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Toronto Film Fest 2008 Early Short(er) List

This year the Toronto International Film Festival has cut back on its big splashy Hollywood fare and increased the number of screens for smaller independents from 29 to 36.

This is not to say the festival will be any less red-carpet worthy.

I find an unusually good selection at this year's Midnight Madness - from the Being John Malkovich-esque JCVD wherein the muscles from Brussels plays himself, dealing with being a has-been only to turn into a post-modern action flick, to the similarly half-documentary/half-tribute Not Quite Hollywood that celebrates or marvels at some of the pulp cinema that led to Tarantino's Kill Bill and Grindhouse. Other films I chose either because they geographically interesting or because their directors have consistently delivered at Toronto and also bring something new to the table (Mike Leigh, Michael Winterbottom, Denys Arcand, Deepa Mehta, Bruce MacDonald).

Here is my long short list which I will narrow down further as actual screening times and discussion unfurls:

TIFF 2008
[Film Title - Director - Country - Series/Genre - Notes]

Eden Log - France - Sci Fi - Midnight Madness

Detroit Metal City - Toshio Lee - Japan - Midnight Madness

The Dungeon Masters - USA Comedy/Sci Fi

Food, Inc. - USA doc

Garden/Ing - Japan

Genova - Michael Winterbottom - UK

Ghost Town - Ricky Gervais new comedy

The Good, The Bad, The Weird - South Korea

Happy-Go-Lucky - Mike Leigh - UK

Heaven on Earth - Deepa Mehta - India

Horn of Plenty - Spain/Cuba

Hunger - Steve McQueen - UK

In the Shadow of The Naga - Thailand

JCVD - Mabrouk El Mechri - France - Midnight Madness (Jean Claude Van Damme plays himself)

Me and Orson Welles - Richard Linklater - UK

Not Quite Hollywood - Mark Hartley - USA/Australia - Midnight Madness

Picasso and Braque go to the movies - Arne Glimcher - USA

Plastic City - Yu Lik Wai - Brazil/China

Plus Tard tu Comprendras - Amos Gitaï - France

Pontypool - Bruce MacDonald

The Road - based on the brilliant Cormac McCarthy novel starring Charlize Theron

Rain - Maria Govan - Bahamas (coming of age)

The Real Shaolin - USA/China (sports Doc)

RocknRolla - Guy Ritchie - UK

The Sky Crawlers - Animation - Japan

Slumdog Millionaire - Danny Boyle - UK

Synecdoche, New York - Charlie Kaufman - USA

Tears for Sale - Uros Stojanovic - Serbia/Croatia

Tokyo Sonata - Kyoshi Kurosawa - Japan/The Netherlands/Hong Kong, China

Tulpan - Sergey Dvortsevoy - Germany/Switzerland/Kazakhstan/Russia/Poland

Two-Legged Horse - Samira Makhmalbaf - Iran (doc - abuse/poverty)

Yes Madam, Sir - Megan Doneman - India/Australia

Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love - Chai Vasarhelyi - USA

Video games make playing God fun!

Will Wright, the genius behind the SimCity/Sims Online franchise is on year who knows what of developing Spore - a profoundly complex AI engine that looks like a cross between Playdough and Lego Mindstorm on the surface. This is not by accident - when I saw Mr Wright speak at the Bannff Media Conference several years back, he confided that one of the things that most influences his game design is Japanese zen gardens - the idea that though the landscape has been radically altered, dozens of iterations later it appears as though it had always been that way.

Spore is about building new organisms, or combinations of organisms from the uni-celled beginning to complex space colony end.

Sims is about moving virtual Barbie dolls around and seeing how they feel about each other and themselves. You can not micro-manage them, only give them subtle catalysts to work from.

But there is also another kind of playing God that doesn't have any game-designer objective behind it. That is the merge between old terra-forming software like Bryce 3D and map-making for gamers who love first-person shooters.

I am hacker when it comes to playing games - most gamers are - we like to see what we can can break about it before we commit to finishing it. Even Will Wright admitted this; the first thing kids do when they encounter a new game is figure out what the limits are - can you walk off the path, flip upside down, self-destruct, kill others, etc. This is how we learn the laws of its universe.

When I used to play Everquest - I had no interest in actually questing - I was more curious about using it as my new instant messeger. I would meet people in Qeynos and we would wander over to a willow tree I had found and chat. The game for me was to see how long I could engage total strangers in stimulating conversation, enjoying the vistas, without ever having to kill anything. Why does that almost sound creepy?

So you can imagine my interest when I see a map-maker become available in a first-person shooter like Ubisoft's Far Cry 2. Check out this vid:



I have little to no interest in shooting anyone. But I have a lot of interest in creating landscapes that I can walk through - not as some omniscient invisible Arrow Key Monster checking out my Thomas Kincaid wannabe digi-art (a la Bryce) but rather as a developed avatar with rich 3D, ray-tracing and texture on a next-gen console.

Halo 3 also worked towards this with its Forge software. And Bethesda's Obilvion on a PC is simply a dream for world-building - there are currently over 4500 modifications online created by user that you can implement into the world and see how it unfolds. Not all the mods work together, and many are redundant in ways that prove disastrous to running the game without a crash - but when you get the combination just right, you can get a near-cinematic experience with endless variation that has no time limit and no rules. My girlfriend and I use to play with a hyper modded Oblivion and then go out to a garden and comment on how much nature looked like the game.

And if you were to believe Plato. or the Baghavad Gita's discussions of maya - then you would recognize this is hardly a new idea.

Xbox and Netflix Team Up - Still Waving that Blu-Ray Banner SONY?

From xbox.com:

"At E3, Microsoft and Netflix, the world's largest online movie rental service, today unveiled an exclusive partnership to offer the ability to instantly stream movies and TV episodes from Netflix to your television via Xbox 360®."

Netflix recently introduced its Watch Instantly program that allows subscribers to view selected (that is, the titles already converted) titles instantly on their PC. A plan costing as little as $8.99/month allows unlimited viewing during that month.

Well here is the trump card Microsoft was holding as it took egg in the face over the loss of the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray war. This is not another Xbox vs. Playstation post nor is it an HD-DVD vs. Blue-Ray treatise - it is a celebration of the fact that at long last a massive high-definition video-on-demand solution exists backed by two of the respectively largest players in the world.

Yeah it's too bad it's an exclusive grab for Microsoft because it means not everyone will be happy; investors in Playstation will punch all sorts of holes in it, and lots of finger pointing will happen. But every time I go to NAB show and see the big TV players scrambling for what is going to happen next and we all wonder when Broadband random-access, full resolution, full-length programming video will be available (yes Vimeo.com is cool and looks nice but really, do you want to watch 3 minute programs for the rest of your life?) well its now. Actually, it is technically this holiday season (2008).

I was already radically changing my movie-viewing habits by staying home to purchase whatever might already be up on the respectively meager offerings from XBOX LIVE Marketplace - it was worth it for instant on-demand on my 46" HDTV. But with the introduction of Netflix and an $8.99 a month subscription to Netflix (with a $7.99 monthly Xbox Live Gold membership) - thus a total of under US$20 - I have access to tens of thousands of titles for unlimited use directly through my Xbox 360 with HDMI out to my HDTV.

But hundreds of questions arise as we contemplate the implications of this announcement. With Sony launching its video-on-demand (VOD) service on the Playstation 3, with portability to the PSP, are we caught once again in a format war - this time between Sony Playstation 3 and Microsoft's XBox 360?

What will the new console-based VOD universe mean for distributors?

How will actors, producers, film composers/musicians and the rest collect royalties?

What will differentiate legitimate films from indie YouTUbe fare? Surely studio releases will qualify as "legitimate" films and television, but what differentiates them? As a film studio, Sony and all of its subsidiaries has a direct interest in the films in makes available, whereas Microsoft simply wants to push as much traffic through so that it can participate in the home entertainment lexicon.

One may argue that the audience that doesn;t yet own an Xbox, may not be so excited about having to commit to the platform just to take advantage of the exclusive Netflix opportunity. But look at the inverse - with the Xboxers super happy with this seemingly limitless and convenient option, the advertisers and studios should be asking - how will they get the Xbox/Netflix viewers if they aren't in that catalog?
Bravo.

Save up for those Gucci 3D glasses

Hollywood has started to align itself behind the idea that the movie industry, despite a healthy summer take 26% over this time last year, is still seeing 5% decline in people's butts in movie theater seats.

They are meeting this challenge in a variety of ways, principally among them the idea that 3D is a movie viewing experience that can uniquely be appreciated in the IMAX 3D screening theater. The Hannah Montana movie of 2007 made almost 3 times as much on its 3D screenings as it did in conventional 2D theaters - earning almost 60 million in 3D showings off its meager 15 million dollar production budget.

The studios have taken notice, and there are no less than 25 3D movies in the production pipeline including comers from Dreamworks, Disney, Sony, Universal and even some independents.

Interestingly enough the companies that manufacture the 3D production equipment were caught off-guard by this sudden backing from Tinseltown. Caught with their pants down, they are now scrambling to get everything from cameras, lighting systems and stereoscopic editing solutions to market. And they are meeting the challenge - companies like Iconix, makers of the world's smallest HD camera showed a high-def stereoscopic camera system at this year's NAB show that can be had for somewhere in the ballpark of US$250K. Sounds like a lot, but that is just the first wave. Digital Ordnance showed a High-Def stereoscopic video playback system for newar realtime playback of your 3D content on set so you know you are getting things right. This is quite something considering the massive amount of bandwidth required to spit out synched, near parallel streams of full 2k HD of an array of hard drives.

But enough geek talk.

Another very interesting event that took place at this year's NAB show was the live satellite 3D television broadcast from Howie Mandell in Los Angeles. The company behind the demonstration, 3ality, has managed to acheive this using a simple single stream no different than 2-D television.

Yes, you heard me right. Live. 3D. Single-stream. Broadcast.

Samsung and Mitsubishi are already selling 3-D ready digital televisions, and recently WIRED magazine featured an exclusive stream of Bjork's new 3D video. They pointed out that the stream HAD to be viewed from their site because of a special encoder that permited it to work. see the trick here? it requires a proprietary encoder for playback - that means, until some hacker/coder develops a freeware/open source version of a hi bandwidth 3D streaming encoder, people can control where viewers access content. Advertisers LOVE this. And so do the content creators because they get financed by the advertisers. So 3D is big business and mark my words, before you can say "What is Blu-Ray?" you will be getting a catalog from Fred Segal's with a price list for the latest Gucci Polarized 3D glasses - you know the tortoise shell ones with the miniature diamonds in the arms.

Because in a year's time, you won't leave home without them.




ps. the above Gucci is FAKE and they had nothing to do with this article which is entirely speculative.

The Golden Age of Steampunk is Upon Us

Why do I feel like I have already posted this entry? Perhaps it is because I have been announcing the sentiment in the tagline for the past decade.

The etymology of "steampunk":

I first heard the word steampunk when my friend Matt Johnson, after editing my book True and Selfish Prophets commented how much he enjoyed the steampunk imagery. Though I had never heard the term, I immediately knew what he meant; my book is filled with "Gnostic technology", "dream gadgetry", "systems of gears and crankshafts", antikythera mechanisms, and a wraith-like blue-skinned creature named Archkali who skitters along the ceiling of the protagonist's dreamworld hovel on a system of wires and pulleys.

My interest in these things stemmed from my lifelong study of Alchemy, the Templars, secret societies, Darwin, the Kabballah, The Dark Crystal and Time Bandits, technology and my strangely inherent Luddite tendencies.

I began researching this astute term for my suddenly obvious obsession and was inevitably directed to Steve Jackson and his GURPS role playing system. "Steve Jackson came to it happenstance by drawing on his prolific genre bending to corroborate the pieces into what he coined “steampunk” but probably was an evolution from Cyberpunk. Indeed, the two share similar anti-social traits and usually embody those who are on the bleeding edge but living in the margins."

It is a logical progression. As Steve Jackson games are necessarily creating rich environments for their subscribers to play around in, as Cyberpunk was a rich palette in the early 90's to draw from, the seemingly natural migration of its system to other time periods like a hundred years prior to turn-of the century Mary Shelley/Emily Bronte/Conan Doyle/Jules Verne with all of its explosion of new tech is practically guaranteed.

I was amazed that there was never a dedicated section to the Steampunk genre in any video or bookstore and so I explored creating a tome that discussed its origins, significance, meaning and impact on our culture. I logged extensive notes on the topic and promised myself I would release at the very least a handsome coffee table book (because it is so deliciously visual) but feared that somewhere there was already someone beating me to the punch.

When I created my musician profile at garageband.com almost five years ago, I bypassed their stock music genres from the drop down list, selected other and input "Steampunk" as that which best described my music.

When I submitted my 40 page grant proposal to FACTOR in Canada last year, the section designated for marketing and style was replete with images of airships, copper gadgetry and citizens dressed in handsome teched-out Victorian attire. Despite the excellent proposal, I was denied funding - the evaluation gave me excellent marks in all categories but flunked me on this area.

Steampunk as a musical genre (what it might be):

What does Steampunk as a music genre sound like? Well I have seen the emergence of bands that claim they are steampunk because they Cosplay the genre while playing whatever kind of music they might, but rather than shoot them down for it, I would venture to be even more inclusive – for me Steampunk as a musical genre embodies that which merges an organic sincerity with an admission of a deliberate influence or interference of technology. By this definition, My Bloody Valentine (lumped under the Wombadelia umbrella in the Gen-X 90’s) is Steampunk for its organic somnolent breathy vocals and miasmic textures, while deliberately forcing the listener to be self-conscious of the very medium to which is was recorded by wobbling the whole 2 inch tape itself while playing back – breaking down the fourth wall. I submit that Steampunk may also be the more classic camera obscura organ-driven musical accompaniment to a Lumiere brothers screening, or perhaps Tom Waits’ Bone Machine, made of blown dynamic mics recording giant tin artifices clanged and beaten with sticks in a backyard shed. I hope that the genre does not ferment and harden into some self-parodizing gimmick that can be quickly discarded when the fad goes passé.

A few weeks ago I even promised my friend that within not five years but one year, kids on the street would be sporting monocles as the latest fashion trend. He looked at me as though I was crazy, but alas, even in this projection I was overly conservative. Just type Steampunk into the searchline at ebay and you will see how true this is.

I did the same with robots in the early 90's when I created the ironic annual holiday Robot Pride Day. Then pirates (when we formed the league of Sky Pirates in 1994). Now, in retrospect anyone even remotely jacked into the system would retort "big deal, that's obvious." It wasn't before Bruckheimer and Netscape and Pixar and licensing PKD happened.

But really I am not here to trumpet my prescience, but instead to contribute my two cents before this all blows up in the mainstream and saturation steamrolls the finer points into mass-marketed pulp. Because Steampunk is indeed now locked on with its Tipping Point.

So here are some lists and excerpts from my notes with some additional commentary. The lists are hardly exhaustive, they are just here to substantiate the prevalence of Steampunk in our culture:

Films:

Amelie
Brotherhood of the Wolf
The Brothers Quay films
City of Lost Children
Dark City
Delicatessen
Jan Svankmeier films

All Hayao Miyazaki films:
Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Castle In the Sky, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Porco Rosso

Metropolis
Stardust
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
Steamboy
Time Bandits
Treasure Planet
The Great Mouse Detective
The Dark Crystal
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
The Golden Compass
Van Helsing
Wild Wild West
Westworld
A Very Long Engagement

Tin Man (television)

Steampunk Subgenres:

Victorian
Gothic
Western
Post Apocalyptic
Fantasy
Dickensian
Post Renaissance

Steampunk Videogames:

American McGee's Alice
Myst, Riven
Arcanum
Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water
Oddworld
Final Fantasy series
World of Warcraft
Panzer Dragoon Orta
Gunvalkyrie
Thief

There are too many books to even open the category. Just visit Amazon and you will get more than you could ever want. But beyond the obvious Mary Shelley, Conan Doyle, and Jules Vernes, I do want to give special mention to the perhaps less obvious Bruce Sterling, Neil Gaiman, Diana Wynne Jones, Erik Davis, Isaac Asimov, Stanislaw Lem, Lewis Carroll, Mervyn Peake and Piers Anthony as participants in the genre.

I kindly request that those of you who are geeking hard on this genre do not flame me for including or omitting items, as I am posting my own research pro bono here - forfeiting the opportunity to participate in the coming landslide of money to be made from exposing this movement. I do invite your constructive comments, however.

A steampunk infomercial for WETA workshops custom Steampunk pistols:

Why is Steampunk relevant?

I had a band in the late 1990's called Ribcage. The band's motto was "air for flight, blood for rage." The name stemmed from my epiphany that the ribcage protects our breathing mechanism, our inspiration, our soul, and it houses our heart, our passion, our blood pump. It is the technology that serves as a vanguard to all that embodies our most sacred and important inner machine.

When I attended the Toronto film festival in, I think it was 2002 or 3, I had the opportunity to see Terry Gilliam do a very exclusive master talk for select members of the media. It was centered around the new film he was working on "Tideland." I had prior knowledge of this project because I was sent the script and asked to audition several months prior. I realized something as I approached the material about Gilliam and his subject matter, and the way he did things, and I wanted to ask him directly if I was near the mark. Here are my notes, in their original form from that evening:

Terry Gilliam says it’s mostly a budget thing, but even so with all the glories of CG he feels ultimately cheated; despite the visuals being there, there is a lack of credible tangibility…he likes the idea of found objects that you can touch and tinker with. And that’s really what this is all about isn’t it. Keeping the magic in our own hands in a way that we can grasp. As though we are the frustrated inhabitants of Flatland, we need the techgnosis to exist in a dimension beneath ours so that we can still feel as though it is under our control.

Gilliam says that the ubiquitous pipes coming out of everything for him represent a form of opulence as he grew up on a farm with an outhouse and the radio was a medium that forced the listener to use their minds eye to create the imagery. In London the pipes were due to retrofitted bathrooms growing up and around antique elaborations of architecture and so it also represented a form of urban sprawl slowly choking the landscape of tradition.

I asked Gilliam what the term Steampunk meant to him. He looked at me the same way I must have looked at Matt Johnson that day I heard the term for the first time, and yet knew exactly what it meant. Having earned his attention, I hypothesized that considering his obvious reticence about the positive influence of technology and bureaucracy (Time Bandits is about greed and power that comes from controlling technology, Brazil is about the terrors of bureaucracy and overindulgence in technological systems) that perhaps the lean towards the last industrial revolution - that which was powered by steam and coal - permitted an exploration of our irrevocable cyborgian reliance upon the machine, but sustained in a world of things and organica; that at the very least the age of steam resembled our human makeup in some way - where coal and fire is our heart and the steam is the air exhausting from our lungs. He considered it, visibly filing it away in some mental lower drawer, and then responded he didn't disagree.

And this, I think is the essence of Steampunk's true allure for us today; we are surrounded and often outpaced by the technology to which we are unsustainably married, and yet the interface is virtual and alien - not tactile and visceral, but representative. We call ourselves meat suits and wetware, but we are profoundly ensconced in the circumstances that arise from our interactions therein.

In his seminal book "Finite and Infinite Games" James P. Carse writes "in order to operate a machine, one must operate like a machine." We must change our very nature in order to commune with the object that empowers us. It renders us differently than we are and enslaves us to it. But steampunk attempts to reclaim some of that control - its origins are in a time of imagination, wonder and discovery as we plug things into wrong sockets to see what lights up, we tinker, modify, experiment, bend the laws of nature and influence the elements to serve our fantasy. It is self-empowering rather than overwhelming. It is a tweaker/hacker's heaven. It is populated by modders, do-it-yourselfers, independent researchers, alchemists, mad scientists and independents. Of course its time has come - nothing could better reflect the double-aught zeitgeist. It is the story of us fighting for our lives.

In his book Carse also writes that a machine operates from an energy that is introduced from outside of it, a garden thrives from energy that comes from within, from its own chaotic and variable nature. This inspired the name of my mid 1990's ambient music project "Automated Gardens" whose motto was "There will never be a future" - meaning, there is only a now. Our imagination is the seed of our tomorrow (I am now paraphrasing Kahlil Gibran).

Steampunk is the externalized manifestation of this inner urge to remain a part of the magnificent and mysterious world of which we are still a part.

This article is ongoing, and may be updated without notice. Your comments and contributions are invited.

the britney block and the erosion of n american media

It is a form of insanity, what the Buddha would call hardcore addiction were he to use the vernacular. We are in a riptide of obsessive compulsive behavior that has left mainstream media culturally bankrupt; everything is post-source to a degree that we are mashing up a mashup culture. Every news source now has a dedicated Britney block that is set to follow Britney, and any incoming reports on the subject trump all others. One tabloid promotes its cautionary tale examining what it is to live with mental illness with Britney Spears as its focus. beside it, another tabloid gleams about how you can learn how Britney lost 15 lbs in a month. Hrm. Mental instability / weight loss. I wonder if there is a co-relation in this case? Could it be the girl wouldn't be half crazy if she wasn't being followed around by a bunch of lecherous spectacle vultures all day?

As South Park eloquently illustrated, she is this year's sacrificial lamb, whom they wait to execute in the town square so they can move onto their next virgin. Hannah Montana anyone? The druids did it because they wanted to please the gods, but what do we gain from this mania other than to stuff the holes in our psyches, those perturbed emotions and over-stimulated nervous systems, than junkie-level distraction?

But I turn this lens around on you now: how ya feelin? Little kooky?

If you want to know how to scratch that itch, check out nature. Try silence. Take a vow of silence for a week - don't comment, don't talk, don't attempt to mitigate. Just focus on impartial awareness. If you embark upon this, I further recommend at least temporarily discontinuing exposure to the noise - of the radio, the internet, the television, the game console. Check in with your self and register What's Up. This will be hard. It will feel like you are going crazy for a day or two or three as your mind grasps for something to satisfy its insatiable hunger for information. And then something will shift. You will begin to detox your nervous system and perhaps even, in recognizing your aversion to the mental clutter, begin to abhor it the way an ex-smoker abhors cigarette smoke.

I am not presenting anything here that you do not already know. I am simply substantiating that it is going on. Here. Now. Here. Again. Now. Like knitting. Loop in. Now here. Loop in. When you have reconnected to the immense richness of all the things around you in the present, your junkie-mode for all the attention grabbing drivel of the mainstream media will begin to appear as it really is - a desperate and petulant child crying out for your attention. You can either feed it, or let it exhaust itself and restore some equilibrium and have a good life.

And from that place, you will create. You will become a source. And then, I will blog about you.


---

I am attending the National Association of Broadcasters convention this week. This year's conference has a heavy focus on content creators. I am interested in hearing with what they want to populate the multiplicity of broadcast "solutions." I do not have any disdain for the content creators; they have stories to tell and they need your attention to get the funding to tell them. some will bail out and fall prey to sensationalism. some will figure out a way to transcend that and win you over by virtue of a virally active word of mouth based on merit and innovation/genius. I look forward to reporting back to you.

Blu-Ray vs. HD DVD - the end of another format war

Here at the Culturepin I provide a form of virtual safari through the bleeding edge landscape of the world and contemporary society. Suffice to say it is a treacherous terrain filled with uncertainty and conflict that requires a certain mad bravery to traverse. Even more treacherous is attempting to predict what will unfold around the next bend or come to pass just over the horizon.

So I avoid being a soothsayer, but rather, an echo of what is going down on the frontier. Which brings me to today's subject - the latest format war in the VHS vs. Beta legacy, namely: Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD.

Here's a very condensed version of what is one of the dirtiest and most agitated format wars in history:

Blu-Ray, a format developed by leading company NP Infotech and co-developed by Matsushita, Pioneer, Philips, Thomson, LG Electronics, Hitachi, Sharp, Samsung, and Sony (a collective that named itself the Blu-ray Disc Association as recently as 2004 - all this to say Blu-Ray does NOT=Sony per se), aspired to be the new high-definition playback and storage format for laser-based media.

On the other side of the proverbial laser-based media universe, was Toshiba with HD-DVD.

The shakedown was that Microsoft released an HD-DVD player for the Xbox360 and Sony went with Blu-Ray for its PS3 gaming platform.

Millions of emotionally charged discussion board posts later, Wal-Mart, that proverbial lynch pin of all things mass-marketable, announced it was phasing out HD-DVD and going exclusively with Blu-Ray. Just two nights ago - Valentine's Day, 2008 I said that if Wal-Mart goes with Blu-Ray it's all over.

February 15th, 2008, Engadget, a popular technology blog, thrust itself onto the global stage by boldly announcing the end of HD-DVD based on Wal-Mart's announcement that it was going with Blu-Ray and citing reports from Reuters that Toshiba planned to stop production at its HD-DVD factories and thus the meme percolated throughout the format battleground.

None of this is absolute - however, for those who have been watching from the sidelines, wondering when they can start ordering their high-definition entertainment content from Amazon - you now know which way to hedge your bets.

Two things to ponder:

1) When a format wins, it is not necessarily because it is the superior format
2) When VHS killed Beta, there was no internet community

In the meantime, I am going to enjoy the copious bonus features on my Children of Men HD-DVD from my Xbox360 and wait for the prices of the remaining HD-DVD catalog to plummet so I can get another 350 or so titles that were released in the US for pocket change.

Disclaimer: I am not an advocate of either company or format - I have a Sony Bravia screen and I use Sony Vegas software, while I am inputting this entry on my Toshiba m300 Satellite laptop.

The Future of Music Has Arrived

And it looks like MGMT.

Ironically, I am already late with this band because I first heard about them on a Rolling Stone magazine of top ten bands you haven't heard of. They just played the Echoplex in Los Angeles, and are touring small venues across the country but in seconds they will be opening for Radiohead and Arcade Fire, and then they will be headlining the Hollywood bowl in Yes/Fleetwood Mac fashion.

I don't say this lightly. I never say anything lightly, especially when predicting the future. But we have all been waiting for the pendulum to swing us out of the oppressive culture war in America of the past decade, waiting to see how the fall of the Old Industry would ultimately scatter - and now that everyone from Prince and Radiohead to the upcomers have bucked tradition and the record deal dream - the new superstars are emerging through the new sub-radar channels. And MGMT represents all that freedom.

Their video for Time To Pretend accomplishes even more succinctly what Beck attempted with his retro video0feedback bonus features - dissolving the precious facade of bling and perfectionism and photo-realistic CGI and lays it out just as it is - a playground in the virtual realm, just as we used to play in the now quiet jungle gyms in our worn out cities.

We are now living with a generation that has always had an internet there. It IS their playground. It is where relationships and first kisses, and bruised knees and drunken parties formed. It is all the guts and spit and blood and bubblegum of life in real-time with real consequences, and the watchdogs are equally circumvented, and the contrarians gather in underground clusters, and every once in a while something comes along and shakes it like a Christmas snow scene and the whole thing illuminates into a fiber optic mantle display.

The New Wave is a revival of 70's hedonism, Steampunk (that callback to the What If that connects our electro-static smattered wetware to the organic), ninjas (the covert assassins of the establishment) and Pirates (self-explanatory and no it has nothing to do with Jerry Bruckheimer and Johnny Depp).

When my band Blue Dog Pict covered itself in stage blood, dresses and twelve foot puppets, it was to erase the lines, plug things in to the wrong sockets and see what lit up. There was no such thing as web browsers back then. MGMT has that and now you don't have to somehow catch their show to see what I mean. MTV doesn't need to decide it fits into their programming so that you can see the video. It can come right at you.

Here it is.

http://www.court13.com/TimeToPretend_480.mov

Now go play. The future is yours.

This is a test - ready for my vlog

The Culturepin pushes in

Ok, enough journaling and pontificating, let's get down to the root of what The Culturepin is really about - putting the pin on the ever accelerating limn.

Coolest new things I have seen this fall:

1. A Japanese company is developing exercise equipment that transforms human exertion into electric power - now the gym can recycle its own energy! (seen in Wired Mag)

2. Zero-fee multi-person video calls with video voicemail that actually looks good (and spews out a healthy 15 fps) has finally arrived - discover the good news at oovoo.com

3. OLEDs are finally hitting the market - Organic Light Emitting Displays are like bio-Lite Brites that will enable manufacturers to create paper-thin display screens. Can't wait to get my Hi-Def baseball cap that plays my latest YouTube vlog above the visor.

4. Casio's new Exilim camera has a built in YouTube encoder that captures video at YT's optimal video rez and uploads in just a couple of steps.

5. Solid State hard drives make their debut in all the latest must-have computers this Christmas. That's right, your boot drive will no longer have moving parts and a 0.1 ms seek time as opposed to the lava-like 11-17ms seek time of the antique platter drives. Although they are only shipping in max 64GB sizes, that will surely expand as the price drops over the next year. Other must-haves to stay in step with what's next: mini HDMI outputs, Expresscard slots, and HD screens that support 1080p resolution.

6. The Writer's Guild of America goes on strike to secure profits from content that broadcasts online. A strong argument considering the networks are now streaming full-screen broadcast resolution programming from all their hit shows with 15 second commercial spots intact. As of the time of the strike, nor writers nor actors participate in any of this revenue. Not one penny.

7. New models for the music industry. here are two scenarios:
i) Artists will receive shares in the industry like a Microsoft programmer receives shares in Microsoft.
ii) Music becomes a utility, like gas or water, where you on the "tap". All your Bluetooth gear is metered and you are billed at the end of the month.

8. Real ID - yes the passport is undergoing a major revision that involves a digital chip that stores all your vital stats. sure it will curb passport fraud, but it will also inexorably link you and your whereabouts to the Machine. Goodbye privacy. Same thing goes for rail and water travel in EU. Over 90 pieces of ID can now be requested to secure your travel pass. Coming Soon to America.

9. Social Networks = the new 90's DotCom Bubble. Seems every day a new SocialNet is springing up. As of now I have accounts at myspace, facebook, trig, imeem, buzznet, linkedin, going, wayn, quarterlife, friendster, twitter, evite, fancorps, freedom.ccp, youtube, etc etc. Can't wait for Web 3.0 cuz this party is way overcrowded. I think if I recieved a hand-written, snail-mailed poetic correspondence emoting some sort of primal human urge I might eat my fist.

10. Water wars. Oil is so turn of the century.

Have fun out there. Be excellent to each other.

Rock Soup!

As the story goes, a young boy, hungry and road-weary wanders into a small village with nothing but a small rock in his hand. He enters the village tavern and walks straight into the kitchen where he greets the cook and proclaims that he will teach him the secret to the greatest soup in the world if only he will offer him the pot to demonstrate. Bemused and intrigued, the cook hands the boy a well-worn cast iron pot.

"I shall return with it promptly" the boy promises and heads back out into the village and over to the first house on the left. Knocking on the door, he is promptly received by the old woman who resides there to whom he shares the same story, promising the same result in exchange for a donation. She has nothing but some wilting parsley which the boy modestly and accepts before proceeding.

He continues in this fashion moving door to door until he has acquired celery, beets, carrots, venison, potatoes and so on. Having raised considerable curiosity among the townsfolk, he now assembles them at the town square where he asks for a match which is quickly offered. He takes a moment to consider the various contributions he has accumulated and decisively selects the most complementary which he then drops into the pot.

The fire beneath the cauldron is lit and the ingredients set to boil.

"Behold!" shouts the boy at length, drawn from the kindness and variation of your respective hands and good will, I now summon the forces of magic to deliver to you the greatest recipe in the world!"

The boy begins handing out bowl after bowl of the resultant stew and the townsfolk, thusly congregated partook of a communal and bounteous culinary experience.

Well, in so many words, that is how we made the record. Two in fact. I started despondent, out of luck and resources, or so I thought, until one day, exhausted with exhaustion, I forced myself to begin, with one hundred percent commitment. Not 99.9% but 100% - which meant at all costs, take no prisoners, whatever it takes. Without ever harming an animal or an ego, without over imposing or burning a bridge, we are almost ready to share the communal result of this experience with the general public.

"Box" is a set of acoustic material that needed it's own space and time to be presented and will precede the release of the full rock record "Come To Life". And until the very last minute, we will still be making rock soup; drawing on the talents, enthusiasm and good will of musicians, engineers, designers and music fans to bring together these new musical projects.

Where so many people are concerned with getting the cash together so that they can then do what they want, we are proving again that tenacity, audacity and pragmatism, coupled with passion, curiosity and a good will together make a powerful force indeed. Even today Josh and I were welcomed to Darcy Macguire's studio in Toronto to track some last minute vocals for a pair of songs we decided to append to the Box album, one of which was written by Paul Gallinato that we recorded on his brief visit to LA from Buenos Aires.

Josh and I have been capturing video chronicles of the process and we want to share it with others who may be interested in creating their own indie ventures. The first episodes of Rock Soup will be premiering on YouTube within the month of November, so keep an eye out. And more importantly, keep an extra 10 piece aside for the release of Box, coming to you before xmas.

If you have a cool story about how faith and dedication manifested something amazing in your life, I would love to have you reply to this post and share it with our readers.

The unexpected arrival

Josh and I realized that before we release the full-blown supersonic miasma that is my "solo debut" we had to record some of the acoustic stuff that is floating around, and if not released now, may never find a home, short of some awful "b sides and collectibles" nonsense that I would have to go Supernova to have matter.

So the last day we had available to record in the sauna with our Avalon pre's AKG's and Rode NTs, we threw down. Eight songs in all. The album, which will precede the "studio" record is code-named "box". It will likely still be called box when it's released which should be within the month.

Lots of red wine, starry nights pacing around The Balcony, and shoving audio cables in boxes that squeak and grind more than S.A.M. the robot from Sesame Street and we are starting to find something pretty darn interesting.

My dad also bought one of those vinyl to CD thingies from a Skymall catalogue and I went totally apeshit digging through all the warped 45's from my childhood. I have to say, the two and a half decades worth of dust buildup and scratches make them sound way better. Some of that may find its way onto the acoustic record. I can't help myself.

So in a few days I fly back to LA - land of Sushi, chronic perfect weather, and SocialNetworkObsessedMeloDrama. And then I can hear what this all really is; framed by the boundaries of marketability and cult of personality, the experience Outside will finally show its strength or weakness.

Either way, this thing is coming out in a month.

I hope it makes you feel something.

ps. Josh, you rule for putting up with this crazy shit we do.

Sat. Sept. 8th - TIFF

My friend Emanuel Pereira came into Toronto from Vancouver to see two films on which he was post-supervisor working with Brightlight Pictures who, consequently, have their first two films ever in the Toronto Film Festival.

Tonight we saw "American Venus" starring Rebecca de Mornay as a freakishly control-crazy mother and Jane McGregor who plays her anxiety-ridden but highly sympathetic daughter.

Pic starts off as a dark comedy in the spirit of American Psycho before taking a more serious turn that examines topics - addiction, obsessive compulsive disorder, anxiety and depression and type A domination over another.

The film's score sounds like a direct Thomas Newman lift, which was my primary complaint seeing as the title already feels derivative of the Allan Ball pic. The other point of contention however - the unusual, deliberate pacing of the scenes, where the simple act of going through a stack of cheques unfolds as it would, rather than time-cutting, ultimately won me over.

Rebecca de Mornay gives a tour de force performance. She digs in and commits fully - giving us full reason to believe that she indeed is addicted to unloading a mag from a 40 .cal just because it helps calm her nerves, and will go to any length to get her fix, even in a place like Canada where getting hold of a gatt isn't so easy.

Jane McGregor, as her daughter is heart-achingly fragile and ever so lovely. I can't to see more from her as her star inevitably rises.

All in all, an engaging and unconventional perspective on an old idea, I'd tell friends to put down a ten piece for it. 3.5/5

---

Monday we go see Manny's other pic from Brightlight - "They Wait" - a psych thriller featuring James King (oops, it's Jamie now).

----

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford - I auditioned for the role of Robert Ford while I was shooting the L Word in Vancouver. I wanted it something firece. Lost the part to a better man. But this one will do well, I think. Of course because of Brad Pitt, but it's a solid script and a great take on an old legend. Top five for buzz at this festival.

Lars and the Real Girl - I think the journalist who implied Ryan Gosling might smell Oscar hype over a role wherein he is myopically in love with a silicon blow up doll is a bit of a reach, but I certainly must believe that director Craig Gillespie must have done something right. Yep you guessed it - I read for this part as well, when I was shooting "Cake" with Heather Graham in Toronto back in 2004. I don't think I quite understood how this was going to play - as a Farrelly Bros. comedy or as a straight piece like Edward Scissorhands. I am hearing it's somewhere in between. Worth checking out either way. High on the buzz meter at the fest among critics.

Two days until the fest kicks off

Having had more time to explore the cornucopia of films (did I really just say that -->shoots the typist) I wanted to list some of films I a most interested in. This, of course, will likely change as buzz and exposure affect the climate - in a flash a certain film can become a lightning hot must-see (wtf is wrong with me and the cliches today?) whereas a 'big-player" may suddenly be reduced to tepid interest. Hey, the point of all this is that no one has really seen any of it except maybe Piers Handling and the film selection committee.

At any rate:

Nina Davenport's "Operation Filmmaker" looks to be that little gem of a film that covers seemingly innocuous material but ultimately speaks on a much larger level to great effect. The very way it came together as a film defies typical imagination. Sure bet for me.

Young People Fucking - I read it, because I auditioned for it, and then I fought my ass off to do it. The script was tight, and so current. The dialogue was wicked and merciless. The only other time I felt this excited about a script truly grasping the teenage zeitgeist was when I read for Brick. I wonder if the film will let the screenplay down the way Brick did. Gotta find out for myself. Two tickets please. I know Sarah Polley was attached when I read for it. Seems that changed.

The Joy Division twins. Well, I thought 24-Hour Party People pretty much covered it - in fact I loved that it touched on Ian Curtis so laterally - but I guess now we can learn the rest with not-one-but-two (here we go again with the cliches) Joy Div pics. The "non-fiction" pic is eponymous. The other is "Control" - a biopic. Peter Howell of the Toronto Star says the latter is flawlessly portrayed by the lead actor. I'm gonna go find out.

Peter Bogdanovich introduces
Bucking Broadway John Ford
I mean. Come on, does it get any better than this? A print of a John Ford film from his first year of directing that was thought lost until now and presented and contextualized by Bogdanovich. Sold.

TIFF 2007

Ah delicious. I have returned to Toronto for my annual pilgrimage to the Mecca of movies. I have noticed some interesting changes this year - the 30-coupon book has been scrapped, there are 200 more films screening than there were last year (where there used to be roughly 310-325 this year there are over 500).

A lot of interesting music films covering Joy Division to The Who and everything in between. Got a tip the "Ex-Drummer" is a real over-the-top knockout.

I will likely see "Diary of the Dead" at Midnight Madness, since my friend worked on the production and had too many good tales to tell about wrangling zombies in a swimming pool for three days.

My good friend Manny Pereira did post on "American Venus" and so I am interested in seeing how they pulled the film together.

I typically do the fest in the most fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants way and stand in rush lines. I do this because a) I meet new people with similar tenacity and interests, and b) sometimes, when I don't get into a film, I get into something I never would have considered. That is the real joy of the fest for me - exposure to unknown territory. I love knowing nothing about a film when I go in and I try to maintain this stance as much as is possible. I want to afford the production the ability to seduce me on its own damn terms.

I will update this as the days go on and look forward to sharing my thoughts about stories I can't even yet imagine.

Have a great TIFF!

Links to last year's TIFF coverage:
http://keramsongs.blogspot.com/2006/09/tiff-day-8.html
http://keramsongs.blogspot.com/2006/09/tiff-day-7.html
http://keramsongs.blogspot.com/2006/09/tiff-day-5.html
http://keramsongs.blogspot.com/2006/09/tiff-day-2_08.html
http://keramsongs.blogspot.com/2006/11/evolving-poli-mocku-bio-mentary.html
http://keramsongs.blogspot.com/2006/09/tiff-day-1.html

"Culture is not a commodity, it is a necessity"

"Culture is not a commodity, it is a necessity."

Unless someone can correct me on the source of this quote, I am going to attribute it to the last person I know who uttered it - Midi Onodera the lesbian Japanese-Canadian director of the film "Skin Deep" in which I played a transsexual woman over a decade ago. The film explored sexual, ethnic and social archetypes.

It has always stuck with me, because it highlighted something we at some point took for granted yet had already become so prevalent in our collective, dare I say, North American mindset: "culture festivals," "a shot of culture" - the idea that it was something you went out and got a dose of, like a soul drip mainlining into your consciousness.

"Freedom fries" is perhaps the most chilling prominent example in recent memory of whitewashing the diversity that exists in life.

I just stopped by Mashti Malone's, the Persian ice cream store on La Brea and Sunset, that serves "homemade" flavors that include lavender, ginger rosewater saffron, pomegranate, Turkish coffee, so that I could pick up some black currant juice. This is the only place in Los Angeles I have found where black currant juice can be found. There is a reason for this.

"Blackcurrants were once popular in the United States as well, but they became extremely rare in the 20th century after currant farming was banned in the early 1900s. The ban was enacted when it was discovered that blackcurrants helped to spread the tree disease White Pine Blister Rust, which was thought to threaten the then-booming U.S. lumber industry ^[1].

The federal ban on growing currants was shifted to individual States’ jurisdiction in 1966. The ban was lifted in New York State in 2003 as a result of the efforts of Greg Quinn and The Currant Company and currant growing is making a comeback in several states including Vermont, New York, Connecticut and Oregon.^[2] However, several statewide bans still exist including Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire.^[3]. Since the federal ban ceased currant production anywhere in the U.S., the fruit is not well-known and has yet to reach the popularity that it had in the U.S. in the 19th century or that it currently has in Europe and the UK. The first nationally available black currant beverage in the U.S. since the ban was lifted in many states is a powerful health-food nectar under the brand name CurrantC. Since black currants are a strong source of antioxidants and vitamins (much like pomegranate juice), awareness and popularity are once again growing in the U.S."

- Wikipedia

In article by Ann Baldelli about the return of the Blackcurrant, farmer Allyn Brown III points out the irony "that the federal government banned commercial cultivation of the Ribes species, which is native to America, to protect the white pine, which was imported from Europe. While commercial crops were eradicated, the currants and gooseberries thrived in the wild."

When I was a kid, my grandmother used to serve us blackcurrant juice daily. Rife with antioxidants and more vitamin C than any other juice (except perhaps Kale juice which would be really unpleasant). It was as common to me as Kool Ade or Tang may have been to others. We were in Canada so the laws around its production were different.

As I left Mashti's, I noticed a little Middle Eastern restaurant. Hungry, I walked in a found an incredible, albeit brief menu of cornish hen kabab with sour cherry rice, saffron chicken and so on. I exclaimed, to no one in particular that it was a lovely menu, and the gentlemen standing in line before me asked if I had not ever been there before. I replied I hadn't. He confided that it was one of the oldest Persian restaurants in Los Angeles and that the food was delicious. What was interesting was that he started to say "Iraqi," but stopped himself and opted for the politically cooler "Persian" qualifier instead.

As he was leaving, he gave the proprietor, a large burly man, a kiss on each cheek, said some words to him in Arabic, then turned to the cooks at the take out counter and wished them well in perfect Spanish. Why this filled me up so much is, I suppose, the motivation for this piece.

I left a message for my friend in French the other day, in response to her French accented outgoing voicemail message. She called back to say how much it turned her on. This made me wonder - why is it so exciting to hear someone speak a non-English romance language? Because it is rare here in the US? Because it belies culture?

I was fortunate enough to be raised in an Ecuadorian/Polish household and was thus exposed to an already fecund environment for diversity in tradition, sentiment, nuance, music, literature, history and there's that word again, culture. I learned French in school (being that I lived in Canada, French was always an option in school). All of this gave me a much richer understanding of the world, of food, of poetry, and most interesting to me, a way to think and say things that could not be similarly conveyed in English.

English is an incredible language. It is vital, complex, malleable to a fault and extremely effective for communication. But it easily lacks in certain departments. Note the almost inherent surrealist and analogical perspective of Spanish speakers, or the wry, didactic attitude of the French speaker, the sensual, familial sensibility of Italian, or the efficient, inclusive grammar of Japanese. Though the observation may threaten to engender stereotype, it only appears that way because it has to be parsed through the observational calculation of English.

This all to underline a disturbing phenomenon starting to spread like so much White Pine Blister Rust on the internet - localization of content. Is it ironic that a discussion on heterogeneity should be wary of the threat of localization online? Does the original world wide web not resemble more of a WTO than a UN? Perhaps from askance, but really it was just an lifting of borders. At the dawn of the browser, suddenly the curtain was lifted on the world, and without the barriers of money, Customs officials and mainstream media, we were afforded access to the thoughts, feelings and approaches of our contemporaries around the world.

With the advent of localized content (something already implemented at YouTube and MySpace) we restore the idea that what is immediately around us is of most interest, thus renewing an insular, incestuous perspective.

POM is all the rage now, but pomegranate juice was a staple in Arab countries for eons before it became a major industry in California. Like the Amazonian rainforest, we have no idea what other virtues and gifts exist within it mysterious borders, until it is perhaps too late. Every day another language goes extinct and with it all the nuance, perspective and wisdom of that culture.

It is imperative that we remain open to all of this and understand that all of it is required for the full experience of life, rather than treat "foreign" custom as a sideshow attraction.

Making the Record - Song Diaries pt. 1 - "We Breathe So Brief"

TRACK 1

We Breathe So Brief

As with most songs, I had a chord progression on the acoustic guitar and had yet to fill in lyrics. In my head, there was clearly a female vocal harmony that played counterpoint to a pair of urgent closely harmonized male vocals.

One afternoon I had Jessica Hathaway come by to drop some demo vocals so we splayed out on the carpet and scribbled down stream of consciousness ideas for her to sing. Those eventually became the lyrics to this track which is heavily inspired by my love for the early 90's wombadelic period that included My Bloody Valentine's "Loveless", Stereolab's "Transient Noise Bursts and Random Announcements" and Dinosaur Jr.'s "Green Mind."

The second half of the track is a classic Blue Dog Pict-syled "garden section"; a voyage into the subconscious - visceral, dreamy and typically more jammy - inspired by David Sylvian's "Secrets of the Beehive" and all the luscious, impossibly melancholic warmth that it rendered on vinyl.

As with almost all the songs, the drums were laid down by Ryan (Brown) at the backyard tracking studio in Burbank, and the acoustic guitars in the sauna at my parent's house in Toronto. Peter Devlin, a true guitar hero, tracked the funky strat stuff on my parents' porch one sunny July afternoon, as well as the Pink Floydesque licks in the latter half of the song, but the rest was far from conventional.

Wes Styles came by the (Chemical Light Factory) studio in Hollywood with his huge guitar pedal board and laid down three bass tracks - one that is pure grindy bass fuzz with octave pedal, one that is through his wah and chorus and became the primary "clean" bass track, and one that uses delays and flangers and an old Coke bottle as a slide to toss out random bass fx and swoons.

Before she moved to NYC, I had Natalie John stop by to track vocals and a trumpet solo which was later redone by Stewart Cole (a horn prodigy). Natalie's vocals are still in the track and sound slutty and surly as ever. Brilliantly rendered. So much charisma.

I later recorded some vintage 80's keyboard pads and after that some Ebow guitars through some amp sim plugin to create controlled feedback (guitar feedback is an absolute BDP/KMS staple).

After a couple of months of letting the track simmer I returned to track the electric guitars. This is a track that is different than any other on the record, but for its particular early 90's-ness it is perhaps my favorite - reminiscent of "The Cost of Admission" off BDP's "Spindly Light und Wax Rocketines" which may be the best track I have yet released, in my opinion.

I conferred with Josh Joudrie via MSN and webcam over the progression of the track and discussed methods for completing the sound canvass of the song.

Finally over the course of a week (during which my dear support friend Misa Cohen presided with tea, humor and wine) I tracked all the electrics on my trusty, highly customized Fender Strat same one I used on all the BDP records - yes Johhny Camden's "Watson").

All in all the song has over 24 guitar tracks. L, R and center channels for clean JCM 800 clean, crunch, power chords, MBV bends, and Princeton Chorus jazz leads. I then ran stuff through the McDSP plugins to rebuild everything I had ever learned from using the true analogue gear at Number 9 Sound in Toronto during Spindly and at Tone King Records during the Project:Ribcage era.

Essentially I built a signal path that pushed the guitars through an SSL console strip then into a Manley VariMu compressor, using a Urei 1176 to shape their transients, and then into a Neve 1073 or Avalon just for the tube stage, and then squishing it onto Ampex tape with a 100hz rolloff with a 6db boost at 100hz. Of course, every single track required its own treatment, but the end result is pretty colossal in its approximation to the old school Spindly sound. Despite all the influences, it really does end up sounding like nothing more than post-BDP. I guess it's just the fact that everyone involved came from that school.

At any rate the track sounds almost like what I heard in my head that muggy LA day almost a year ago. I am stoked about unleashing it on the public. This song, for me, is just an indulgent throwback to the days when music existed for its own damn sake - to uplift, to throw up its arms and say "I have no idea what the fuck to do, but it sure feels good doing it."

I thank Jessica for her inspiration and truly instinctual input - she and I have an irascible bond and it can be felt in the end product of this track.

"
Radical experiment
Lavender peppermint
Rainy days
Cloudy nights
Manta ray, iolite
Here's the test
What's your best
Can you rest
Never night
It's my turn
Have I learned
Do I care
Take the stairs
Or just breathe
Or just bleed
Or just leave
Lifelike dreams
Lifelike fears
Lifelike deaths
History's silhouettes

We breathe so brief
Release beliefs
That kill me slowly"

Dear Brother

With all due respect to those who have died in the spirit of serving some higher moral...

It weighs on my heart that despite my strongest efforts I was unable to get through to you, though it is not surprising and unfair to my own efforts when contrasted with the coercive mechanisms devised by the military to persuade you.

I have buried many friends for as many reasons - suicide, illness, overdoses - but yours will be the hardest to accept, because you trained for your own death. And you trained to take the lives of others. The saddest part is that you employed your greatest assets - tenacity, loyalty, dedication, intelligence to prepare for this tour through darkness, whereas you could have just as readily exercised these virtues towards the light.

What are you fighting for? What is it that you are being indoctrinated with that makes you believe what you are doing is for a greater good? Your responsibility is to yourself and you have defied that. With this decision you have made, you have also forgotten about those who love you. You counter that you are doing this to protect us; this only underlines the naivety upon which you have based your decision. Whatever sense of martyrdom you are carrying around in your heart is simply mislabeled hubris and selfishness - the ripple effect that harm coming to you through your experience will create is a function of your decision. When a person takes their own life they fail to respect what they leave behind. It is an utterly selfish act. I am not sure if you were playing a bluff - but they army is gonna call you out bud. They want a return on their investment.

Recognize that if you had filled your hours with other data then you would have arrived somewhere else. The sense of inevitability you now feel and face, is a function of your own creative power. But now you have surrendered that ability to choose over to someone else and there is a price you will pay for defaulting on your own free will. It is like walking to the front steps of prison and asking them to lock you inside for no reason other than having convinced yourself that you are not worthy of participating in the abundance of life. You gave up that bounty.

I am certain that you have been schooled to think that what you have been trained to do is to think on your feet, to take initiative, to steer your own course, to live the impossible dream, to explore the world, to discover your fullest potential. But you have been conned and that is what hurts me most. That I believed you knew better.

You were the kid who got a job so you could pay for your own singing lessons. Who aspired to set a Guinness record for tap dancing the longest distance - from the suburbs to downtown, who wrote incredible stories of marvelous lands, who aspired to be a nuclear physicist and gemologist.

But this is not fantasyland now, brother. Your mortality and your fragility are both very, very real. Whatever insecurities were preyed upon when that recruiting scout approached you on the bus home from school that day - memories of being teased at school, of being different, of being called weak - they are what has delivered you to this momentous decision you have made, and now it is your path - one that you accepted, that you fed with your own powers of manifestation. There is no destiny in it - only the legacy of choices you made. But you have relinquished that power now. Now you are someone else's property.

There is a time and place to fight for what you believe in. But you have signed up for someone else's war. It wasn't a threat to your country. It wasn't a threat to your family. You actively sought this fight out and decided to jump in for a piece of the action. To "prove" yourself.

There are many ways to defend freedom. Unfortunately a bigger machine than you are capable of perceiving co-opted the word and transformed its utility, just as it has your understanding of what other options and ultimately rewarding and significantly more self-empowering methods are available. I will, with the same tenacity and determination continue to support freedom, peace, love, understanding, wisdom and I imagine to greater effect.

The only thing we have is to choose how we think about things and from that we manifest the life we will live. I respect that, and I respect that you had the power to choose for yourself. We make our own beds, we dig our own trenches.

I miss you already.

May God bless your path.

The Secret

Is not a shortcut.

Is not a short walk.

Is not a movie.

You, who wield creation, are you comfortable with your power? Are you able to rely on it to get you from point birth to point demise? Do you play to win or to continue the play?

Is your self comfortable with abundance and thus are you able to truly give without taking the hit, and responsibly guide your charge through the darkness, or are you surviving, thus rendering your power a means to an end?

Have you taken care of yourself? When you see an abandoned child, a hungry homeless person, a sickly grandparent, an uncontrollable addict, can you see yourself?

Can you afford the same compassion to yourself?

That is your charge. It is your only charge.

Are you pragmatic and realistic? With all your dreams, aspiration and visions intact, can you attend to the here and now and supplant desperation, misery, loneliness, sadness, fear, regret, disappointment and rejection, actively and immediately with an actual objective towards self-perpetuation, soundness of mind and body and do so actively and begin immediately.

Are you comfortable with holding your own hand, stroking your own hair, feeding yourself first, putting on your oxygen mask before the person next to you?

Can you walk through the unknown, in the face of the status quo and maintain certainty towards your aim?

Are you self-sufficient with love or do you panhandle for it in the form of attention, acknowledgment, acceptance, a one night stand, a response?

Can you listen, just listen without inserting your own mark in the flow of events?

Can you surrender to the flow? Can you you dive into the rapids?

Can you persist?

Can you feed yourself?

Can you handle the way you are if you drop the bullshit? Can you accept that you don't know? Moreover, can you accept that you do?

Can you live without having to find yourself, and accept that if you did, your understanding would already be obsolete?

Can you walk meet the Devil at the gate before the bridge and say I need no further assistance. I am complete in my walk and will not waiver, and yet I am malleable enough to not break should I be diverted or obstructed or even hit.

Can you sit in the fire? Or do you thrive on distraction and avoidance to reconcile yourself with truth.

Can you remember anything at all, before the Distraction World took hold of your fevered and impressionable mind?

Do you remember not wondering if you look fat or skinny, or smart or stupid? Do you remember not classifying anyone else that way?

Can you make an impartial judgment?

Where is you courage coming from? Does vindication drive you?

Do you think you can get rich if you just believe it hard enough, because it really sucks not to have what your neighbor does?

Can you empathize with your enemies and detractors?

Can you take the smaller piece? Can you take the larger one?

Do you believe in destiny or do you believe in reaping what you sow?

Is affluence the end to the means or the means to an end?

Are you accountable? Can you communicate yourself simply or are you cryptic? Can you admit as much?

Are you able to simply observe your anger, jealousy, and fear with curiosity, as a student might a dissected frog? Or do you rush to cover it or release it, lest you be discovered, lest you see that your are a balance of light and darkness?

Are you able to apply reason to opinion - if the public promotion of your identity is true are you able to acknowledge its validity, and if it is incorrect or driven by other motives, can you simply disregard it with confidence?

There is no easy answer. The secret is not in a word or a sentence or a set of goals. The secret is you, its solution is the application of your power. Your accountability to that power. You are living the result of your mind's work.

Do you have the courage to face change?