The Turtles

Tonight…as I write this, in fact…Flo and Eddie are doing their Turtles songs 4 blocks from my house at an outdoor concert. I couldn’t attend so I’m enjoying the metaphysics of media by catching them over late summer air currents while watching and listening to them on DVD. The result is a mix of understandable late-career reality mixed with their early 70’s performance in Frank Zappa’s “200 Motels”. I’m getting a double-whammy convincer that these guys have strong vocal and performance chops to be admired whether they are doing pop material or “avant-garde” outside stuff.

Dog Days of Summer

I see a lone young man walking down the Ozone-less sun-drenched sidewalk sucking on the straw protruding from a Gulpmaster 3200 unrecycle-able plastic vat full of high fructose corn syrup, red dye, and ice cubes made from murky city water...

I'm keeping the good thought through the Dog Days of Summer...

Guitar Player Audiences

An audience of guitar players is the most tedious audience I can imagine. They demand that you be "interesting", while an audience of real people asks that you open doors.

Now and Then

Yesterday I showed a friend how we can do a forward-delete on our MacBooks by pressing function/delete. He kept asking, “Why would I want to delete something I haven’t written yet?” He retriggered my ongoing internal question, “What’s the difference between a Zen Master, someone who can’t think outside the box, and an Alzheimer’s patient since they all live in the moment?” A bit of a Zen koan in itself…

 I first began pondering this question while caring for my mother during her final years as an Alzheimer's patient. Her body had helped her quickly and effortlessly conquer a discipline  that I'd spent years studying and trying to achieve...