Universal Health Care

No links, no one else's opinion, no grandstanding - just what I think. Health care in the United States of America is a right, not a privilege. For those who oppose it because it means the "socialization" of the U.S.A., I counter with an appeal for them not to use public roads, not to send their children to public schools, not to use the public library and suggest that the U.S. Military should be outsourced to private industry - maybe Haliburton. That would cement the anti-socialist cause.

For those who are afraid that a government run option for health insurance would undermine free enterprise, then, perhaps UPS and FedEx should be our main mail carriers and we can get rid of the U.S. Postal Service all together. That would take care of one of the socialist complaints, too.

Listen: I work for a state run hospital. I have a health condition that requires constant care, medication and supervision. I can and do work full time and at a job that requires a relatively high level of skill - I am one of those folks at the computer help desk that does everything from reset passwords to modifying interface preferences on the back end of clinical medical record / ADT /billing applications... not just sweeping floors here - I work this job and I have the health insurance offered by the state and the hospital and the university that it is attached to - and still, a full third of my income goes toward insurance co pays. Though my job sounds like it should be a high paying one, it isn't. My doctor has actually told me that I might be better off financially if I were to go on disability - and he states that I would qualify. That is so very sad if you ask me. Here I am, able and willing to work. I pay huge fees for insurance and the rest of the money goes to co pays and spend downs.

Some tell me that if I feel that I'm under paid that I should get another job elsewhere. Fine. I have no problem with that...except for the fact that under current law any insurance company would be able to deny me because of the pre-existing health condition.

I do not have all the answers and I know that members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate and the Office of the President don't have the answers either - but a change is needed and what is being proposed is a far cry better than the system as it stands now.

Redesigned Website

So much is going on these days. The DURATION show at the Blue Note on July 25 was great - lots of good feedback. With that show over, the same personnel now are 100% Hormone Junkies. YAY! We're practicing for a show in late September at the Earthdance Festival here in Columbia, Missouri. We'll be playing a few of the same songs from the DURATION show, plus three songs from the new HJ album: Arsenal - which should be out by then.

Before all of that happens, though, I want to have good, working websites up - for myself and for Hormone Junkies. I am not the most fluent at such creations, but I do what I can. I've started reworking my own website http://DEStudios.net and I'm somewhat pleased, but it doesn't have the interactivity that I was hoping for. I'll be tidying things up in the next few days and then I hope I'll be able to get to work on the Hormone Junkies site.

In the meantime, I am totally jazzed about the prospects of getting back into the swing of things.

DURATION Video Tickle No. 2

Here's a video "tickle" of a rehearsal for a reunion show of a band I was in back in the 80s called DURATION. The show will be on Saturday, July 25, 2009 at the Blue Note in Columbia, Missouri. Only 2 of the 3 members of the band are able to be in the show, but the third member, Bob, has given us his blessings. Me, Stuart, I'm on guitar and bass, Cathy Wickell is on drums, and sitting in for Bob Brass on keyboards is Hormone Junkies electro wiz, Richard Cravens.

It's Sarah Palin....AGAIN

She's BACK! And I'm almost as tired of her as I am of "Michael Jackson is dead, let's act like fools" prime news coverage. But, because I actually have respect for the work that Mr. Jackson did and I have none whatsoever for what Sarah Palin has done, I offer up one more time my song and video in honor of her nothingness.



More love coming soon....

Woo HOO! It's AudioBoo

Here's a preview of the upcoming series of podcasts that will be available for download.

Thought for the Day

>> Empty handed I sit before you and behold, there is an instrument in my hands;
I travel here on foot yet I ride on the back of a mule;
And when we pass over this bridge, it is not the water that flows beneath us,
But the bridge. <<

--paraphrased and reset from Fudaishi

Mental Dystrophy

I have been working up a set of music that I can play in coffee houses and the like with minimal setup and equipment, yet with enough of a technological edge as to challenge the listener. I want to show a certain realness and humanity to digital, electronic sounds. I want to tell a story, but, since I am a part of that story, it's hard for me to narrate it from the outside. Sometimes I feel as though my abilities are diminished by atrophied real world skills.

While recording the music that I've been practicing, I come upon, from time to time, examples of what happens in odd inspired moments that others might never know except for the fact that I have caught them on the computer before they scurry off into the aether without other humans ever hearing their twisted but insightful sighs.

Here is one that was caught recently. I've called it Mental Dystrophy. Flawed and clumsy at times, brilliant and facile at others, I am happy to allow others to share this intimate time with me.

Been making nose again

Despite having a chest cold these last few days, I've been inspired to get more music out. Several weeks ago I got the BOSS Loop Station out and started tinkering with things and ended up creating several soundscapes that seem to work just fine. I submitted them to Tesla Software, a company that creates several great iPhone apps for optimizing brain power. Skeptical? Don't be. It's good stuff. Here's hoping they like what they hear!

In the meantime, I'm getting the three pieces from the Loop Station session ready for release. It will be, as is often the case, free with an option to donate.

And now, I need to walk Max and then get back to bed. Health and Wealth and Happiness, y'all!

Olympus Mons Video

I got an HD camera but I don't have any good HD editing software - yet! The video looks like feedback but it's actually a recording of a couple of movies on TV edited with blinking eye images and some stills of the actual Olympus Mons on Mars.

Of course, you can still download the MP3 of the audio for FREE from the link on the sidebar to the right. Hope you enjoy, and if you feel like donating, that would be cool, too.

OLYMPUS MONS

Click on the images to get to the final (for now) version of Olympus Mons. To the right you will see a PayPal donation link. Please, do not feel obligated to donate, but if you like the music and wouldn't mind more, then I encourage you to help out. More than anything I want the music to get out there and for folks to enjoy it.

I've had a blast working on it and learning so much about Logic 8 and a host of other things as well. The more I do, the more I learn, the more I want to be doing more and more of this.

On listening to the track, you may notice some references to the great David Byrne and Brian Eno album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. To say that it has been an inspiration is just the beginning. If you don't know the record, do a search on it and buy it. It is nothing short of amazing.

As for the technical stuff, I used Logic 8 as my digital audio workstation software, the Mac OS X text reader for the vocals, Crystal soft synth, Logic's sound sculptor and Ultrabeat. I also played the guitars with the Line6 POD XT live digital sound modeler. The track was produced at Dangerous Enlightenment Studios in association with Stolenflowers Media with assistance from Richard Cravens.

In the not-too-distant future there will be a dedicated page for more music and podcast downloads, images and information about my work, Hormone Junkies and other projects. Again, if you choose to donate some funds it would be greatly appreciated but it is by no means necessary.

Thanks to everyone, especially Dick and Joel for all of their help!

Hit and Run - Brilliant

New Single Out Soon!

I've run into some snags with the release of the album Neologism, so I'm putting out a single for y'all. It should be available for free download by March 15. I will also be putting it up on iTunes and Amazon MP3, and I'll have PayPal links so anyone who feels inclined can help out the cause can do so. I'd be appreciative if you did.

Olympus Mons is yet another experimental slab of sound - different yet the same as my other work. I have abandoned the idea of creating guitar only music. It was a novel idea and the work I did with that mindset is good and has served me well. Time to move on. This time around I'm taking advantage of synths, drum machines, samples and yes, guitars. It's dance music. Insert goofy attempt at evil laugh here.

Stay tuned and stay alert. Don't let opportunities pass you by. Life is good. Challenging, but good.

Taking Art Out of the Entertainment Section

A friend of mine sent me a transcript of Karl Paulnack's address to the freshmen at the Boston Conservatory. This is amazing. There was no click back or source notation, but I'm posting the whole thing here because it is important. I'll write more on it later.

If anyone has source information, please let me know - I want to give credit where credit is due.

" Welcome address to freshman at Boston Conservatory, given by Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of music division at Boston Conservatory.

“One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn’t be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother’s remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school—she said, “you’re WASTING your SAT scores.” On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they LOVED music, they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren’t really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the “arts and entertainment” section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it’s the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.

The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture—why would anyone bother with music? And yet—from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am alive, and my life has meaning.”

In September 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. That morning I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn’t this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day.

At least in my neighborhood, we didn’t shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn’t play cards to pass the time, we didn’t watch TV, we didn’t shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang “We Shall Overcome”. Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.

From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can’t with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber’s heartwrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio for Strings. If you don’t know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn’t know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what’s really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.

I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings—people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there’s some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn’t good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can’t talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn’t happen that way. The Greeks: Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.

I’ll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in Fargo, ND, about 4 years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland’s Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland’s, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier—even in his 70’s, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: “During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team’s planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute chords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn’t understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?”
Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.

What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year’s freshman class when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this:

“If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.

You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives.” "

Layoffs Causing Remainders to Bail

My employer, under a hiring freeze has fired three workers in the past 2 months. As a result, there are not enough people to cover the shifts of a 24/7 help desk-call center. In response to this, management has redone our schedules and will, come the beginning of March, require us to work different shifts, ranging from 7 a.m to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, to 12 hour shifts from 7 p.m to 7 a.m. spanning weekends. Also, the workers will now be "on call" for covering for evening and weekend workers. To make matters more interesting, employees will not be paid for the on-call time. In short, our free time is now no longer ours.

We were blind sided by the email that arrived yesterday and, according to management, if we have problems with the schedule as it was delivered to us, we are to resolve the issues between ourselves.

It seems that the economic situation is now to a point that the reduced work force is causing more pressure on those who remain employed and many of them are now at the breaking point. For myself, this new schedule precludes my having a second job and caring for my mother who I visit nearly every weekend.

The new schedule almost seems designed to force us to quit. If any more employees are taken from the schedule, then coverage will be impossible. But, being a college town, management will, no doubt, be allowed to hire from the hungry pool of newbies at below fair market wages and save tons of money on wages and benefits.

Conspiracy theory? Yup. No doubt. Whether this is the case or not, the reality is that I cannot work the new schedule, my cube mate, a single mom currently on hemodialysis will not be able to work the new schedule and our former supervisor, a family man with a wife who rides to work with her husband every morning not just to save money, but because they only have the one car, well, unless they can get someone to pick one of them up way out in the country when their schedules diverge or when he is called in after hours, he will not be able to work the new schedule.

That's three of us. Three out of hundreds of thousands of people out of work.

The Sound and the Sway (reprint from MySpace)

The Sound and the Sway
Category: Music

When Dick and I first started talking about working together, before Hormone Junkies became manifest and long before we even mentioned the idea of a project together, we spoke about how music makes us feel. We listed bands, composers, artists and their works that caused that special surge in our internal systems, and those that initiated intellectual movement - soul and substance. We were up front about the fact that music, for us, was not a vapid method of passing the time, it was not a place holder for physical and mental inactivity, but an engaged essential state and process. Music was not to be played then not listened to. It was not to be performed and then not moved to. It was not just artificial environmental decoration - no. It is essential. It moves us on the inside and the outside. It engages us from the top of our brains down, through our eyes and mouths and throat and lungs, down and into our muscles and bones, our hips, our thighs and calves to our feet and our toes. It makes us dream and it makes us dance.

And that is how we got to "dance" music. A dance band. That's what we wanted. We wanted to dance. But, we realized immediately between us that our dancing was not limited to 120 beats per minute, kick drum on the down beat, syntho-throbbing, sub woofer pulsing club tunes, though we by no means dislike that type of dance music - we, in fact, love and embrace it. To us, though, dance music is so much more. We spoke to one another about bands like Talking Heads, the Orb, Underworld, and New Order. Groups that have gotten our hips and feet moving in the past - dance music. But, we realized that we also would dance to Yes's The Ancient or Sound Chaser and to Eno's King's Lead Hat and Energy Fools the Magician. Hell, we'd dance to the music of Elliot Sharp and Henry Cow. Our idea of dance music seems much broader than that of some of our colleagues. For us it's the sound and the sway, the meaning and the movement.

So, the sounds that channel through us, the music that we facillitate and the vibrations that we initiate, that music is all dance music. Sometimes it will make you dance, some times it will let you dance and sometimes it will dare you to. In any case, it is there for your head and hips alike. Al Gore reminded us that an African proverb states "when you pray, remember to move your feet." We offer foot moving music for all sorts of prayers.