"Yup, you're a real important person."

Goddamn how we delude ourselves. That might be the most effective way to exist and accomplish stuff, deluding ourselves. How else can you possibly justify the triviality of your boring, retarded life? Do you not realize that no one cares? Not only that, but no one has EVER CARED. And not just that either. No. In the future, yes, that’s right, no one will care either.

Deluding ourselves to some extent is kind of healthy though, if you stop and think about it. Let’s say I have a great idea and am motivated to pursue it. Wonderful. I’m geared up and ready to fucking go. Let’s hit that shit. That’s hot.

“Oh but wait, why am I doing this again? To gain some sort of cosmic acceptance and meaning derived from deliberately ignoring the pointlessness of my life by simply spending time doing things…to take my mind off of aforementioned?”

Great. Sounds good, let’s get to it.

Don’t They Get It?

Forget politics for a minute – I have a lot of trouble understanding why the notion of applying simple rules and regulations to something already heinously complex will result in anything other than a catastrophe.

Has anybody in Washington ever bothered to study economics?? Even the basic kind?

Has anybody in Washington ever bothered to understand the concept of incentives in government versus incentives as citizens? And why understanding their differences is crucial to understanding the real consequences of the policies executed?

Why would anyone want to give more power and money to these people? What else could they do for the public that the public itself couldn’t do on its own? Has anyone taken a look at government programs and how they are run? Do people enjoy themselves at the DMV or something? What the hell is going on?

Are people just lazy? Do people say “Oh, that sounds like a lot of work and expertise that I don’t have/don’t have time or money to get. Let’s just hand it off to the government and assume it will work out.” I mean, I can sort of understand this, it seems to make sense intuitively, but come on. It also seems intuitive that all girls, everywhere, are insanely attracted to me because I am special and brilliant. Thanks, intuition. You’ve led me to my masturbating alone in the dark night after night.

What I really can’t understand, is a given person’s blind faith in the power of these people. They are there to be liked. Fine, but can we at least CONSIDER that when they are busy “borrowing” a trillion dollars from the next generation of kid/adults that are allegedly on their way to turning into brilliant and high-yielding artists raised in privileged environments with nothing but degrees in “cultural studies” and a ridiculous sense of entitlement? These are the people you will be taxing the shit out of in 30 years, government. Good luck and Godspeed.

Opinions

“Everyone is capable of having an opinion. Opinions are also infinitely reproducible – and that tends to be precisely what makes most of them valueless.”

Finally Figuring Some Things Out

Okay, so I’m new at the whole ‘writing-cohesive-pieces’ sort of thing.

I’m a jazz trained pianist, and I’ve been doing quite a lot of classical work in the last two years. This means my primary music education involves strictly technical work sitting at the piano. The most involved I got with the technology side of things was recording a couple times in my friend’s basement, using his recording equipment. This was back in 2002, and we used a Fostex tape deck. Joy.

I own four keyboards, including a Wurlitzer electric piano from the 1960’s and a Roland synth from the mid 1980’s. That’s about it though. I own no software, nor do I currently even own a computer that may run that kind of software.

I’m the nerd among the other nerds that just played lots of scales and actually did what the teacher asked. In high school, rather than occupying my time trying to imagine what “blowjob parties” would be like, I spent that time trying to figure out why a major 6th chord voiced a certain way sounded so powerful. Not to say I didn’t love blowjobs, but I’d rather miss out now and end up getting more of them while on tour doing something awesome – like playing the major 6th chords.

In a jazz setting, people get together and literally improvise over the chord structures of a tune. There is a culture, a mentality, and a set of particular methods of practicing that accompany this. I was exposed to this in high school and much more during college. As happens a lot in college, your tastes and assumptions about the world and yourself change pretty frequently. For whatever reason, they weren’t headed in the same direction as the jazz-heads, so rather than try to assimilate, I made the decision to try something different. I had no real impetus for making the decision, except that I noticed myself becoming far more frustrated than I usually did every time I left a jam session.

“We get in the room, and play a few tunes, jerk off over them, and occasionally they go somewhere. We stop, congratulate ourselves. and leave the room with nothing for posterity.”

I just got kind of tired of it. There had to be more options available musically that I could fall into and love.

After trying a bunch of other failed ideas, I came to the conclusion that maybe there wasn’t any “scene” or whatever that could make me happy enough to feel good about myself. Maybe I had to invent one.

Great. That sounds naively romantic and legendary, and like a completely fucking endless amount of work. Inventing a scene. Or genre. Or whatever.

It could SUCK for all I know, and from what I’ve produced already, it is just barely escaping the void of suck. But I don’t care. I love doing it. And I love thinking about it and thinking about getting better about it. And I love the feeling that one day I’ll be good and free enough to do precisely the things I want to do. Its just some work I have to take care of in the meantime.

I Am Depressed, therefore Full of Unique and Profound Things To Say

Sometimes I wonder why the fuck I’m doing this. I’ve heard successful entrepreneurs reminisce about their times in the beginnings of their ventures – and they typically say something like “If I knew how hard it would end up being before I started, I wouldn’t have started.” Doing as much personally meaningful stuff when I’m young and helplessly ignorant is probably the best the to be doing. That being said, it is frighteningly easy to fall back into the comfortable verbal pat-on-the-backs of good friends and family who support you.

“Everything will be okay, you’ll make it. You’re talented, so you’ll make it.”

The reality is, none of it means anything. I literally doesn’t mean anything – and you have to know that, down to your core, that those words of encouragement, while nice and uplifting, don’t really mean anything. At that point you can decide whether or not to move forward, because if its vague words of encouragement from external personalities and motivations mostly influencing your own drive and fervor to accomplish stuff, then you’re probably fucked.

You can’t fall back on the sympathetic promises of other people, because they aren’t you and definitively do not share your motivations. They don’t care, nor should they necessarily care. They aren’t you.

The only thing left is to take complete personal responsibility for what you want to do. If you’re going to feel truly liberated as a human being then this is essential. You have to take responsibility for who you are, what you are at least attempting to do, and see it through to the end. No bullshit. No “Well, if I had these things, then I could move forward…”

No. That’s horseshit. Either move forward or don’t, and take responsibility for whichever you choose. Its a visceral and unpleasant feeling, but the deeper you explore this the less you want to head back into what you were before.

And its a process. I’m starting to get that making art is not a glamorous or romantic sort of thing. All the audience tends to see is the product, and well, yeah, there is glamor there when it works. But the process of getting good at making it? Making GOOD art? Its a pain in the ass, frankly.

Don’t get me wrong, its a profoundly uplifting process, and there is nothing sweeter than the feeling of having worked on something and being able to contribute it, no matter how shitty – but it also sucks a lot of balls and brings out the most exquisite feelings of worthlessness you’ll ever encounter. Cheers.

Brett

Do You Know The Number of Intervals Between Two Pulses?

Funny but important question I asked somebody during Christmas over beers and Jimi Hendrix: How many intervals are there between two pulses?

The context is musical. The pulses could be, say, quarter notes, but think of it primarily as pulses. How many intervals of time from one pulse to the next?

The answer is: a lot. Infinite, actually.

The answer seems kind of obvious, but there are larger implications to this. What do you do once you know this fact? If you’re a musician, how do you use this to your advantage?

When you listen to some of the best musicians in the world, what makes them good is their ability to hone in on those infinite intervals, and to skillfully play with them. They can tease and prod and stretch the time itself. This is a rhythmic phenomenon. Listen to the Meters or James Brown or any good funk band, they all have one thing in common – that fucking pulse is relentless. Its brutally honest and human, and this is what is lost with digital drums and some recording software. More importantly, the musicians themselves have practiced their ability to feel these pulses, and all the space between them, so that they are free to imagine the larger musical image they are trying to convey.

To think of it another way – close your eyes, take a tennis ball, toss it in the air, and try to clap your hands precisely when the ball hits the floor. Its surprisingly easy right? Which leads to another question – where is this intuition coming from that allows you to determine accurately when a ball hits the ground, despite having your eyes closed?

Answer: gravity.

No fucking shit, right? But that is, once again, what makes some excellent music excellent. We derive the concept of pulse based on our sense of gravity, and our sense of gravity is innate (or particular to this planet).

Watch somebody hit a home run – even before the ball clears the infield it feels pretty obvious when they’ve hit one. Even before that, you can tell by the way the bat is swung that it will connect beautifully with the ball. That’s gravity. That’s having a honed relationship with it.

Take a caveman – one day he sees a bird feather fall from a tree and float back and forth in the air until it hits the ground. The naturally fluttering movement of the feather strikes him as funny, so he runs to his cavewife and shows her, using his hand to demonstrate the motion he saw the feather make. The cavewife intuits the hilarity of the movement without him having to explain it.

Or take basketball – you just somehow fucking know when somebody is going to make a shot, the moment the ball leaves the athlete’s hand.

So this is a cool concept, and not foreign to music. Its all the same. Take a guy like Thelonious Monk, by all standards NOT a great pianist. And yet listen to his sense of rhythm – it more than makes up for his lack of pianistic command and expertise.

Our sense of gravity informs everything. Fucked up, right?

Being a Know-it-all is great, if all you want to do is know things

When you’ve committed yourself to researching a particular field, the most important thing to remember is that its not really about who did what. Being able to recall dates and people is helpful when trying find factual data to support your case or argument, but its not the same as being aware of and understanding the long-term principles that have either been transgressed or used competently.

Take music-marketing, something I’ve gotten interested in and knew next to nothing about about 6 months ago. I’ve subscribed to lots of blogs, and some of them, the blog posts themselves are literally “link dumps” with a brief, if any, extrapolation on the content of the links. And there are many links. Hypebot.com is a great example of this.

I read as much as I can of Hypebot.com – its like an hourly updated newspaper that appeals to the micro-universe of music and marketing. However, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t completely overwhelmed at times. A night or two ago, I was reading through his archive because I had missed about a week of his posts. Because of this, I had a shit load of posts to catch up on.

In scrolling through them all, clicking on the links and reading through them all, I felt really uneasy and insecure – no matter how much time I spend on this stuff, I’ll never be able to know and recall everything. I’ll never be able to keep up with all this information and still get all the work done I need to get done in my life. I stopped reading and sat back in my chair. Why was I working on this then? Why am I spending time doing or worrying about something that is impossible?

Because what I was doing and worrying about was ultimately impossible. And unnecessary. In order to do what I need to do successfully, its not required that I recite facts and what particular move company x did then or whenever. I was reading this blog and others under the false and stupidly held assumption that in order to be successful, it required knowing these things and also understanding all the larger concepts. So I wised up and came to this conclusion:

Success in this career is dependent on my ability to absorb as much raw information as possible, try to follow the logic and patterns behind decisions that companies, artists, labels etc., make, and then to gradually infer some conclusions and place them in the context of what ought to operate well in the particular economic environment that I’ll be working in.

And even then success is not assured. I still have to execute all these wonderful ideas. That takes balls. It also takes, I’m slowly learning, a mild insanity and occasionally irrational belief in the purpose behind undertaking the entire operation.

Conclusion: the point is not to know everything. Because you can’t. So stop trying. However, you can learn how to think and process information, and that is what you ought to do, because then you can actively apply it to what you really love to do. Leave the details for someone else, like a lawyer.
(Also, having music that doesn’t suck and that people actually want to listen to helps a lot too)

I'm a baby and my ideas suck – but I'll be back tomorrow

What I find utterly baffling, and at this point in my music career, I really still shouldn’t, is how fucking difficult it is to simply play or put down on record the ideas in your head. I can imagine all sorts of awesome shit, multiple melodies going everywhere, rhythmically inventive phrasing, and yet when I sit down to work the things out, what I end of conveying is a laughably botched version of what’s in my head.

The magic going on in your head ends up becoming banal and unexciting in reality. What’s worse, is the  ideas are often just okay.

I would be fine with finding out an idea itself sucked a fatty. Great, at least I know I can get rid of the thing. But if it turns out so-so? When you finally have it recorded, and basically the whole idea in its entirety ends up sounding, well, ‘alright I guess,’ what the fuck do you do? I know what I do.

I stare at the computer and slouch in my chair, depressed and disgusted, listening to the idea over and over again, hoping there is some further genius hidden in my crappy tracks.

There is hardly any further genius hidden in those crappy tracks.

However, the only responsibility I have is to keep working on this stuff. Every damn day. I’ve sacrificed a lot already to get to this point where I can comfortably spend the time to work out these ideas, and I plan on sacrificing more. Why? Because I’ll be fucking miserable if I don’t. Being miserable and working out this stuff beats being miserable and not working out this stuff. Easy. Its not really the most romantic and compelling way to frame the decision to work on the things you love, but then every true artist* needs to learn not to take the pussy route and assume you’re climb to success will entail sunshine and handjobs from beautiful girls. No. Its the kind of thing that gnaws at you, and you either relent and do your work, or you take some other route and let it fester inside.

Either way, its up to you. I know I’ll be back tomorrow.

*My definition of a ‘true artist’ is not a successful one, nor an unsuccessful one, but one who works on their craft as much as possible, almost every day. Read The War of Art by Steven Pressfield if you want to get good at this.

Oh, you're calm and composed huh? Well F&#$ YOU!!

Having begun my personal drinking career around 18, an admittedly late age, I’ve since then been one of the many casualties in the inevitable resolution of an excessive evening – the hangover.

You know how people tend to refer to things involving death when questioned about their innermost fears or intense dislikes? Yeah. Well think about this:

During the course of the shittiest hangover you’ve ever had, I GUARANTEE at some point in the following day that you’ve either thought or said aloud:

“Somebody fucking kill me. Seriously.”
And meant it. I mean, really meant it.

Death is not the worst thing ever. Death is not even close, because you’re at least, you know, dead.

It is merciful that the hours preceding the hangover are characterized by a typically boisterous and uncaring sort of demeanor. The casually dismissive attitude that damns the consequences of drinking 4 shots of bad tequila and half a bottle of scotch to catch up with you. Stupid.

What I find comically tragic about the whole experience of getting bombed into oblivion is that past a certain level of booze, you’ve reached the point of diminishing returns. And yet no MATTER HOW APPARENT THIS MAY BE, THE POSSIBILITY OF STOPPING IS LAUGHABLE AND GENERALLY MET WITH DISDAIN.

“What, stop now? I’m already beyond the point of no return. Besides, these girls aren’t going to pass out on top of themselves.”

I could take a more philosophical route and posit that people do this because they are trying to rid themselves of the Ego and find the Self, that pure and uninhibited state that all narcotics and alcohol users seek. The problem with alcohol is that at some point, as uninhibited as you might become, your motor-skills take the “fuck you” route and do not join in the crusade – and then you look like every other deserved fucking idiot – too drunk to stand, too drunk to talk, and too intellectually weak to contribute to meaningful conversation. Grunting, using uncoordinated hand motions to direct others’ actions, and spilling things on people are not considered contributing to meaningful conversation.

Things You’ve said while Drunk

“Wow, you’re really cool. We should hang out more.”

9 times out of 10, you will never see this person again.

“Oh, dude! Great idea! We should totally start a band/group/movie/porn site/company/internet company/investment blah blah/cult/.”

All of these things, and their having been mentioned, will be forgotten by morning.

“I wonder if that girl I wouldn’t have shaken a stick at 2 hours ago fucks a lot. Thank god for alcohol. I wonder if she wants to fuck now. I’m tired of jerking off.”

I’m still consistently amazed at how much you’ll end up doing something even when you’re tired of it.

Those individuals with more self-control and awareness that tend to avoid this slide into worthless – I salute you and applaud your maturity.

Sort of.

I’ll catch up to you someday. I’m almost there. I swear.

Coming Home Late [read: early]

I went out last night for the second super-late night drinkathon in a row. I stumbled into my building, as under the influence of drugs and beer as the entire cast of Dazed and Confused, and extremely fatigued from the entirety of two months of a night shift work schedule, capped off with my just-mentioned two day bender. It was around 4:30am, and if you’re horrendously exhausted, drunk, and high at 4:30am, while just getting home – well, I can tell you that I certainly felt pretty shitty about myself.

I opened the door to my building to be greeted by a good looking guy who opened the door for me as I came through. I eyed him a bit suspiciously, because it was 4:30 in the morning, and what the hell is he doing in my building at 4:30am, let alone holding doors for me? I thanked him anyway and walked upstairs. On the second floor, I catch the eyes of a woman jiggling her keys into her door, and she breaks out in that unmistakable “it’s embarrassingly early in the morning and I’m drunk and feeling highly irresponsible about my life” smile/half-chuckle. The gentleman who let me in downstairs must have been her beau for the evening. So here I was, struggling up the stairs at some heinous hour, eyes bloodshot, clothes generally unkept, body unshowered – and the two of us just had a human moment. There was NOTHING that needed to be said at that moment – our acknowledging the comedy within our similar circumstances transcended any need for further clarification. So we gave each other a subtle nod and laughed a “Good night!” in each other’s direction.