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 .........

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.

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.

O B A M A

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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.

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.

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.