Trying to Stop being Clever

  I was reading a letter written by Pedro Almodovar about the Academy Awards ceremony. This isn't going to be about The Slap. Neither was Pedro's letter. Anyway, he mentioned early on in the story that he doesn't watch his own films. I've heard that about actors as well. I have a musician friend who once said something about getting "caught" listening to your own music is some sort of taboo. Well, I'm here to say that I do listen to my own music. For one thing, you can hardly help hearing it when you're writing it, practicing it, recording it, mixing it. But once it's done, does it go on a shelf, never to be listened to again? Is it "uncool" to listen to your own stuff? Well, I don't listen to my music because it's the cool thing to do. I listen to it for several reasons. First of all, I'm listening for ways that I can improve it. As I'm going through the production process, I listen to it in the office, in the bedroom, in...

I've seen a lot, and to use the modern parlance, a lot a lot a lot, of dramatizations of backward time travel. You know, where someone goes back in time to meet their parents, or to discover the answer to some mystery, or just by accident. Whatever the reason, there are many complications. We've heard of the "butterfly effect" that can cause untold changes in future history from the smallest change in the past. The dramatizations often address certain aspects of this, but they can't possibly capture all the many changes and the drastic result of such interference. There's also the fact that, if backward time travel were possible, wouldn't we be all too aware of it by now? The people who come "back" usually end up going forward again to where they came from, like time travel is a round-trip ticket. Aside from the presumption that, for this type of time travel to be possible, many (if not all) points in time must exist simultaneously, there are so ...

So-called "Cancel Culture" isn't about taking things away from you. The removal of possibly-offensive items from the offerings of some companies is not about depriving you of these things, it's about the companies wanting to no longer contribute to things and ideas that offend some people. It's a basic business principle: give the people what they want. If the majority of people are calling for change, most big companies will make that change in the interest of business. I can almost guarantee you that there are changes which have been made in the past for exactly the same reasons as the recent decisions, which have benefitted you. Just to get to where we are now, to where you have these things to be outraged about the changing of, has taken many, many generations of change and progress. When the few cry out that injustices are being inflicted on toys or cartoon characters by those who control said commodities, what they are really saying is, "I value the sta...

I'm glad someone is thinking beyond Drake's Equation and considering more aspects of the possibility of extraterrestrial civilizations. But there is something they don't seem to be considering (I wonder if they are). It may seem juvenile to bring up dinosaurs, but there, I just did. In considering the evolution of an intelligent life form, and the development of civilization, do they consider the role that dinosaurs played? When narrowing down the likelihood of a life form going through a similar process as Earth humans did, you have to recognize that the odds of the catastrophic event that killed the dinosaurs happening on these other planets at around the same time in the evolution of said sauropods would be very slim. So, on a planet similar enough to Earth, where similar events have taken place in the evolution of life, doesn't that suggest that something akin to dinosaurs would develop first? With the unlikely event of a catastrophic end mirroring that on Earth tak...

I know there are ways to buy notoriety and recognition, but I'd rather earn them honestly, by having people decide they like me rather than shoving me down their throats so they have no choice but to recognize me, to then have me "grow on you." Do I want success as a musician? Yes, that would be nice. Do I want superstardom? No, I'm pretty sure I don't. How, then, would I define "success"? Well, I feel I am successful in life. Heck, I've even been successful as a musician, in that I've learned to play and continue to improve, I've performed for people and had positive reactions. I've even sustained myself financially as a member of a music group. The only thing I have yet to do is to provide for my family by way of playing/writing music. That's still my eventual goal, however long that takes. That's the dream. The question lingers about whether, once it becomes my "job" will it then feel like a burden and ruin it for me....

I want to tell you about my friend. My friend is a very talented instrumentalist. I met him a long time ago, a guitar player, a friend of friends of my brother's. After just hanging out and partying, like amateur rock-and-rollers did in the '80s, we ended up together around a cassette 4-track machine. He recorded one of my songs. It was one of the first times I can remember that someone else showed an interest in my music. Later on, it happened that we were in touch and decided to form a band. I still had my songs, and he still had an interest. Chocolate Zulu was born. Existing in the dining room of a house in Monrovia, CA (211 S. Alta Vista Ave), Chocolate Zulu wrote, played and recorded around the Los Angeles area for maybe a year and a half, two years. After that I moved to Atlanta. I had tons of new material from a musically active period, and I recorded a whole new collection of songs ( Up From Here ). I played around with the songs at open mic nights around the city, a...

The Rosemarys was a band from San Francisco in the '90s known for their light-tastic live shows. They were generally categorized as "Shoegaze" in style (Wikipedia calls then "shoegaze-dreampop"). I had never heard of them when I used to trade cds at my local used record shops, and I came across a used copy of their second, eponymous album. Some of these shops had listening stations where you could sample the used product before buying it. I picked up "The Rosemarys" based on the cover, and I went and put on the headphones. The vibro-guitar and the understated vocals grabbed me immediately, and I bought the disc. I, too, was dreaming of Manchester, and it really "struck a chord" with me. This was in the '90s (they were probably still playing shows at the time) before the internet was a household thing, so all I knew about them was what was printed on the sleeve of the cd (come to think of it, I might have started with a cassette and bo...