As you may know, I am deeply interested in politics, in particular the subtle art of crafting imagery, shaping narratives, and building harmony to create something much larger than a moment’s victory. Yes, I want a movement. Oddly enough, these past few of weeks of writing about music have taught me more about love than anything else — I believe love it is what is uniting us at this moment and that is precisely why hatred can no longer win in America.
In 2003, I was drawn back into politics by Howard Dean, the man who gave voice to a dormant and disillusioned left, and in turn tasked me to use my newfound passion to participate in the political process. I genuinely loved what Dean stood for, and under his leadership I was never completely ruled by my growing distaste for George W. Bush, but that is precisely what the election became under John Kerry: a referendum on Bush’s first term, an outlet for my contempt, and a battle against those who absolutely loved him. We all know how that turned out.
Leap forward to 2008 and our present nominee, Barack Obama. Much has been written about his ability to unite us and even more will be said if he emerges victorious, but the one thing that’s missing from the conversation is love. Let me define it: it’s a deep affection for him and each other, an openness to the moment and the opportunity, a hope and hunger for something more meaningful, and most of all a sense of wonder that this is even possible. Here we are on the verge of electing an African-American man with a decidedly foreign name to succeed the most culturally divisive and thoroughly destructive Presidency in our brief history!
Is it any wonder that these stories like Charles meets Barack and Michael Shaw’s incredible post about James Armstrong, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s one-time barber seen in the photo above, are floating to the surface? Just look at the history on that wall, and look at that smile — it’s not smug or self-satisfied, it’s genuinely composed and content that each and every struggle has been worth it.
I can think of no better song than “Damn” to sum up the confluence of their dreams and aspirations, our shared trials and tribulations, and America’s chance to make history tomorrow. This track from George Evelyn, aka DJ E.A.S.E., aka Nightmares on Wax, and vocalist Chyna B. is dripping with funk, soaring with soul, and absolutely bouncing with the energy of new life:
Damn, indeed.
Completely ungoogleable by their proper spelling, !!! is more often both printed and pronounced Chk Chk Chk, but any other three monosyllabic grunts will suffice in a pinch. Like Brooklyn’s Gang Gang Dance, !!! is another New York band (with some from Sacramento, CA and Portland, OR too), and I thought their epic “Me and Guiliani Down by the School Yard (A True Story)” track would be an excellent followup to Monday’s GGD Song of the Day.
It’s difficult to escape the reality of our current situation in America: our economy is crumbling under the weight of its own inequity; our government is in crisis-mode with the Bush administration trying desperately to conceal the true extent of the damage they have done; our environment is changing, rapidly, perhaps beyond the point of no return; our human race is at war with one another over the last remaining drops of oil, soon to be water and food as well; and the list goes on and on. Yet through it all, there is an unmistakeable sense of hope, and a deep desire to find another way forward in the world.
People always ask me, “What’s so fucking great about dancing?”
How the fuck should I know? Yeah, even I can barely understand it
But when the music takes over, the music takes control
Here’s a message to you, Rudy and you, sir, Mr. Bloomberg
And the rest of you ties-too-tight dudes
Y’all could learn a lesson, by losing inhibitions, yeah
Losing yourself in the music, losing yourself in the moment
Because we have nothing more than this very second
You can’t count on the one coming after, no one’s sure about the one before
At the risk of getting all raved out on you, and believe me I was only barely on the periphery of that mindset in the mid 90s, what can and will unite us is love, and dancing, and living each and every moment to the fullest. I truly believe a singular focus on the here and now, with an eye toward our comparable struggles and common dreams in life, can bridge our most historic gaps.
My generation is on the cusp of taking control of our country, and all involved deserve a little dancing in the streets. Our work to end oppression and discrimination may be difficult, but it need not be drudgery, and I for one plan to keep on dancing, laughing, and loving for the next four years and well beyond.
Edited slightly after posting.
Charles Alexander was married for 69 years, but lost his wife just four weeks ago. Ever since then, he’s poured his heart and soul into volunteering for Barack Obama (via debha):
I can’t watch this without crying, but I am more hopeful than ever that Obama can truly bring about the change we so desperately need in America. Yes, change has become a catchall phrase in this election, but look into Charles Alexander’s eyes to see what it really means — it has nothing to do with him, and everything to do with making the world a better place for his grandkids and great grandkids. That’s a life worth living and a love worth sharing.
btw, music takes a back seat to politics on tankt today, but will resume with another Song of the Day tomorrow.
That’s how I feel about tankt right now.
Too many other more enticing ideas on my mind:
- I wanna see who. (Not really sure how.)
- Building and simultaneously demolishing grids.
- User vs. Designer vs. Developer. And the astonishing difference in my expectations depending on my current position.
- Apathy, decency, and subtlety. Fuck ‘em.
- The future. It’s about time.
- Too many tees. (They’re a walking banner ad.)
- You say you want a revolution. Get up. Stand up. Save your own damn self. Take the time to think.
- Is it feathers on a bird or lotsa different chickens?
- Machines for living.
- Embrace the glitch.
- Fragments. Bridges. Limited editions. 10” wax presses. Social mixes. Unconventional remixes. Oh, and a Truitt / Brown collaboration known as TruBro. Is that offensive?
- Outside.in in Brooklyn. Warp Records in London. Family in Ohio. Three in San Francisco.
And,
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
- Steve Jobs
What was once and always ‘all in my head’ is now ready to see the light of day. Like branches on a tree, some will thrive, while others whither and die. It matters not which is which, merely that they exist.
The rich tapestry of life seems especially so these days. After several years of deep and difficult introspection, I feel whole again, and stronger than ever. I am loved and loving more than I ever thought possible. I (really, we) feed and sustain me.
I am grateful for my lot in life, truly blessed, and finally prepared to share it with the world, not for gain or glory, but for the chance to make new connections, gain new experiences, and maybe just get a little closer to a deeper understanding of the world.
As always, more soon.
Today is the very last day of March, as I realized earlier this morning, which means that today is my very last chance to sustain my streak of posting at least once each month since May of 2007. Of course, I began 2008 as ambitiously as ever, with even loftier goals for myself, hoping to post to either one of my blogs at least once each day, but that quickly faded. So what happened? In a word, life. In another, love.
After so many years of living almost exclusively in my head — long and lonely commutes, brutal brain-draining work, and little time in between to barely breathe let alone heal — my wife and I gave birth to Sawyer, our bouncing baby boy. Abby was so in tune with her body and our baby during the pregnancy that even I was able to move into my own. It was a time to be, not think, and it worked wonders for me. I have never felt so alive.
Naturally, blogging has taken a backseat here — those first two months are killer — while I do occasionally post on Sawyer’s blog, I have hardly been standing still. I continue to work with this notion of doing from the being place, not the thinking place, and have begun to see an incredible shift in my life. Surprisingly, my dreams and aspirations haven’t changed, but my approach to them has, and now the idea of dwelling in and writing more about a “world of me” now seems wholly uninteresting, even to me!
Long story short, this post marks a turning point, not the first and certainly not the last, but definitely a sea change. What was once a blog all about me will soon become less declarative and more inclusive. I may be the beginning, but the story will no longer end with me — I want to open doors not shut them with my old “here’s how I see it and you should too” attitude.
In that spirit, I would like to close with an excellent new track from Beckett and Taylor, one of whom I have written about before, called “World of Me” — it truly is the perfect bridge between these two worlds:
Come play with me. The more I think about it, that might just be my new tagline…
I am not a musician. In spite of such a strong personal affinity to music, I lack even the most basic instincts among its instruments. Instead, I rely on my deep appreciation of it, one which admittedly borders on the obsessive at times, to bring me near to nirvana. To be sure, I am a helpless junkie, always looking for a new fix to tickle my ears and lift my head to the heavens…
I am fortunate to have met and become close friends with many extremely talented, and prolific, musicians in my life. We have, at various times, with various strategies, and with even more varying degrees of success, attempted to sell their wares on the open market. It was not an easy business to enter, let alone master, to say nothing of making a profit. Even with critical acclaim, the cost of doing business the old fashioned way (pressing vinyl, of course) was prohibitive.
Ultimately, we put those dreams on hold and went our separate ways. I was thrilled when Stewart Brown and I recently realized that we were living less than a mile apart in San Francisco, and finally reconnected after nearly ten years apart. We are older and wiser now, and while still foolish enough to dream that same dream, we are intent on finding new ways to fulfill it…
To be perfectly honest, I never stopped thinking of how best to market music, and these thoughts only intensified as this “second life” of the internet and its free and easy tools of creation came to be. Brown’s music is infectious (in a very good way) and made to be spread far and wide, and it has long been clear to me that the ease of “spread-ability” is the key to success. So we set out to eliminate anything that inhibits the free flow of music, starting first with the cost to acquire it, so that everyone can hear it instantaneously. That is why you can stream every song in its entirety within the page itself, and even download good quality 128 kbps mp3s (no DRM!!) for free.
I was adamant that we spend as little money as humanly possible (I think our greatest expense so far was buying the domain name). Brown wrote and recorded the music, I designed and built the website, and Kristin tied it all together with her words. If I may say so, it looks and sounds like a million bucks!! Check it out at FORKLIFT ENTERTAINMENT.
I want to point out and thank a few of the many people who helped make this happen…
To Hugh MacLoed and Fred Wilson, two guys who continually experiment and explore new ideas in real-time, right before our very eyes. Their passion and persuasion inspire me to no end. I had trouble finding a singularly illustrative quote from each one, but if you’re at all interested in reading more there’s a combined 71 posts tagged on my del.icio.us from Hugh and Fred.
To Bob Lefsetz, who sums it up best in a recent post entitled “The New Reality”, “You can’t reach them by asking them to buy first. Quite the contrary, it’s like catching a fish. You’ve got to drop quality bait and wait.” He continues, “You establish a beachhead. You try to get people to notice you. And the way you do this is not through endless cross-linking and widgets and all the tools of the helpless, hapless wannabes, but quality music. It’s the only way you can get recognized.” That’s the blueprint right there.
And lastly, to my beautiful wife Abby, who has lived through my countless great ideas and nonexistent execution, who nonetheless never once wavered in her support and always encouraged me to go for it. I could not have done it without you. I love you.
Wow, that was way more than I originally intended to write; still, I left so much out.
I think Brown’s music is poised to take off, and I believe our approach to doing business can help make it happen. I am so excited to see where this goes. I would love to hear what you think, so leave me a comment here or on FORKLIFT ENTERTAINMENT.
As always, more soon.
Someone recently said that I was full of ideas and perspectives, but lacked the foundation to make them real. I have the power and passion, the dreams and aspirations, but no roots. One gust of wind and the whole thing just crumbles…
The idea of having ‘strong opinions, loosely held’ sits well with me. Perhaps too well. I am often hesitant to stand my ground, much too quick to surrender. On the rare occasion I do defend myself, I tend to come across as smug, at best, or vindictive and spiteful, at worst. In the end, neither approach honors me or my ideas and ideals, to say nothing of those on the other side…
I was pretty damn clueless after leaving high school, and all throughout Miami University. I didn’t care much for class, but I became a voracious reader in my ‘free time’. One winter break, I devoured The Fountainhead in four days, later Atlas Shrugged in five. (You should be impressed: I doubt I read 2,000 pages in all of high school and college combined!) Late update: those were my mom’s books!
I spent a lot of time at the library after leaving Oxford. I was fortunate to live near the main branch in Columbus and often went just to pore over the architecture hard-covers you weren’t allowed to check out and I couldn’t afford to buy. I was especially fond of S,M,L,XL by Rem Koolhaas, but also any number of books by Daniel Libeskind, Bernard Tschumi, John Hedjuk, and Peter Eisenman. I’ll deny it if you ask me, but I was also known to check out calculus text books ‘just to stay sharp’.
I dipped into philosophy too, attempting to read all of the big pieces by all of the big names, but all of them bored me. Not so with Friedrich Nietzsche. His work sang to me. I read everything I could get my hands on, from the driest science to the densest prose. Later, I diligently read almost every Hermann Hesse book: Narcissus and Goldmund, Demian, Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, The Glass Bead Game, and so many more. The Journey to the East was one of my favorites.
As you might imagine, I thought myself quite wise. In reality I had at best a cursory understanding what I ingested. And now, as I look back on life, I realize how many of my most cherished ideals I based on that child-like wishful thinking.
I didn’t receive my first clue in life until I turned 25. And yes, I finally realized I was completely clueless: I literally did not have a single clue! As I traveled and saw more of the world, I became acutely aware of my woeful (and at times willful) ignorance.
I became cautious and apprehensive. Soon, I developed an unfortunate habit of adding a ‘but what do I know?’ disclaimer to end of everything I said, thereby negating the validity of my statements. That lasted through my late 20s, sad but true, until Abby finally pointed out the absurdity of my behavior…
Point being, I eventually stopped the tic, but I’m not sure I ever fully resolved the underlying assumption. What do i know? What do I believe? I am always bouncing in between bold leaps of self-assurance (or delusion?) and a grounding self-doubt (or reality?).
Vernon had this wonderful Buddhist text on his wall. This isn’t the exact wording (I never wrote his version down, as I thought doing so ran counter to the spirit of its words), but it’s close enough:
The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both.
You can imagine this sang to me as well. I quickly adopted this as my own, not without merit, but again perhaps without fully grasping the meaning. It became another way for me to separate myself from everyone else. What could have been healthy, and to be fair was and still is on some levels, became somewhat corrosive…
One of the themes in The Journey to the East is the idea of a shared journey. When this particular journey falls apart with the disappearance of Leo, H. H. and the others quickly lose their way. As individuals, each believes that he and he alone is on the true path. I understood that the journey did not fail, that each man failed the journey, but never applied it to my life.
Damn you, patterns. Yes, I have seen this all before, over and over again, and not just in books. After a while, the notion of it always being someone, or something, else at fault kinda withers away. Or at least it should…
I always hated the saying ‘perception is reality’, yet I have to agree with its meaning and believe in its relevance—after all, modernity is tailor-made for such a convenient philosophy. But step outside of the make-believe and it quickly falls apart in true matters of the heart and soul.
In many ways, the past year of my life has been much like my 25th. What I thought to be true—that I was aware of my spirit, engaged in my world, open to new experiences—now seems a relic of my early 20s. Fact is, I haven’t done the hard work to make it not just possible, but probable. Fact is, I haven’t focused internally in many, many years.
As mentioned previously, after watching Abby see such great results from doing yoga (she looks better than ever), I finally gave it a try. And I did it again today. I am amazed at how refreshing such a timeless pursuit feels in the face of all of our modern intoxications. I am somewhat surprised at how I’ve taken to it, but the combination of breathing calmly (confidently and consistently too) and turning my attention inward brings me to a new level of awareness. I even feel high for hours after the fact, the best high ever. =)
I know there’s a point or two in here somewhere, and perhaps it’s this: I have always assumed that I had it all figured out. I mean, I wanted it, right? Wishful thinking is not a strategy (yet another lesson I should have learned years ago). Or, the journey didn’t fail me, I failed it. I remain a shell of the man I want to will become, but he seems a lot more real and much closer now than he’s ever been.
It’s been a bumpy ride as of late, but I wouldn’t change it for the world. I genuinely look forward to waking up and going to work again, and I hate having to shut down for the night. I finally found a form of exercise that suits my body and mind, just like the music I love. I am (re)building my foundation. I feel like my dreams are within my reach. And I believe the best is yet to come.
NOTE: Slightly edited for clarity and consistency after posting. Gross generalizations kept in tact.