

2008-10-21T16:31:00.000-07:00

fuck. through a communication fuck up i was waiting until five o'clock to post what dave posted on his blog at 10 am. oh well. life is messy. i am playing with janes addiction at the 'la cita bar' in downtown la on thursday night around 11. it is small. it is five bucks at the door. we are playing roughly 10 songs.

i agreed not to post about this all before, for a few different reasons, and it has made posting here difficult for me. rightly or wrongly, it felt false somehow to chat about stravinsky or something while i knew you were all waiting on this other news. we have been rehearsing and we have been sounding really solid.

we never know what the future has in store for us; especially with this band. but, at least right now janes addiction has a future that one would have to call somewhat promising.

we are a great band.

2008-09-27T16:34:00.000-07:00

wow. i let the entire month of august go by without a post. first time ive done that since i started doing this, i believe. and now i am dangerously close to letting the same thing happen to september. but my friend pete pointed out that i have been looking at this blog more formally than the culture of blogging asks for. it doesnt have to be anything but what i want to write about at any given time. we talked about this, by the way, at a great show at the troubadour. flea, frusciante, josh klinghoffer and a drummer named stella, whom flea has raved about, all jammed. i told flea that he has been a great bass player for a long time but that night i thought that he has become a master. a real master. what i saw of the opening band, warpaint, was really good too. the bass player played with sex and simplicity, two favorites when writing bass lines. anyway, i digressed. but that is what we sometimes do when blogging. we just speak our minds. so there you have it. after all this time, its not a post that will save any lives, but it is what was on the mind. im off for a bite, then downtown to fleas funraiser (not a typo). its a fundraiser for his music school; the silverlake conservatory. this year its at the train station downtown and the evenings music sounds really interesting.

2008-07-21T13:25:00.000-07:00

belle and i are up in san luis obispo at a little music festival. im here to see/hear two pieces of music; stravinsky's rite of spring and messiaen's quartet for the end of time. heard 'the rite' on saturday night. it is still just one of the most exciting pieces of music ever written. first performed in 1913, as in 1913, and still full of all the best elements of music. it is dark, surprising, challenging and exotic. it pulses throughout with the promise of violent energy and intermittently erupts with complex stabs of giant chords and creative orchestration. it is, to me, perfect music. just fucking great to witness.

tonights piece is the "quartet for the end of time". a piece first written and performed in a nazi stalag during world war 2. for anyone interested, the fascinating story is covered far better here by alex ross of the new yorker magazine. its being performed in a church tonight. im stoked.

2008-06-17T09:00:00.000-07:00

another brilliant vid for those times when you begin to lose faith in humanity. stay with it. it starts slowly.

2008-06-06T12:10:00.000-07:00

i will get it out of the way first, no new news on the janes front. i know many of you are here for that. not sure what to do about that actually. it certainly wasnt why i decided to start blogging. should i start an update section at janesaddiction.org? start a separate janes update blog? stop blogging altogether? decisions for another day. anyway, that aside, i found a really cool youtube vid that some inventive person put up. it is a 'visual score' to an electronic piece by a composer named gyorgy ligeti; a current favorite of mine. it is a piece called "artikulation" written around 1958. sounds like it could be an 'autechre' song but it was written in 1958. as in FIFTY-eight. remarkable. there are a few of you here that i thought might appreciate it.

2008-05-18T10:04:00.000-07:00

how do i talk about it all? how do i mention speculating without creating, at the very least, some wild speculation over the coming months. am i considering something with the boys of janes addiction? yes. do i think something of a deserving quality is possible? not as convinced. not yet at least. do i know what it would look like? i have absolutely no idea. would we play a few live shows? would we try to write something? i havent even spoken yet to dave, let alone any other band members, about any of this. but what has changed is that i am considering it all. and not only that, it feels good to consider it.

the other night at the nme was good fun. it felt pretty positive all around. i enjoyed playing those old bass lines (some of which i hadnt even privately played in sixteen or seventeen years). it was a pretty complete pleasure to do on a personal level. i was left with some concerns though musically. our ability as a foursome to focus, to challenge ourselves concerns me. can we bring the urgency to the songs that made them so dynamic in the first place? i dont know. how do we best do that? i am thinking about it. if i can become convinced that we can do that then i am open to trying. but until that point, i can only speculate. it is only the very beginning of a glimmer of a start to this process. it is an idea that could die on the vine, which is precisely why it has taken me this long to post anything, but it is also an idea that is pretty pregnant with possibility. that feeling of possibility in itself is a sea change for me. we will just have to see.

2008-04-15T18:25:00.000-07:00

ok. so...short story is that ive decided to do a few songs with janes addiction at the nme awards show. they are honoring the legacy of janes and therefore i have decided to participate. i have kept silent this past week about it because i was concerned that if it got out that i was even considering it, that in itself would have been considered an answer and i didnt want to set this in motion until i had really decided either way. so i am sorry for the lack of response to your questions on the blog here.

i went to do dave navarros internet tv show today thinking that i might get some clarity about all this from talking to him. i had only spoken to two other folks about this up to that point. i was really conflicted and i am still unsure that this is the right answer (if there is such a thing) but i am happy to be a part of honoring janes. i am humbled that we are being put into the company of the others who have received this honor from the nme. and finally, i must admit that it has felt really good so far in both heart and mind; just sounds like a cool night. amazing.

now then, i have some basslines to figure out and rehearse.

2008-04-15T11:09:00.000-07:00

over the years, one of the things that has always struck as me as strange is that interviewers have always seemed reticent to ask you questions about the lyrical content of songs. they have told me that musicians generally dont like it. odd to me. what do we talk about if we dont talk about the work. short answer: everything but the work. i bring this up because i have just finished a week of roaming around doing press and i cant remember anyone asking me about the content of any of my songs. and it isnt because people hadnt done the research. i was pleasantly surprised how much the interviewers were generally intelligent and well informed. i just think we as an audience have become so fascinated with celebrities themselves that we just arent as interested in their work. of course, i think alot of interviewees are also culpable for all the fluff content. im just not interested in how much fun an actor had on the set of a movie. but i will inevitably hear that in any interview. wow. now this getting rambly preachy AND pointless. occupational hazard of blogging. im off today to do dave navarros internet tv chat show.

2008-04-10T09:36:00.000-07:00

today its thursday. which means it must be west palm beach. a radio station called wpbz. tomorrow its chicago cleveland then home by friday night. is it just me or did they decide to populate all the new york city press outlets with really capable smart women. very cool. very different from when i began. there are ,of course, many mitigating factors. one of which might be that it was all online stuff; zoom in, mtv, vh1 radio, aol. when its online stuff it gets immediately brainier and i feel considerably more comfortable in conversation. but that was then and this is now. i must take leave. off again. caffeine, radio station, airport, rinse and repeat.

2008-04-08T06:22:00.000-07:00

its here. finally. the record drops today. typical of a day like today, i dont have time for a real post because i have to check out of the hotel in fifteen minutes. then its a zoom in, mtv.com,vh1.com etc. morning before going to providence this afternoon. also, for anyone interested in hearing a rambling and unfocused interview performance, im on wtmd this morning out of baltimore and then they will post a podcast of it. but i must go now. late, as usual. duty calls.

2008-04-06T10:25:00.000-07:00

again, after being stopped by the events of my life, i am restarted by the events of my life. after the last post, i have found everything i want to write next seeming trite. but this morning my hand is forced by the fact there is some music news to update. i begin a little press junket today, taxi is coming in half an hour, doing little bits of press and radio. shaking hands and kissing babies. not one of my stronger talents. but there is the word business in the phrase 'music business' and so i am off to lax. hello baltimore, nyc, providence, west palm beach, cleveland (of course), and chicago. home by friday. i go out the door today burdened by the privilege of an extraordinary life. it certainly didnt start that way. be well and thanks again for all the kind posts about bob.

2008-03-14T11:07:00.000-07:00

i was trying to think of some way to write about the last few weeks of my life. i was thinking about how we dont do dying very well in this country; we dont actually do dying at all, really. but it all just kept feeling wrong somehow. i kept writing but i just kept not wanting to post it. the simple truth is that my friend, my mentor, a father figure to me, died. he died and it broke my heart. he showed me how to become a man. he showed me a way to behave in this world that would create a person i could respect. he is now gone. i can say i miss him right now. but i wont really miss him, really, until i hit the next dark patch in my life. the kind where you are left feeling that all your previous experience somehow doesnt apply. he wont be there to call for input. he wont be there to direct me toward a clearing. of course i will continue to carry his words with me, words of loving guidance that he has given me and instilled in me for eighteen years. and that will have to do, because he is gone. he died among seven men whose lives he transformed. we came to his rescue. we visited him unconscious and intubated in the hospital. we got him out of the hospital when he came to because he didnt want to die there. we fed him morphine while his jaundiced body slept for his last two days. we took care of a man who had taken such care of us. i was honored to watch the end of so great a life. to stand vigil. to bear witness. to care for. he was my captain.

............ Bob Timmins Sept 27, 1946 - March 5, 2008 .........

2008-02-11T08:20:00.000-08:00

i am reading an imperfect but interesting book called the 'black swan'. i stick with it because it is based on something i believe is true about our world: that we like to tell ourselves stories about random events in our lives so that we can feel that we have the ability to control or predict those events in the future. see the stock market or long lines of people being forced to take their shoes off before getting on a plane. some of these stories do no harm and do seem to bring us some comfort. but we have to be careful of others that are more dangerous. and all of them are easy which is the most insidious part of the trap. i heard an example on 'meet the press' yesterday, i think it was there, though im not sure. somebody mentioned that there was still more sexism than racism in america. now that is a debatable point. i dont know if i believe that either way but i do know that the context in which it was said, talking about clinton vs. obama, implied something that does not seem true. obamas growing popularity does not mean that we are less racist than we are sexist. this is a good example of how easy these stories are to tell ourselves and often how neatly they immediately fit the data whilst how utterly simplistic and wrong they usually are. the black guy is more popular than the white woman therefore americans prefer blacks over women? amongst the many flaws in this thinking is the fact that in this primary election, white guys have consistently voted for hillary over obama. whenever i come up with a clever take on something that fits easily i become suspicious. the 'ease' of the fit is a good indicator that there is something wrong; something too lightly examined. ironically, it is these infectious oversimplifications that create our bigotry and sexism in the first place. life is rich and complex and almost always defies easy answers. at least that is my simple story for today and it seems to easily fit the data.

2008-01-10T08:23:00.000-08:00

this started out a comment in reply to some of yours but it got too long so i moved it here:

i wonder what obama can show us before becoming prez. no matter what mitt romney says, or the gop will say in the general election, there is nothing that really prepares you for the job of president. no matter what you do, ceo, mayor, governor; when you become prez you are making a huge jump from the minors to the bigs. when i saw obama on 'meet the press' some years ago i said to my wife, why cant this guy be our president. he was an obviously bright man with a nuanced take on all the problems of our country. as in nuanced, not good guys wear white hats bad guys wear black hats. he actually had some thoughtful answers. thoughtful? a politician on television?

i think that the loss in new hampshire is huge. i think it will take something special to make it past the well oiled clinton machine. coming out of iowa, it looked like we were getting caught up in a wave of naive optimism (not always a bad thing) and that is good for obama. i think going into south carolina with that mojo would have meant alot more to him than anyone because we are cynical about everything these days and cynicism makes you make safe, or 'electable' choices. and it was cynicism that made me think years ago, having been so impressed with obama on 'meet the press' (and so unimpressed with bush, gore and kerry), that we could never elect a guy like that because as a country we dont want complicated answers to our complicated problems and we are still too racist to consider electing a black man president.

2008-01-05T15:32:00.000-08:00

O B A M A

2007-12-15T11:38:00.001-08:00

i am here where the rugged coastline of california gets most rugged - big sur. that sounded more like a bumper sticker than i wanted it to but it is still descriptive. i have been alone here in paradise for the last five days but today i am picking up my bride who will be joining me for the next two weeks. due to the generosity of a friend (who lends us his house here) this has become a yearly ritual for us. we stay here well hidden from all things christmas until after humanity has finished moving over all our malls like locust. i prefer the shine of the light of venus like moonlight on the pre-dawn ocean, standing in close company with two beautiful juvenile deer (yesterday morning) or following a wildcat down the trail in front of me (this morning). i thought i would stop here outside the river inn market for a quick free wifi hookup, to give you all a heads up and all my best to you and yours through the holidays. i hope you can make them as much your own as i have been able to. duty calls. monterey airport. peace during wartime.

2007-11-27T16:39:00.000-08:00

this is where i spent last weekend. in this particular room. set designed by a really talented woman named hilary gurtler. she took a bleak plain white room and transformed it into a more cinematic bleak colorful room. both versions give one an existential chill. in fact, the whole place kept giving me the existential chills. the 'green spot hotel' in victorville. we kept referring to it as the brown spot hotel, both because the building surrounds a barren patch of vacant lot and because of the more obvious scatological implications. we were shooting a short film that is based on a character that presented himself to me through three songs on 'help wanted'. hopefully we will be producing a short film that has elements from the record. we find out what we have this week. the director is putting together a rough edit and will then give me a call. i hope it winds up watchable. will keep you posted.

2007-11-11T18:04:00.000-08:00

two of my latest obsessions. annie clark and alex ross. they are here related because, aside from my obsession with both, in looking at annie clarks blog i was reminded that i am supposed to include photos on this blog of mine. so i started with a quick phone pic of the book im consumed by: "the rest is noise; listening to the twentieth century". its a history of 20th century 'classical' music written by a guy who writes for the new yorker so it is not written by an academic. his writing is flawless and flows. great read.

annie clark plays under the nom de plume "st. vincent". she has made a remarkable cd but it is this bare version of the song 'paris is burning' that i keep returning to.

2007-11-09T09:25:00.000-08:00

i seem to be falling into a sort of rhythm with this blog. if i am posting, i am posting. if i dont post for a while, it then becomes difficult for me to post anything because i feel a need to find something really worth talking to you all about. i know this is antithetical to blog culture. so in lieu of the fact that i dont have anything important to say i will instead share this with you. there is a series of them; 'jake e. lee shreds', 'carlos santana shreds', etc. i am sure that most of you have seen this. if you are here it means you are connected to both web and music culture. but just in case there are some who havent seen these. this is a series of youtube pieces where someone took rock footage and replaced the audio. its quite well executed. parody approaching high art. seems like someone could do a semiotics thesis on this stuff. rock on.

2007-10-20T08:54:00.000-07:00

listening to kcrw's 'left, right & center' from last week, they mentioned how reactionary the blogosphere is. this reminded me of a great article i read in wired magazine, from the early nineties, by a guy named paul saffo. he mentioned that the whole idea of objectivity in the press was born from newspaper publishers. wanting to increase readership they tried to print news that would appeal to everyone without pissing off anyone. in other words, there should be no point of view. no real assertion that this is what a journalist thinks the truth is; even though things might appear differently. now, there is an objectivity that we should aspire to and that is that we should, on a personal level, aspire to remove any bias or predjudice, anything that will cloud our judgement as we look for the truth of a situation. but after doing this to the best of our ability, ultimately, we must make a call. we must put all the information together and say, "this is what i think is going on". that means not always presenting both sides of a given issue equally. i constantly hear reports that misrepresent the facts of a situation by presenting both sides. when you present both sides, it implies that the issue is split. if the headline reads, "human beings do not jump into the shark tank at sea world" then at a point in the article you bring in a representative from an organization that like to jump into shark tanks, then we will infer that some folks like to do it and some dont; like some like chocolate and others like vanilla. the vast majority of human beings might feel one way but that important fact is lost in the 'even' reporting.

so all this safe lack of opinion, lack of point of view, created a void that blogging could step in and fill. if we err on the side of having an opinion and being fuzzy on background then so be it. if you want to check the facts of a story you hear or read, you have the internet. meanwhile we are going to have a point of view. im not sure about mr. saffos take on 19th century journalism, i havent done my own fact checking. in fact this whole post may be just plain wrong. but this is what i think is going on. conversation begins with a point of view. this is the truth we need to begin. if i am wrong you will tell me. blog on.

2007-10-06T12:15:00.000-07:00

i want to take a moment to preach here. a moment in defense of something that has been relegated to obscurity; truth. as in telling the truth. from the interpersonal or private level to the biggest and most public level i am so tired of listening to people lie or dealing with folks that want to be lied to. on the personal level, this is epidemic in my native psycho-astrological-channeler-guru-hooey california, people that would rather hear nice news than the actual news of their life. my wife has shown me the difference between time spent telling someone what they want to hear and time spent telling someone the truth. the difference is so vast that i couldnt even begin to list differences here. the other night, i told her that i consider my ability to hear uncomfortable truths about myself to be an achievement in my life. i am a sensitive person. criticism hurt my feelings so i would react emotionally to it. i decided some years ago that i wanted to get better at hearing criticism. i made a conscious decision to do so because i knew that sometimes the truth fucking hurts and you have to accomodate yourself to it, in order for it to stop hurting long enough, to be able to decide what to do about it.

on a bigger level, and here one cant help but think of our bonnie king george II, i am tired of having to listen to folks who talk about 'values' all the time while also talking about not being able to tell the truth because it emboldens the terrorists or it is unsupportive of the troops. the latter being a particular peeve of mine. i think if someone is in the trenches, dealing with life and death on a daily basis, they are smack dab in the middle of some of the ugliest truth possible. they do not need to be coddled and told fairy tales like children, that is both condescending and cynical. give them the respect they deserve. they can handle the truth. sometimes the truth fucking hurts and you have to accomodate yourself to it, in order for it to stop hurting long enough, to be better able to decide what to do about it.

if brown did a bad job heading fema during the new orleans disaster, he doesnt need an 'attaboy', he doesnt need his buddy george telling him "nice job brownie". he needs a figuritive kick in the ass because he is fucking up and folks are dying. heavy hangs the head that wears the crown. if he cant do his job without hearing, and more importantly being able to learn from, criticism then he doesnt belong in that job. i will say it again for emphasis, sometimes the truth fucking hurts and you have to accomodate yourself to it, in order for it to stop hurting long enough, to be better able to decide what to do about it. period. end of sermon. have a nice day.

2007-09-24T09:24:00.000-07:00

hello people. i have allowed a trip to nyc to turn into a month without a blog post. trip was good. stayed with a friend who is a member of a family of art dealers. her apartment has phenomenal art on the walls; matthew barney, gregory crewdson, even andy warhol. pretty thrilling stuff to live with.

just sent off an email to my lawyer, the planets best lawyer by the way, about the 11th hour soundtrack. it seems there is going to be one. every time i deal with the big machine, ill tell you, i feel less and less sympathy for the demise of the industry. i know that there is deceit and corruption in small companies as well but from my experience, big companies are fat, bullying and wasteful and they do their business according to precedent. in other words, they look at doing things the way they have been done. often times only because that is the way it has always been done. this is where dogma meets commerce. no wonder they are failing. they bring muscle to situations that ask for imagination or creativity. it has been a theme on this blog before, and im sure it will be again, but i am ok with consumers sending the big 'fuck you' that they have sent and are continuing to send. it is working. the big boys are scared and confused. which means that us 'middle class' artists have to take a hit, with some loss in music sales. but at least it is a hit taken for what i believe is a greater good.

good to be back.

2007-08-22T08:25:00.000-07:00

the director of 11th hour asked me to ask you all that, if you plan to see the film, getting out to see it this first week would be really helpful. an unfortunate reality in the distribution and marketing of films, and cds for that matter, is that it is all about the opening week. how many folks see it in that first week can make or break a film or cd. herd mentality? yes. unfortunate reality? probably.

also for those in the l.a. area, i am doing steve jones radio program, on 103.1, with the two directors of 11th hour today (wednesday) sometime between 12-2pm. they also replay his segment at 6pm. and for you all outside radio range you can listen here on the web.

2007-08-10T14:57:00.000-07:00

for those you interested in my former band polarbear, i finally got my shit together and put the 'why something instead of nothing' record up at http://www.myspace.com/polarbearaudio to purchase for download. there are also two songs we did with the super talented producer rich costey called 'satellites' and 'superzero' that only a few inner sanctum peeps had previously heard.

2007-07-18T09:35:00.000-07:00

after watching the latest installment of the '7 up' documentary series last night i am reminded of something i was thinking about the other day as i pondered the rock egomania i have encountered in my life. for those of you unfamiliar with the '7 up' series, it is a series of docs about a group of people whose lives have been chronicled every seven years; starting at age seven then fourteen, twenty-one etc. with the current one being '49 up'. it is a nuanced and complicated portrait of human life. which brings me to the rock egos. let me start by saying that what follows is NOT about perry farell. he doesnt fit this category. but i have personally experienced this syndrome most often, but not exclusively, with lead singers. now i know that i am smarter than the average bear. and when i was younger i got alot of info from the world that supported that notion. it is easy to stand out in the rock world if you are interested in educating yourself and reading etc. but thankfully, i have had the good fortune to spend a good deal of my lifetime not being the smartest guy in the room. and not only has that made my life richer, but it has kept me aware of the limits of my brain. what i have often seen is reasonably bright people get a crazy amount of success, and believe that it was their special power that brought them that success; they are smarter than... or more creative than...etc. but at the same time there is a part of them that knows they are not as powerful as they pretend. and that is where they operate from. their power must remain unchallenged for them to continue to rely on this frail self image and so you see them remove anyone who might be considered an equal. so often their best 'friends' are their make up person or their videographer; obsequious and often on the payroll but always powerless and unchallenging. people who are willing to eat it when the boy-king (or queen) needs to re-assure himself of his power by intimidating his lesser companions or having a tantrum. his world view is therefore able to get more warped and further removed from reality with no one to help inform him of this distance and, of course, no one to blame but himself. life doles out hard lessons to almost everyone. during those times, some of us learn some difficult truths about ourselves and our world while some just insulate themselves more and more from those truths and instead choose to fire their friends.

2007-06-30T11:02:00.000-07:00

years ago, as in many moons ago, i saw a post by a brilliant woman. it was on an early internet forum called' the well'. i dont remember her name but i always watched for her because she had a tendency to startle me with bright ideas. these ideas often came in mundane packages. they came in the conversational tone of people having an online chat complete with the requisite typos. one of her little quips that is still with me is: civilization is hypocrisy. it is one of those really great subversive ideas that you initially recognize as being special in some way, worth saving, but you dont yet recognize the power of it until you watch it work on you for a while. it starts to infect your world view. it starts to appear everywhere. from the kabuki theater of politics to the moment in the grocery store when you are stopped, looking at the carnage that is glossed over in the pork chops weve packaged under neat little plastic wrapping. we enjoy our moral superiority over paris hilton while we follow her every move. but before you start to misunderstand me, before you start thinking that i sound preachy, let me first say that i havent found this information about civilization to be an idea that makes me feel morally superior. instead i find that, as truth often does, it frees me. it is difficult to feel outrage and easier to feel understanding when i am reminded that civilization is hypocrisy. there is a core misunderstanding of my own personal hypocrisy underneath almost all of my moments of righteous indignation and moral superiority. i am just another monkey trying to make his way through the world, making calls the best i can and susceptible to all the confirmation bias, fear, and good old fashioned stupidity that tarnishes all our decisions. wow. coffee moment. just had that moment of awareness that the caffeine has been speaking through me again. blah blah. i could go on and on but i wont because my wife wants me now. we are off to a farmers market and then a serious consideration of the deepest of todays deep thoughts: to iphone or not to iphone? dweeb on.

2007-06-22T19:16:00.000-07:00

in that random way my life works, i was settling into an evening of making myself dinner and doing some chess tutorials solo (wife was out of town), when i got a call from my friend taylor hawkins. he told me the foos were playing a little show at a small club in the valley. so an hour or two later i was standing in the crowd of a small club. it was very cool. its always special to see a band that has been touring and is battle hardened play a small club gig. it really gives a sense of scale to both their success and their ability. to see them in a little spot, where we all started, is to see an uncontainable force trying to be restricted into a tiny space; stuffing lightning into a shoebox. that tension makes for a perfect rock show. rock music should be difficult to contain. so little of it is these days it seems.

2007-06-04T15:54:00.000-07:00

in my internet meandering today i came upon a site for the sasquatch music festival, which, by the way, had a lineup that looks tempting enough that even i , with my considerable disdain for the crowd factor of those things, might make it to. but this site lead me to an arcade fire site where i saw 'journal' entries by some of the band members. in one, win recommends an orwell essay which reminded me of my favorite orwell essay. i hadnt read it in years, not since we began the debacle in iraq so i looked it up on the net. as i remembered it, i thought it would speak to us americans and what we are doing over there because it is about one of the corrupting influences of imperialism. a sickness that cripples the oppressor more than the oppressed. so i just reread it and it has all the candor, directness and power that i remember. i find it heart breaking on many levels. it is called 'shooting an elephant'.

2007-05-30T14:22:00.000-07:00

my friend andrew sent this to me:

"sometimes you are at your computer and want to send an email to someone's cell phone, but don't want to deal with going to your cell phone and text-ing them, and don't know what the email address of their phone is.

Just send an email to [phonenumber]@teleflip.com, so to email a phone, for instance, 3105551234@teleflip.com

It works for any cell phone, any phone number."

thought i would pass it on.

2007-05-21T15:39:00.000-07:00

im here at henson studios. ground hallowed by many creative hours and many cool artists but in my estimation the coolest and oldest is charlie chaplin. my friend taylor walked me over on the cell phone to where you can still see charlies footsteps in the cement. no plaque or anything. just barely visible and therefore sort of ghostly. they turn out in that distinctive chaplin waddle. good stuff.

listening to playback. billy bush has made the new track, 'unexploded', sound great. stoked.

2007-05-11T09:12:00.000-07:00

DICK cheney is at it again. this time on an aircraft carrier making threats toward iran. it seems to me that we need some new players representing us on the world stage. the members of king george II's court cant help but look foolish; or to paraphrase john stewart, the bush administration cant do anything at this point that doesnt seem ironic.

going into the studio today to finish up a new song and do some fixits (laying in some more taylor hawkins drumming). the remarkable engineer billy bush got us a couple of days at the old a&m, now henson, studios on the semi-down low. its good to have friends in high places. we worked yesterday and will again today. the studio is absolutely fucking perfect. the right amount scruffy character and then also, of course, it has all the great gadgets as well. the enormous kermit the frog on the outside aside, it has a great vibe. and i do mean 'vibe'. very seventies. i wish i could always work under such circumstances. well i get to today. im off.

2007-05-01T10:02:00.000-07:00

been in a small town in mexico. there is only one atm and you cannot use a credit card. this is a small town. while down there i read my latest wired magazine, one of my favorites (up there with 'new scientist'), the one with the 2007 rave awards results. these are peeps that wired thinks have distinguished themselves as innovators in different categories; gaming, films,industrial design, etc. one of these people is henry louis gates jr. he is an intersting guy. he is someone who always seems to have interesting things to say about race in america. he is being recognized here for doing a program in inner city schools that involves letting minority kids study science through their own dna and genealogy. so inspired. if more people figured out ways to make learning come alive in a personal way like this then we might be less likely to be duped into having the contempt for science that we seem to have these days. and i personally might have been able to stay interested enough in high school to have graduated. who knows.

but im back home now. my skin is a slight shade darker, i am reasonably well rested and i am ready to get back at it. finish and deliver 'help wanted' to dangerbird this month. the doc '11th hour', that i did some music for, is on its way to cannes film festival. i have some friends in need of some love and support who are struggling to stay alive. one of our two loved cats died. i am a year older. all of this leaves me humbled and aware that this life is temprorary rich complex and ultimately interesting and beautiful. or as lou reed put it more succinctly, 'lifes good, but not fair at all'.

thanks for all the happy birthday wishes.

2007-04-15T19:32:00.000-07:00

i asked belle for her thoughts about the making of the cd and this is what she wrote:

where to begin?
eric has never considered himself a musician. always operating with a different set of rules than the rest of us. he lives music every day. almost constant noise in one form or another. guitar, piano, never bass. never.

polarbear was an experiment in complicated noise-making. layer upon layer. I remember people were amazed by the integration of a laptop in the live shows. put off even.

polarbear was mostly about people realizing that eric was not who they thought he was. he was interested in making things difficult. dismantling song structure. pushing the technology.

help wanted grew out of a different process. it was written on the guitar. in fact his renewed interest in guitar was sparked by persuading him to play a cover (a cat stevens song as a present for a friend's daughter). it was clear that he was not happy about the idea. until that point I never ever heard him play a cover.

I think e was reminded that day to take another look at the genius of other people's work. leonard cohen. pink floyd. lots of pink floyd. in particular the pure genius of roger waters poetry (one of the few musicians e considers a real poet, as opposed to a great song-writer). by always looking forward he had forgotten to look back.

suddenly e was writing songs on the guitar that sounded like songs. help wanted grew out of his curiosity about that process. unconventional as always, he had somehow worked his way backwards to the place that most people start from.

process is always very much in evidence in eric's work. in music as in his life, nothing is hidden. he has a deep appreciation of the happy coincidence and of the beauty of imperfection. he is endlessly curious about everything (as you might have noticed).

ps

I should mention that we got a piano about six months ago. if you have a chance to see the 11th hour documentary, you will see what I am talking about...

2007-04-07T12:19:00.000-07:00

big thanks for all the enthusiastic responses. to answer the repeated question, i will probably be playing some shows, webcast maybe or some such. but it does not look like i will be doing any extensive touring. i will of course keep you posted here and again i thank you all.

2007-04-04T09:09:00.000-07:00

IT has happened.

2007-03-23T19:25:00.000-07:00

still toasty from a 10 am to 7 am work burst on the doc score. im still bored of me and my opinions but i did find a cool fifteen minute talk given by michael shermer, the leader of the skeptic society, i thought i would share. what will be of particular interest to you music folk is near the end he does an interesting demo about our perceptions of rock music being played backwards and our ability to hear hidden messages. this was a big deal, when i was a kid, with all the 'rock is the devils music' types. of course his talk has good information as well but if you dont normally consider yourself the dweeby thoughtful type, it is entertaining and its only fifteen minutes long. Check it.

2007-03-13T13:13:00.001-07:00

i missed david bowie. having loved bowie so much as a kid, but hearing his hits placed so often in commercials etc., i wondered if i had lost my love. so i had the idea that i would create a playilist of all the songs that havent been overplayed or overused from records that i didnt listen to as much as a kid. i listened to bowie before i was old enough to know how cool he was; also listening to styx, kiss and elton john singing with kiki dee at the time. but my best friends father was a famous guitarist named gabor szabo and he introduced me to bowie. i was maybe 11 years old? but i digress, back to the bowie playlist, basically i saw making a playlist of deepcuts as a way to sort of rediscover an artist i know well and loved once. got me thinking that artists deep cuts have always been what gave an artist a depth to their fan base; devotion. but some of that went away with the focus on singles, or i should say refocus on singles (pop started that way after all). the music biz furthered their own demise along more quickly with this fixation on singles, which fit in nicely to the early small bandwith download culture of the late nineties. not enough bandwith yet to download an entire cd but enough to make pirating a single song doable. and if you repeatedly dupe us into buying expensive cds with only one good song, while bandwith starts going broadband and digital copy ability/internet distribution makes downloading copies of songs easier and easier, you have a recipe for the disaster the major labels find themselves in. tough to feel bad for them. the enormous vacuum they left is being filled piecemeal by lots of smaller and exceedingly more interesting businesses and models. i will watch it continue to unfold to the tune of 'memories of a free festival'. the sun machine is coming down and we're gonna have a party.

2007-03-03T17:50:00.000-08:00

hello my friends. i know i have been remiss in my blogging duties. partly due to the fact that i was unable to get onto blogger.com for what i believed was a blogger problem. it turned out it was something i have never encountered on my own end. fascinating stuff, i know. but i have been busy. mostly busy writing some music for a friends documentary called the 11th hour. interesting stuff about environment, greed and renewable strategies. i am doing half of the score and a much more musically qualified french composer named jean pascal beintus is doing the other half. i also took some pix the other day in venice for a forthcoming announcement about my solo cd.

that is all for now. im off to help a friend celebrate his 40th birthday.

found a great quick read. some succinct answers for all the annoying times ive had to endure hearing people, including our president, speak of science as something you believe in, 'scientism', like any other religion. its a little essay by phil plait, the bad astronomer.

2007-02-20T10:17:00.000-08:00

one of the drawbacks of getting your ideas form television is that you have to get your ideas in small enough chunks to fit between commercial breaks. noam chomsky pointed this out in the film 'manufacturing consent'. any truly different idea, that completely overturns what you have come to believe, sounds like nonsense on a chat show (btw, although put forth this way, this doesnt entirely justify every time chomsky has sounded like nonsense to me). because any topic is generally built on a bunch of assumptions that everyone in the discussion agrees on, if you question those assumptions then the whole conversation breaks down, complicates in a way that wont fit between commercial spots, and the one questioning the assumptions generally looks like a freak - like he doesnt play well with others. im thinking of all this because this morning on my way to get a cup of coffee i was listening to the skepticsguide podcast. good episode by the way. interviews with matt stone and christopher hitchens. but they were talking about this article. The short version is parents arent using medicine on their childs brain tumor and instead are putting their faith in a 'psychic healer'. they brought up the fact that there exists, in 41 of the fifty states, laws that make parents exempt from child endangerment prosecution if the treatment of the child is based on religious beliefs. they said that these are laws that need to be looked at and discussed in the public sphere. now, the reason i was prompted to write this was that the next thought that came to me was, 'now is not the time to have this discussion'. this country does not seem capable of a reasonable discussion about any difficult or nuanced topic right now. i think this is beginning to change but the change is happening slowly. we are rolling the big wheel over into a more tolerant time. it is my hope. i cite the recent 'obama-mania' is an example of peoples desire for a return to reasonable dialogue. i think we are tired of cartoon representations of complicated topics and he represents that. it is a long road to the white house but he does seem to be doing well right now as a representation of things reasonably considered. in contrast, i am personally concerned that i have gotten emotionally caught up in my outrage alot lately. it has made me enjoy too much my righteous indignation. when i make simple and broad claims about 'how things really are...' or 'how so-and-so really is...' then i am in dangerous spiritual territory. or put another way, i am becoming less effective. being 'right' feels good. its easy. not being sure but putting forth your best considered solution is much more difficult. uncomfortable. but it is my belief that nothing, nothing is ever black and white. all is a shade of grey. when i begin to look for the nuance is when i begin to approximate the truth.

2007-02-12T10:07:00.000-08:00

good morning. had my coffee this morning with a tivoed 'meet the press'. during a commercial break, that i was fast forwarding through, i spotted dennis hopper. i wondered what product he might be peddling. he is talking about his dreams and youth yada yada. it turns out he was peddling some financial investment company. i recently went to an event at something that was referred to as 'artist loft spaces' in marina del rey. hopper was one of a few artists that were described as being artists-in-residence at these lofts. turned out these were carpeted condos and hopper was the evenings window dressing, the hand model. now im a reasonable man and i understand needing to make a buck. if you are an artist this is a tricky, shifty and always changing public tight rope you need to walk. we all have rents and mortgages but what i wonder is, in the dense thicket of 'edgy' media and advertising, when does an artist stop being an effective salesman of something that by definiton is not about sales. it seems like each time out, when you put your product next to a particular piece of art or artist, a direct relationship is created that we all recognize. there is a simple formula to this relationship with a zero sum. mojo of hoppers distant past is decreased while the mojo of financial company is increased. led zeppelin music mojo is decreased while increasing cadillacs mojo. but after these exchanges, one does not move on with the original amount of mojo intact. we can make a living and make compromises, because i know life is messy, but why not apply some reasonable ethics to your business affairs. i have made plenty of decisions that were certainly a compromise for financial reasons. but i also could have made considerably more money had i simply taken every big pay day offered. i dont say all this to pat myself on the back. it is just that i feel a sense of balance in this area. like evrything else in life, all is not black and white. i would feel like a real asshole is if i was using my youthful rebellion to sell some evil corporate deathburger. but hey maybe thats just me. or that just might be my intellectual vanity. but then that would be a topic for another post.

2007-02-04T23:13:00.000-08:00

every year on super bowl sunday there is a thought that occurs at least once, "i want to write a song about super bowl sunday". i never watch the super bowl. this idea comes to me every year as i spend an afternoon in a nearly uninhabited city, while everyone else watches their televisions. it is a particular space that i really enjoy. something beautiful about an empty city; like walking through an abandoned worlds fair. i am reminded as i happily move through this stillness that i have never felt like i was built like most folks. from the get-go my wiring dictated that i spend my time away from, rather than amongst, the herd. talking with belle over breakfast, there was a late teen/early twenties kid at the next table, alone on a series of different but uninterrupted phone calls. talked with the phone almost a foot away from his face. always curious to me. he was talking about betting on the super bowl. couldnt help but hear. now let me first say that there were a few things he said that betrayed he was a decent kid. but the substance of his conversations could at best be called inane. i began to think about my inane youth and about my nephew. hes four months old. how will he deal with the unforgiving gauntlet of youth. come his teens will he feel awkward and out of place as i did. if not, good for him of course. but i did think that it seems like my strategy might not have been such a bad one. you are suddenly hit with a tsunami of hormones while simultaneously realizing your parents and any authority figures in your life are full of shit; but you havent yet got the life experience to fully fill out your own world view. why not just lay low for a bit while the dust settles. learn a thing or two about the world on the down low then emerge an interesting young adult. if you are a young person, or feel love for a young person, who doesnt seem to have the herd instinct that most folk have, i hope to buoy you up a bit. i know that one of the most unbearable aspects of my youth was that people constantly told me that i was in the prime of my life. youth is everything. if youth was everything then i had nothing and there was nothing but worse coming? the most important thing that my mother ever told me was that her life didnt get good until her twenties. that was the only time i had ever heard someone say anything like that. i couldnt agree more. contemporary america doesnt really value aging but i do. for all of youths vigor there is also ignorance and self absorption. as a wise man once said," you dont often get anything in life. you only trade one thing for another." i for one am happy to trade in what i had for what i am getting from aging. so there. another super bowl sunday and i didnt write the song but at least this year i wrote something.

2007-01-25T09:35:00.000-08:00

last weekend, belle and i went to see a performance by the kronos quartet at ucla. the show has been resonating with me all week. really inspiring show. the most fascinating piece of music was the first one of the night written by j.g. thirlwell (better known to most of us as 'foetus'). it hasnt been recorded yet but it is one i am going to keep my ears open for. its called 'nomatophobis'. really difficult listening music. i told my wife that i thought kronos were smart to begin the evening with it because it took full concentration to get anything out of it. if it had been later in the evening it would have been difficult to give it the full attention it deserved. which made me think again about the role of music in our lives currently. it was such a rewarding evening of music because the quality was so high and it had my full focus for almost two hours. that combination is increasingly rare in our world. i so rarely listen to music like i did some years ago. it is the background sound while i check for emailsmstextgooglesearchpornimwikidvdhdvoicemails (ha that just made me check my phone for new email). at some point i learned, and this applies to everything, good food, film, etc. that the things in my life that have enduring power, took some time for me to initially appreciate. things that are catchy are generally ephemeral. i have come to believe this so completely that i have begun to recognize things that i 'like' differently. i have begun to get better at recognizing that something, here its music, has a quality that is initially intriguing and not necessarily overwhelmingly seductive to me. that recognition is subtle and not always reliable but i have found it to be a much more interesting compass. i have called that more subtle lingering charm the 'resonance factor'. will the movie i saw come to mind in a daydream a week later, for example. not everything has to have this deep significance, of course. fun and sparkling charms are great to litter ones day with as well but that is easy and they take care of themselves. i have to put a little effort and focus into something that i might find initially difficult, weird or, heaven forbid, boring. instead of a constant cycle of sugar high and a sugar crash i need some things to endure. at least a little.

the rest of the evening was michael gordons 'potassium' also beautiful and unrecorded. two traditional songs from iran and iraq that were good too. clint mansells music from 'requiem for a dream'. i almost always like clints movie music. a piece by matmos who i always find have a very clever process for producing music that i found ultimately unsatisfying. and the show, pre encore, ended with a piece by einsturzende neubauten who, among flipper and others, was some of the music i listened to as a boy. i liked being contrarian then but i can see now that was also the beginning of being able to recognize that there might be something beautiful in something initially repulsive.

2007-01-18T23:34:00.000-08:00

sports it seems has always been the working class mans theatre. a way for people not artistically inclined to watch their beliefs and mores played out on a stage. analogous to their struggle and the competition of living. if living is competition. we seem to belive that in america anyway. so its sort of a perfect analogy for an imperfect world view. all this sets up tonights analagous sports observation. i am a fan, unfortunately, of los angeles' hockey team. i know a considerable amount more than i should about them. they are an awful team this year. awful. the general manager of the team every year has something called 'breakfast with the gm'. he meets with season seat holders and fields their questions. i was not there but read a report on the net. the season seat folks were pretty upset. did i mention the team is awful? awful. so the gm starts addressing their concerns about the state of affairs, including some of the big mistakes that he is responsible for himself. can you see where this is going? i hear the reasons why he made the decisions he made. he takes responsibilty for bad calls. talks about what he is going to do and what he is going to try doing with candor and authenticity. i dont always agree. but his forthrightness and leadership are convincing of his qualification for the job. he has assessed the situations well with some wisdom and clarity and plans to continue in the direction he was going in with appropriate adjustments. ok i know this is getting obvious. i thought of our stubborn monarch, king george bush ll. he is a man (i use the term loosely here) that has always made a big show of being a leader. the author of the phrase, "i am the decider". i think it was shakespeare that said,"methinks he doth protest too much". if you have to keep reminding people that you are the leader then i would suggest that you are not leading. during his entire reign he has operated with the belief that we did not need to know what he was doing or why he was doing it. he has created what jon stewart aptly called the most complete "catastrofuck" in iraq. it has gone so completely wrong it is almost perfect. he has now retreated into a tall tower that he shouts from the top of, alone; rice and cheney notwithstanding. by keeping everyone shut out and now being isolated, he has given no human being any faith in his decision making ability. speaking with my wife, raised in england, we talked about how much all of us (houses of congress now included) sound like we are talking about a king. we all talk about not being able to change his mind. we wont be able to stop him from playing his godforsaken (evidently right?) war. he is the stubborn boy-king of old english monarchy. awful.

2007-01-12T09:50:00.000-08:00

its strange to spend so much time thinking about being an american. i traditionally havent spent much time on the subject. it is amazing what effect the debacle of our current presidency has had on us. i have very little experience in the realm of feeling patriotic. i can remember wandering around the monuments of washington dc in the middle of the night (they are all quite well lit at night) on tour back in the janes days. i was moved, as intended, by the enormity of the accomplishment of these men in crafting this american political experiment. that is the only really emotional experience of patriotism i remember having. i find this feeling generally hard to come by for a number of reasons. most recently, i have allowed other people, the wrong people (from both the left and right of me i should add), to define america for me. when i hear americans like susan jacoby speak about america i can recognize the beauty of the acclomplishment we are all a part of. beauty that is of course complicated. what, that is true, isnt? as she spoke about the intentions of our founding fathers to keep a division between church state i felt stirrings of patriotism. these men all believed in god. most were christians. they were wise enough, and susan mentions that the last person executed in france for blasphemy was twenty years before they drafted the constitution, to know that church being seperate from state meant there would be a better chance for true freedom. this is inspired. i know all the usual and cynical complaints about this stuff. they have been dogging my every word as ive written this. i was a teenge punk rocker for a second after all. but cynical criticism is often mistaken for good solid skeptical reasoning. and without noticing, this cynicism can become a refuge that keeps one safe, 'right', and for me at least, ultimately unsatisfied.

in an unrelated story, i am aware of the fact that you are all more interested in music news than in my broader human blathering. fair enough. i am a musician after all. so on that front, negotiations have officially begun with a company about finding a home for my solo stuff. lawyers are talking to lawyers.

2007-01-02T16:28:00.000-08:00

2007. hello all. we are returned from paradise. must report that there is at least one place left where peace still exists. you know i had this little rant written about this that i found at steven johnsons blog. but i decided to delete it because why start off the new year with the same old crazily fucking absurd story. right?

instead i will start with the cheery winter story of the donner party. i watched a dvd from the american experience doc series. beautifully done by the brother (?) of ken burns, he of the epic civil war documentary. very much in the ken burns style. but anyway, i digress. the point of all that is to get to alexis de tocqueville. the documentary begins with a quote by him. he continues to amaze me. i will really sit down and read him one day when i grow up. but for now i will continue to marvel at his insight into america and americans in the little snippets i find littered throughout our culture. he made these observations in the 1800's no less. the 1800's. this particular quote is not only appropriate to the doomed donner partys decision to find 'the shortest route' to california, but is also, i think, appropriate to the holiday season and the crazy wake of shopping that follows. it sums up eloquently a major theme in my work, in my spiritual struggle and in our collective and unexamined dreams. have at it.

"it is odd to watch with what feverish ardour americans pursue prosperity, ever tormented by the shadowy suspicion that they may not have chosen the shortest route to get it. they cleave to the things of this world as if assured that they will never die and yet rush to snatch any that comes within their reach, as if they expected to stop living before they had relished them. death steps in, in the end, and stops them, before they have grown tired of this futile pursuit of that complete felicity which always escapes them." -alexis de tocqueville

2006-12-23T10:10:00.000-08:00

ive been pathetically uninspired for over a week now. nothing worth posting. but i am looking forward to getting out town tomorrow. my wife belle and i are going to a friends house on a cliff. he has lent us his house three out of the last four years. my wife and i hibernate from christmas through new years. recharge the batteries. its become our yearly ritual of replenishment. so anyone within earshot, i hope you all get some good time away from whatever makes the grind part of your daily grind. paradise is not wired for the net so i will not be here until 2007. peace in wartime.

-e.

2006-12-15T11:12:00.000-08:00

some frivolous fluff for a friday morning. just returned from a surf. good celebrity sighting. fiona apple. living in la this is not so unusual. but that woman is an unusual talent. it amazes me that with our obsession with celebrity we have distilled celebrity to its essence. we are often no longer concerned with how our celebrities achieve their fame. we just want famous people. of course, paris hilton is our current poster child for this. we have a remarkable knack for seeing what we want to see; for projection. the work of shigeo fukuda comes to mind. his work is perspective specific. he makes objects that look like a pile of nonsense until you look at them from just the right direction. or in the case of one of my personal favorites, unless it is lit from a particular direction and the shadow cast reveals an order not obvious in the original object - a floating mess of eating utensils creating the shadow of a motorcycle.

2006-12-11T10:43:00.000-08:00

Just found a website for a woman that i consider the great love of my youth; Bernadette Seacrest. She wasnt a singer then but she is now. She IS now. She has a myspace page for anyone curious. Torchy stuff. To pull off this sort of music i think you need at least a certain amount of genuine soul. Otherwise its unlistenable. Bernadette has this quality in spades, both as a person and as an artist. This footage of her doing a half-speed version of Billie Holidays 'My Man' is fucking gorgeous.

2006-12-10T21:16:00.000-08:00

FYI - the lennon cover song shirley and i were going to do for an upcoming benefit cd is now not going to happen. there was a misunderstanding with the scheduling so we are now left short of time. unfortunate. this time of year always becomes a really difficult time to get anything done.

2006-12-05T08:28:00.000-08:00

i have had a piano in the house for two months now. this experience reminds me of one of those moments in my early creative life that shaped my outlook. my friend chris and i discovered an artist in a gallery at ucla. my friend lived directly across from the college so we would often wander across. one of the things we did regularly was visit the art gallery there. one day the gallery was showing an artist named laurie anderson. she went on to do some great things (like o superman, united states parts 1-4) and some pop songs, not so great, in the eighties. but this afternoon at ucla i didnt know anything about her. in fact i didnt even know what a performance or a conceptual artist was. i was struck by her gallery show and kept my eyes peeled for magazine articles and interviews. in one that i found she mentioned that she did not practice violin after a certain point because she didnt want her playing to sound like television; too perfect. i have used this strategy (and the quote) over the years. in fact, i dont know if this is apochryphal but, i heard somewhere that the talking heads all switched instruments on the song naive melody. such a great song. but back to the piano. i have noticed that my guitar playing has improved and my knowledge of chord/key structure has grown, i have begun to sound more and more like all the professional musicians i know. i have always been more concerned with creating music that has a vibe or mood than in crafting crafty pop songs. i believe there is generally an inverse relationship between pop knowledge creative instinct. they arent mutually exclusive but there is a danger there. i know the restlessness that comes with the basic medium of songwriting. but i dont want to make music more and more like sting. i have no eventual jazz or math metal aspirations. therefore keeping myself naive in some respects as i continue to learn as an artist is a goal. i am a rank amateur on piano. this means that i can 'discover' really basic chord progressions without being aware that i have re-invented the wheel and therefore continue writing with an energy i might lose if i was on guitar. on guitar i would recognize that i have been playing some really universal chord progression and either stop completely or begin to think about how to dress it up. the dressing up usually means thinking about what key im in and therefore what usual rules apply and then not surprisingly, it starts to sound more usual. more like everyone else.

2006-11-30T21:45:00.000-08:00

ive been tweeking on this symposium all week. discussions of god vs. science by some of the heavies; dawkins, ramachandran et al. i know most folk dont have the inclination for three days worth of discussion but i thought that i would put up a link of one two hour segment that is especially dramatic and well argued. both sides were a little better represented here. otherwise the conference has been pretty biased toward science. which i of course enjoyed because of the unusually large anti-religous resentment i have been carrying around recently. unlike in my youth, i now generally try to keep my feelings about religiosity to myself. but then again that is usually much easier to do. if it interests you then there is lots more to see at the symposiums main site.

2006-11-28T09:04:00.000-08:00

today i am reminded of the fact that i have always had an escapist relationship to reality. i remember riding in the back of my parents car hoping that aliens would come take me to their planet. after reading the chronicles of narnia i remember pushing through the hanging clothes of my grandmothers armoire looking for a portal. i wondered when i wandered any forest if i would be able to find bag end. could it be somewhere under the ground of this world? then age twelve and thirteen i discovered lsd and mushrooms and began searching around in the inner world of the expanded mind. there was a line of connected electricity to all these explorations that were a lusty search for a reality that was more interesting to me than the one i dealt with everyday. add to this that i was a shy and uncomfortable kid who was always ill at ease around other folks. this same spirit has changed its superficial look but remains with me to this day. i find the usual life unsatisfying. i get restless with the usual choice between lifes little contests (money, tv size, freeway traffic battles) and the boredom of routine. i am still looking for the portals into more interesting worlds. but after being continually disappointed by the 'magical' ones, i now look to this world for escapes into wonder. there is plenty that is true that gives me this adventurous feeling. there is plenty that we dont know that is a rich source for wonder. the more i learn, the richer is my experience of our ignorance. i am glad to see that it seems that science is beginning to assert itself more vociferously into the public sphere. not just passively being used, when convenient, to 'support' some religious claim when it fits and then summarily dismissed as 'just another kind of religion' when it disputes a silly claim. i read a fascinating book some years ago about a conference held at m.i.t. on alien abductions. now i dont believe that little jawas are traveling millions of miles to earth because they are interested in getting a look up our asses. nor do i believe that they could navigate all that space only to blow it in the final mile and crash into new mexico. but people are really motivated about these ideas. that in itself is interesting to me, for example. i understand all too well the impulse to make this world more interesting. a world filled with ghosts, mind reading, gods who smite bad people, alien abduction and government conspiracies is more exciting than one without. but this world is infused with all sorts of more reliable wonders. and pursuit of the reliable ones doesnt have the darker side effect of increasing our gullibility, easy belief, and addiction to simple answers. these things that make a population easy to control.
oh yeah, by the way, in addition to caffiene this was all started by hearing about this guy.

2006-11-27T11:41:00.000-08:00

the job of an artist is, at its most basic, a simple act of (as raymond carver put it) bringing the news from my world to yours. for many reasons we are all then able to find some sort of comfort in the fact that the world is seen by others as similar to or related to our own. we have a community of at least one other. i am reminded of this because we are now entering the gauntlet of the christmas holidays and this is a particular time of year when i see a world around me that seems very different from my own. i feel that i am beeing carried along by a large wave of crass christmas commercialism that is dictated by the markeplace to the tune of "little drummer boy". and every year i am visited by the brilliance of the film 'brazil'. there is a sequence in the film where a character is attacked in a mall and overcome by bits of christmas wrapping that are floating along the street. i am buoyed up by this image every year. i remember it and it gives me a small comfort that though it may seem it sometimes i am never really entirely alone.

in an unrelated story, a good one for the world full of wonder category, has anyone else seen this story about an elephant recognizing himself in a mirror. such great interesting creatures (social sophistication, funerals etc.) even before this latest news.

2006-11-19T16:36:00.000-08:00

Just looked at some photos that a friend of mine is showing here in hollywood and here on the web. the photographer is jennifer finch of L7 fame but i knew her before she was a rock star. There are pics from the very early eighties. Flea, keith morris, henry rollins and that ilk. There is one of yours truly, age 17, long before janes addiction was a glint in anyones eye. It is proof that i was once a truly unremarkable and pimply young man. When i looked at these i was again struck by the good fortune of my life. The fact that i can remember being that age and seeing a reproduction of an artwork called "barney's beanery" in an art history book. I saw that it was housed in a museum in amsterdam and i remember thinking ,"how in the fuck will i ever get to amsterdam." But when the circus came to town i was able to leave with it and i have been on an extraordinary ride from that moment forward. I have since seen enough different countries to leave me tired of it and grateful to be able to spend the last year here at home with my lovely wife. Speaking of which, fyi, there are two of my ex-girlfriends in the photos as well. Good stuff.

I actually did years later wind up stumbling across the barneys beanery installation at the museum of modern art in amsterdam. I had forgotten about the fact that it was there until the moment i saw it.

2006-11-15T23:42:00.000-08:00

jesus. has it really been this long since my last post. i dont have anything to say right now. ive been sick so the only thing ive done for days, really, is watch television on the couch under a couple of cats. i can feel my mind atrophy. one thing, i thought id mention. i have written mostly about politics on this blog. this because of the intensity of that part of our american world these days. but from the way people have been posting, i thought it worth mentioning that i am happy to talk about anything musical. questions. thoughts. whatever. i am a musician. i am not a political pundit.

speaking of music, it looks like shirley manson and i (with some possible help from some friends) are going try to cover a lennon song for an amnesty international/darfur charity cd. spent another afternoon with her a couple of days ago. she really is the best woman in rock. i really appreciate people with a complicated world view. especially these days in the climate of easy answers and all the religious nonsense. it seems that thoughtful rationality has been in short supply. speaking of rational thought. found a really good podcast ive been listening to. its called skeptics guide to the universe. info at: http://www.theskepticsguide.org/. has the intellectual rigor but is also really human and conversational. beats listening to mall punk radio music in traffic.

i hope i feel good enough tomorrow to head out to jpl for a lecture on black holes. should be interesting. wow. what a fucking ramble. shirley told me that, if i am going to do a blog, i have to be consistent. even if i have nothing to say. just say that i have nothing to say. so here it is. and was. nothing.

2006-11-06T09:23:00.000-08:00

it is the eve of the election. if i was a man that believed in prayer, i would be praying alot. i would be praying that americans would use their last chance to send a message to the world that we all did not, and do not support our current administration. what we do on tuesday will be more closely watched, considered and debated everywhere outside the united states than it will be here. if we do not send a clear message to our government, and by extension to the world at large, then we will have missed an opportunity of huge proportion. if we do not take back houses of government, then we will in effect be saying (as we did with the bush re-election in '04), that we, the american people, approve of the violent and simplistic way that our government has been behaving. if we do not stop bush cold, if we then elect a more moderate conservative (like mccain) as our next president, we wil have given our approval, consistently, for eight (and then possibly twelve) years and in front of the eyes of the world, throughout this awful and important era. we will have lost many more hearts and minds, including our own. think. vote.

2006-11-02T09:10:00.000-08:00

i think that like most folk (especially american folk) i do not normally consider myself a political person. in more reasonable times i see the battle across the aisle of government being fought by two teams with remarkably similar styles and each representing lobbyist and special interest groups that i know very little about. this battle, in most years, is fought basically to a draw that looks more like kabuki theater than any real exchange of ideas. nothing drastic happens. certainly people dont die at the rate they are dying these days.
it is one of my core beliefs that the most effective and consistent way to help the world is to ask people to look at their lives through art. it is arts charm that makes it subversive. and i guess that there is a core optimism buried in here. because i also must believe that people, in general, are good. when we make rational decisions, with little intrusion from fear, we tend to make basically decent decisions. so how do we operate from that reasonable place. we enlighten ourselves and each other when we can.

when i heard recently that north korea was returning to multi-lateral talks, i thought i have to give bush props because he didnt cave and now l'il kim is returning to talks as bush predicted. if i am going to complain about the awful job our president is doing, i have to transcend my resentment of him to credit him when he does something right. if i dont do this then i lose my ability to be fair and i become a schoolyard name-caller with a schoolyard world view. in short i lose my soul and join the mob. it turned out my moment of transcendent generosity was short lived. now i know that a politicians life is a mix of trying to institute a sytem of government you believe in and another part playing a game you must figure out how to win; elections. this blend between ethics and gamesmanship is one of the more interesting things about politics. but as daniel schorr reported on npr here, beijing is reporting that bush sent someone to meet with north korea, one on one, to strike a deal to get l'il kim back to the multi-talks. things just seem to continue to be all games and no ethics at this point.

maybe after this election the democrats will win something back. some semblance of a balance of power will be re-established in government and my interest in politics can fade back to its pre-war levels. i wrote a song on my solo cd that is as close to a political song as i will probably ever write. its called "revolution (of no one)". it is about (amongst other things) the lack of a sixties style voice of dissent in this country. that our 'debate' seemed to have only one side arguing. hopefully, come nov. 7th, my song will be made irrelevant.

2006-10-24T22:40:00.000-07:00

just got back from a discussion between the writer steven johnson and a head of epidemiology at ucla. they were discussing stevens book, 'the ghost map', which is about 19th century london and its struggle with cholera and which i am currently in the middle of reading. really interesting night. made me envious of those who live in nyc. that city is always full of interesting evenings like this one. alternatives to the usual club/bar/movie/tv menu that i have found generally uninteresting since i was 20. stevens book, like many of his books, is really interesting in its approach. he is a multi-disciplinary thinker. on the surface, it is a narrative story about an outbreak of cholera and the eventual discovery of its cause and cure. just the story aspect of it and the setting (london 1845) have a dickens sort of feel. this alone i would enjoy, being a bit of an anglophile (married a half-british girl after all). but the book is full of insights and sub- topics that are fascinating and disparate involving urban theory, self-organizing systems, microbiology, post traumatic stress in post- 9/11 nyc to artificial selection pressures producing our ability to drink liquor with relatively little alcoholism.
wow im rambling again. big time. will stop here. if any of this sounds in any way familiar or interesting, read stevens book. its a great read and easy read.
inspire yourself though. you cant rely on anyone else to find it for you.

2006-10-19T22:14:00.000-07:00

not that im really impressed with the democrats but i do hope they win something back. only because i am tired of the republicans having so much power that they are able to frame every argument. there has been no dialogue for years now because the republicans have been able to set up all these false choices in front of the american people. you are for the administrations policies or you are for the terrorists. you are against gay marriage or you hate the family. you are for the republicans or you are unconcerned about the threat of terror. you have white christian religious values or you have no values. these are false choices. this is political checkers. it shuts down the actual dialogue because real topics get discussed. with all the difficult and arguably unprecedented problems this country faces we need a real exchange of ideas. this means we need both sides of the conversation. as corrupt and silly as our system is, and show me one that isnt, at its best it can produce a broad spectrum of approaches to most problems. and right now we need all the variety we can muster in our problem solving. variety breeds creativity and creativity is what we need. a distributed system is a better decision maker than any one man. especially when the one man is as limited in scope as george w. bush.

2006-10-17T10:14:00.000-07:00

just bought a giclee of an artist named ray caesar. he does very cool stuff. digital surrealist. he has a nice blend of obvious skill and technique (digital), with an eye toward the intangible. the intangible part is the what gives his work legs and makes it something that breathes well day after day. alot of his creative peers, some of whom i quite like, seem to lack that eye to the long view. they make works that are a quick charm with little lasting effect. not ray though. some of this might simply be age. ray is older. either way, rays stuff has a dark charm that lingers.

2006-10-16T13:30:00.000-07:00

Istanbul from my hotel window just because i am experimenting with this blog software and its the coolest city in the world.

2006-10-16T12:44:00.000-07:00

i finished mixing my record on friday. finished. friday the thirteen even. i know metaphors like this are over used but it really feels like a re-emergence from being underground. and that being said, as i come back up, my head clears and my eyes adjust, the landscape looks really unfamiliar. unfamiliar is, generally speaking, a good word in my opinion. especially in this case because the unfamiliar landscape im referring to here is the music business. i remember years ago, when people first started complaining about the illegal/legal downloading and all that it was doing to the music industry, i was not convinced that it was all a bad thing. i thought then, and i still think now, that the music business needed a shakeup. things had to change. with change there are inevitably pains and victims. granted. life is always like that isnt it? things needed changing. things have been changed. things are still dramatically changing. i find it interesting. the change that i have always thought is the most important is that an artist no longer needs to convince a man in a suit that people who dont wear suits will be interested in hearing the artists work. that was one of the biggest walls in the old system. now i understand that these days getting your work to those that care is a little like writing a poem on a piece of paper, folding it into a paper airplane and sending it out over a demilitarized zone. but when that does land in the right persons hand, they then share it with others and a special relationship has been created. this might not apply to the mega stars, who can only complain about diminished cd sales. but for the rest of us, especially those like me in the musical middle class, this is much more attractive than hoping to be one of a handful of bands chosen by a handful of corporations. so i begin to take and make phone calls and meetings to figure out how best to navigate these new waters, stay interested in what i do, and get my delinquent work into the hands of those it might mean something to. bell rings. bout begins.

2006-09-20T10:28:00.000-07:00

seeing bill clinton on the daily show reminded me of what a leader of the free world can look like. i had almost forgotten. over the years i have made it a goal of mine to better understand the views of people i disagree with. i grew up in a liberal household and have always led a lifestyle surrounded by liberals and therefore grew up with the belief that conservatives eat their children. i have often therefore found it difficult to understand their opposing views. but at the same time i have known that i am not being fully informed if i only hear the voices of those who parrot my own. i wish that i could remember the quote i once heard by jfk about how he would like to speak to those he disagrees with because he already knows what those that agree with him think. very wise words. that was my goal. to listen to, rather than constantly reacting to, the other side. as if there is only two sides. silly. but i started by listening to rush limbaugh (years ago now) at times on the radio. i know. trial by fire. but if i could start at an extreme i thought i might be able to most quickly learn how to swim by jumping into deep water. over time and in between expletives i began to understand some of the basic conservative beliefs. i could understand that you might believe that what is good for big business is good for companies that employ people and that the more people who are employed then smaller is the number of people who suffer in poverty. ok. if only it were all that simple. but i could see how you might approach things that way economically and socially. with these simple ideas i began to strengthen my ability to listen without reacting. needless to say i have long since stopped listening to conservative hate radio (or its liberal counterpart for that matter). but i do keep my eyes and ears peeled for conservatives, like governor mccain or tony blankley of the washington times and npr's left, right and center show, who i have continued respect for and can easily disagree with whilst fully understanding, and respecting why they believe what they believe. my concern is that the present administration is undoing my good work. it has finally gotten really difficult for me to listen to bush without just bristling. his 'conviction' has morphed into increasingly pissy stubborness and people continue to die as a direct result. and trying to watch cheney on 'meet the press', christ, i just kept fantasizing about grabbing him by the back of his head and pushing his face down into his soup. i once heard the dalai lama refer to the leader of china, because of his continued oppression of the tibetan people, as his greatest teacher about compassion or understanding. with that as the model, ive got an increasing workload with this administration. lots and lots to learn. lots.

2006-09-15T15:48:00.000-07:00

just got back from the banksy show downtown. it was a show that wound up being a lesson to me in the power of context when it comes to art and messages of dissent. at dinner with a friend, M, a few nights ago, i mentioned i was going to see this show. he said he didnt like banksy. found him too obvious, M said. i replied that he was just being an art snob. banksys 'art' is obvious. he is a graffiti artist i said. his works are messages of dissent. they are meant to speak with directness like a statement. not obliquely like a poem. they are not meant to subtly imply, nudge or allude to the intangible part of our lives in the way that my favorite "fine" art does. so there. that was the other night.
we now move forward to this afternoon. i am standing in the middle of this big open multi-roomed warehouse space. banksys stenciled graffiti are reproduced on canvases, and other surfaces that hang like canvases, around the room on the walls like art. like Art. gone is the boldness to it all. the boldness that i most appreciate and find exciting about his public work. the boldness now seems really juvenile. precocious but simple. simple like slogans. but because of the context they are in now, it is all preachy and uninteresting. if you put a guantanamo detainee at disneyland (like banksy did do) it is an exciting piece of dissent and its very existence is bold. it is bold even before you think of the content. then as you combine those two thoughts 'how did he get it done' with ' its a guantanamo detainee in disneyland' a third undefined relationship happens and that good click of recognition happens that makes you recognize something being good in art. but on a wall at an art show, both those supports are missing and you are simply left with his object of art. no depth. got it. next.
now all that being said, the fact that he is doing bold work like he does in the present political and social climate is not lost on me. i will continue to be charmed by the outrageousness of what he is able to pull off. i will continue to look for and appreciate the work he does about our world ON the world. but next time i might skip the gallery show. viva la revolucion.