I got asked today to fill a spot at the Farmer’s Market in Campbell tomorrow, the first day of May. I’ll be performing from 9am -1pm. Lord help me. I’m going to bring out my keyboard and computer, and looper and create some ambient textures. I wasn’t sure I was ready to play out with this equipment and style but I’ll give it a go, probably earlier in the day and see how it feels. It’ll be a live experiment and I should be partially asleep and probably still dreaming so that should add to the whole design. Come out and say hi.
Downtown Campbell. Can’t miss it.
Rhythma Music | Comments Off on Playing Out Tomorrow @ Campbell Farmer’s Market
I was in a very large Victorian house that had been converted to a hotel with a meeting hall. I was chatting with a young lady who was sitting behind a desk checking in the visitors to an event that was being held in the hall. In between check-ins, she was telling me about winning the lottery. She was only work this desk because it interested her to participate in this activity and not because of any monetary compensation. She asked me if I wanted to know how she won. Well, of course I did… duh! She told me to invest $10,000 in lottery tickets, spread out over the course of a year. That was how I’d be able to win, as that’s how she did it, and she’d won millions. I needed to get more details on this procedure so she got up to go for a walk with me, but every time we’d rekindle the conversation, someone would walk up and start talking with us about something. It took so long that I eventually woke up without ever getting the change to hear her whole story.
Dream Journal | Comments Off on Method to Win the Lottery
I was digging thru some stacks of magazines and papers searching for something I never found and what I came across was really interesting. No, I mean REALLY interesting. I’ve been a subscriber of Wired magazine for eons. It’s a magazine that closely aligns with my sense of design and my desire for information that feels relevant and untainted, sometimes controversial, and often enlightening.
This article in particular was enlightening because my education in the sciences was minimal. I always leaned toward the liberal arts and away from anything that required too much memorization of intangible concepts and “things.” Thorium can be found on the periodic table along with other actinides like uranium and plutonium that are currently used in 100% of the world’s nuclear reactors. Interesting that I found this article right when Japan is having a serious problems with the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. I don’t believe “authorities” to tell you the truth when it comes to the risk involved in the radiation that’s leaching from the plant and how it will affect the planet at large when that radiation gets spread about the planet by our weather system.
Enter thorium… a once upon a time contender for the energy that would feed nuclear power plants. It lost out to uranium, not because it’s not clean burning, not because it’s less bi-product producing, and not because it’s mostly harmless (you can carry it in your pocket), and not because it’s hyper abundant. It lost to uranium because uranium’s by-product, plutonium is what war mongers like to use most in bombs. Isn’t that lovely? We have the radioactive by-products of nuclear calamities like Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and now the Japan crisis poisoning our plaent, and they could have been averted if we had chosen to not make bombs.
Take the time to read this article in the 2010 issue of Wired. It’s well worth the read: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/
Life in General | Comments Off on Thorium, The New Nuke – A Must Read
I was staying in a very large and extravagant hotel somewhere. I think the situation was music related and my mom was there. The day before we were concluding our stay, a large film crew checked in. They were there to film a new version of American Beauty, but with the edginess of The Virgin Suicides. I ended up in a clothing shop of some sort along the lines of Abercrombie and Fitch, the kind of place where you’d shop if you were 18 and had wealthy parents. I was laying back on a long cushioned bench chatting with my mom when a young Norwegian man and woman walked in and sat nearby. Both were very pale, slender and blond and had that Northern European character of everything having a proper place about them. As it turns out, the couple were working for wardrobe for the movie. The young man wanted me to try on a shirt for him because he was unsure of the size and whether it would fit whomever he was dressing. It was a polo style shirt with royal blue and white horizontal stripes. I told him I was a medium, but he wanted to see how the large would fit me. I took it and went into the dressing room which was more like a bedroom. There were benches, clothing hanging on the walls, and there was a salesperson in there. The shirt the young man had given me was part of a package; a hat, belt, and some other accoutrement all hanging from the same hanger. The salesperson was upset that I was trying to dismantle this set to get the shirt off just to try it on and insisted on finding the shirt apart from the package. She looked around the room and became exasperated at not finding the shirt in there.
Next thing I know, I’m in The Poet & Patriot in Santa Cruz. I’m walking thru the bar with a bicycle, thru a group of performers. I realize that they having an open mic and I’m thinking of checking in to see if I can play a song or two. I walk toward the bar and have this knowledge that the bar is different than I know it to be, that the beer is served deeper into the back instead of the bar that I’m accustomed to. As I proceed toward the back, I’m stopped by a young brunette twenty something with a clipboard who insists that I can’t proceed with the bicycle. I ask her why not and she starts talking about the number 1, and examining her clipboard. She finally acquiesces because she can’t give me a justifiable reason why I can’t proceed to the bar with the bicycle. So, I walk to the back and the bar is similar to a horse stable with corrals on both sides of the room. On the right were three of these where the dividing walls had been removed and there was a menu up above. In the corrals were large kegs where the beer was stored. There were all boutique beers. I recall looking for Newcastle but it wasn’t there. I settled on a beer with a green label that looked similar to Sierra Nevada, but I don’t recall the brewer, but the name of the beer was something like Bright Buffalo at Wounded Knee. It was a light ale which isn’t something I’d normally go after, preferring dark ales and porters, but it seemed to fit for some reason. I could order at the time because the servers were all in a corral on the left side of the room filling beers so I walked over to the wall to the left of them where there were rows of shelves filled with elaborate steins. On in particular caught my eye. It wasn’t particularly large but it had a button on the handle that activated a top the slid back allowing just enough space to sip the beer from the stein. I picked up the stein to examine the mechanics of this mechanism and see how hard it was to clean. I was impressed with it and it’s emerald green colour and decided to get it. I proceeded over to the other side to get the beer and asked the server who was now present how much it was. He wasn’t sure whether this was my stein or whether I wanted to purchase it. I told him I was interested in the stein the the light ale on the sign to me left, so he walked over to a cash register, punched in something and told me that it would be $3.50. I said, “I’ll take it,” surprised at the lost cost of the item. A guy had perched next to me at the bar so while the guy was filling my beer, I told him about the film crew in town to remake American Beauty but it didn’t appear to know about the original. I reflected on how many people have so little knowledge of the brief past.
Dream Journal | Comments Off on American Beauty and The Poet & Patriot
This dream came about the same day that I had done an EMDR session which went way back in time to unearth some dirt. I was in the big house. A family appeared to have moved in and they had two children, both under 10. They were playing upstairs when I came across them. In the back of my mind was a shallow memory of the house being haunted, but it was so vague, kinda like painted over wall paper. You may find a seem somewhere but the original image is gone. I looked at the children and realized something new was taking place and I was okay with it.
Dream Journal | Comments Off on The House Has Children
1. Power on camera.
2. Hit the menu button and scroll to VCR SET. Set A/V->DV OUT to ON.
3. Use Sony i.Link cable to connect DV end to camera and FireWire end to computer.
4. Open iMovie or app of choice and it should connect to the camera and allow you to import.
iMovie will rewind the tape for you but you may not necessarily want it to do that. If you don’t, just start the import process from anywhere on the tape. Since it’s going to happen in real-time meaning that if you have 40 minutes of video, it will take 40 minutes of playback time to get the video off the MiniDV cartridge, plus the app’s processing time of the video. You can stop the import process at any time.
Life in General | Comments Off on Transfering Video from Sony DCR-PC110 MiniDV to Snow Leopard
I caught a nasty cold a couple of days ago which really impacted any and all creative productivity. This was a disappointment, not because I was sick but because I was in the middle of producing a song that was going really well and had me pumped. Suddenly, I wake up Sunday morning and I’m trashed. So… life gave me lemons, and I love lemonade, so I decided go thru the videos that I’d remembered to take of shows I’d done, which isn’t many because it seems that a video camera is one of the last things I remember to bring to a show, and pull out the juicy bits and upload them to YouTube. There are quite a few songs that I need to process and upload, but for now I’ve uploaded the following:
Rhythma – I Am That, written by Sean Michael Imler
Rhythma – Going to War, written by Sean Michael Imler
Tarradiddle – Valentine’s Day, written by Marshall Mason
Tarradiddle – Walk Away Clean, written by Sean Michael Imler
There’s a tree outside my window.
Window: Human created object thru which I can use my eyes to see thru.
Eyes: My eyes are parts of my body that are connected to my brain and interpret light.
Tree: I’m told it’s a tree by people that have studied and named such items that dot our planet. I don’t know the people who came up with the word, “tree”, nor do how they came up with the word. I know the tree is there because I “see” it with my eyes. The image of the tree is translated and connected to the part of my brain that uses language to describe the image.
Brain: I’ve been told that I’m part of the human species, and all humans have brains. I have no proof that I have a brain, it’s only circumspect. I imagine that the prospect of my seeing my own brain with my eyes and translating that image with the object that I’m perceiving it with to be something that might only happen in a laboratory of which I’m unlikely to visit. I must rely on what I’ve been told about other people’s research in brains, that I too possess a brain and that it operates in the way that it does, which means that it’s only hearsay. The truth is that there is only other people’s so called brains that allows them to perceive the brain in the way they do, which also means they could be completely wrong by two possible incedences.
1) The brain has a built-in security mechanism that allows itself to not be decompiled and artificially manufactured.
2) The brain has an inability to understand itself.
The result is that the brain alone is insufficient to describe itself, thus, insufficient to describe anything else around it.
Humanity has created an incredibly complex system by which it explains everything around us but is still insufficient in describing anything beyond what the brain can interpret and classify, in which case it is safe to say that nothing is as we describe it because our tools for comprehension are inadequate.
