the history of the last few weeks in an email

Dear Gentle Reader,

DAMN! It's tricky trying to keep up a blog when there are so many things that want to be done that aren't your blog!

But ok, I atone for my sins: Here is an mass email I sent to friends and family. It pretty much sums up what's been going on and whats on my mind.

(And if you get through it all, theres a special treat waiting for you at the end ;D)


Dear Gentle Readers, (friends and family, etc al)

I was replying to an email to my dear mother and one thing lead to another, and after take a three hour break from my coffee-in-the-veins style composing session, at 07:00 Central Europe Standard (+1 hour GMT, yes?) I bring you the latest update and mental musings from my life here in the littiebig Netherlands. Aka, THE CHRONICLES OF AN AMERICAN IN NETHERLANDIA.
k'cha! Whang! Zing! here we go...

[Replying to an email mum sent me, but thought you all might want to know what I'm doing as of tonight....]

On Sep 13, 2007, at 9:53 PM, Linn wrote:

Dear Eric,

What is the Radiohead song that has the spinning tube thingy sound...Mary Rain had one of those tubes you spin around and they make a sound, pitch depending on how fast you swing them around their head. Do oyu know which song has that?

I love you!!
Ma




Like Spinning Plates. It's off Amnesiac. They change pitch and hit the the natural resonance of the tube because of some kind of air thing and whatnot that sends vibrations some places and so forth. Mary knows. But the point is that in the ONE pitch that is produced when you spin it at low speed, you hear every tone in the universe, all packed into these frequencies and resonances. Thats non tempered, organic tuning for you.

Tomorrow I go get a gym membership. only €70 one year of buffness! Protein shakes, here i come!

So let's see... what's going on....
Primary news:
I have a new commission I'm frantically working on! My newest piece is part of a program about failure music, or falling down music. It's for

Flute
Clarinet
Tenor sax
Baritone sax
two percussionists (playing hi-lo toms, tambourine, kick trum, and high-hat)
piano
contrabass.
and me (doing the speaking part)
Funny story, I'm getting it in late; today the leader/conductor of the project was like "you missed the first rehursal today!" and I was quickly reached into my situational tension-diffusion comments, and said, "well... if the theme of the program is failure, we're off to a good start! haha" But yea, he didn't laugh so much. I then quickly reversed the frame and changed the subject. Great success! *thumbs up*

The piece is a stream of consciousness piece, about ME, writing the piece for this program. Play within a play thing, and I will be performing the part of my own mental dialogue. So I'll be up there, commenting on my own composing (or lack of composing) and then I'll comment on the probability of it being performed, or say stuff like "Shit I bet Arnold [the conductor] is thinking 'where the is that kid's music?? he must be really irresponsible!'" and then I write in the conductors score, to yell at me, "Where is your music?!? The players don't have any parts!!"
All sorts of exciting 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th walls will be broken down in 5 minutes! And the piece, although written as a failure to compose something successful, will become a success either way. Having failure be a theme is really handy, because you win or... you win: if the piece sucks, you win because you fulfilled the requirements and framework of the theme. If the piece is ACTUALLY good, then you've just written a good piece. Chaw! Anyway, I think it will be really interesting, on many different levels. Failure will be built into it, my locked up mental dialogue will be open and free to roam the score (so basically ANYTHING I'm thinking while writing it is fair game), and for bonus failure probability, the technical skill demanded of the players is quite high, which makes the potentiality for THEM to screw up while playing is also high.
The NEXT cool thing about this project is that it's going to tour around the Netherlands and parts of Belgium, but the bit I'm really excited about is the fact that this piece is going to be performed in the Concertgebouw, in Amsterdam. The Concertgebouw is the Netherlands premier concert hall, soopjadelux style, famous through out the world, etc etc. Kind of like Carnige Hall, except not. It's a very exciting thing to be able to put on your resumé. : D
So we'll see how all my cursing and unorthodox performance habits go over in the lap of high Dutch musical society....
Ehh! They're Dutch. They probably see weirder stuff on their way to work.

Secondary news:
Some of my classes are in Dutch, which sucks, but I have the best argument at my disposal ("I didn't come here to learn a language, I came here to learn music! Now if everything is taught in Dutch, why do you not give your foreign students Dutch language exams?? Dur-hay.") but I'm dealing with that and setting up private lessons for things like music history and composition techniques of the 20th century, which is an important class. I also have to figure out how to renew the residence permit (I think it MIGHT be less €'s then I expected... *crosses fingers*).

Tertiary news:
I met a nice Irish girl. Dancer from... Carlow? [sp?] Something like that. Anyway, she's great and all and we get along real good. But I'm quickly becoming concerned of the CLINGY thing... I should probably start putting out vibes that display the "no-clingyness-area" sign. But I tell you, there's something about speaking the same language that sometimes makes all the difference. Strange... and I remember something about love overcoming the language barrier and being a cross-culture force of nature...
Still, it's rare to find someone who isn't completely self absorbed and impossible to have a conversation with, so should I not throw this opportunity away lightly....? Actually there are more attractive, interesting young women here then anywhere else I can imagine. So much so, that the idea of getting hung up on one person (when you're only 21 and when there's such potential for so many good experiences to be had all around,) gets a little ridiculous. [lolz]



Speaking of all this,.... reminds me – booyakasha! I have to tell you about this guy I know called Aldrico, because he's now in the pantheon of Most Influential People in my life. The "M.I.P. Pantheon" Watch:

Ok, so, there is a CRAZY but awesome dance teacher from Curacao teaching at the Fonty's Dansacademie that Wouter [my best Dutch friend] and I have known him for about a year now. He's the most congruently, wacko, nutjob who you can't help but love because, (in his words) "Baby, I am only love! Look into my eyes right now; I see me in you, and you and me, and I am only listening to the voice of God, and God is love. From God, the universe and every person on earth, I want you to know you are a GOOODDD, baby, yes a GOD. And I am a God- Look around you! Everyone here is a God! I love them too! There is no such thing as coincidence! You are doing what you are doing in your life because it makes you happy, and I am here talking to you because it makes me happy. Coincidence and problems in life do not exist; only the illusion of coincidence and problems exist! [actually, I might have just made that up myself] Never ask a question if you feel you cannot life with the answer...!"

... these and other things are just a few of his collected wisdoms. And all, coming out of a small black (gay? bi? who knows) dancer wearing a yin-yang dew rag, hemp rainbow coat and the lower part of a sarong while saying in between great breaths of philosophizing, that (though not his corporeal from) he is a being from Proxima Centauri ("... Ah, you people on this planet are so strange sometimes...") and how he will read your mind, but only if you allow God's love into your being and become one with him... All of that is fairly overwhelming when you first met this guy. I've even noticed the most super mellow, chill, laid back, socially proofed, "I'm so mellow, I'm melting" or "I'm so open minded my brain fell out" people become temporary Republicans compared to Aldrico. I saw one of the most hardened, curt, severe guys I've seen turn into a laughing baby after about an hour in the proverbial arms of Aldrico. So when I met him, he was wholly beyond my experience, and I was more then a little skeptical; seeing such ardent, unbridled enthusiasm for whatever truth he was proclaiming and touting with such reckless abandon give me a kind of mental knee-jerk reaction of instant skepticism.

Maybe skeptical isn't the right word... Curious, is the way to describe it. All these things about the man add up to two words in the minds of most people: FUCKIN' WACKO. But every action, utterance, or dialogue you have with him is so congruent and consistent, and is spoken in such a tone that conveys such an unequaled conviction, gusto, sincerity, passion, [etc] and at times some kind of benevolent fervor, you can't help to be affected by the guy in one way or another.

In the end, using the words "touting beliefs" and "spreading truths" don't do him justice; That merely reduces him down to an image NOT of a person who has evaded the sometimes-nightmarish-reality what we experience everyday as (and what I call) the "Juggernaut That is 21st Century", but rather another babbling, oddball-truth monger on a BC-AD, downtown Babylon/Jerusalem street. Which he is not.
He's another babbling, oddball-truth monger on an AD-CB, downtown Tilburg/Amsterdam street ;-D

[Note: Oddly enough, "Oddball" was the original henchman-character idea for the 1964 James Bond film "Goldfinger" (whose first draft was oddly enough penned by a young Charlie Kaufman and depicted Oddball as a 6'5" [198 cm], obese, acne ridden, red-haired Chinese hit man, rather then what the producers eventually sold out for, being simply, a physically powerful Korean actor); where "Oddball", instead of doing something productive for Mr. Goldfinger, (like nonchalantly killing James Bond by [after J.B. desperately tried to ¡whang! him with a Roman Cæser bust], slipping an arsenic-infused, semi-self-sustaining-pneumatically-powered-exploding-cufflink in one of James's stolen prophylactics and whipping it around his head like a latex sling, or hurling a potassium nitrate laced, soaked-in-gasoline-waiting-to-exploding-on-impact-dickey at James's car) would attempt to pick up a golf ball with his eye and stand in a hunched over position while in a wedding dress, with both eyes going slightly different directions, humming "We'll Meet Again" Sadly, these scenes were mysteriously lost during the editing early drafts.]

Back to it....

Ok so...! It's more like... in a world where technologies change so quickly (and our society is based on technology, so the affects of rapid changes in technology are reflected in a rapidly changing society too,) where fads are ever shifting, styles, trends, in, out, fashion ever changing and chanting: "be like this!", "no be yourself!", "Go with the flow", "Don't follow the pack" [the last two are actually two postcards taped on my bathroom door, RIGHT next to each other. What a fucking, blatant, wishy-washy contradiction; the pop-culture establishment commanding you to embrace and reject at the same time, the very pop-culture establishment that tells people what's hot and what's not, the same disembodied idea that people resort to because of the confusion that ensues from two mutually exclusive ideas being jammed down people's throat and companies making profit from the aftermath[birth?] of it all. wtf?], OK so because of all these contradictions and push-pulls in our lives, coming across someone who is SO set in their reality, SO congruent with it (congruent is the word of the month. Use it.) and most of all so real about it, it's no wonder everyone in this school i go to is moved by him on some level; you either love the guy and find him intriguing or you find him to be just another bizarre eccentric, irrelevant (and irreverent , thats for sure) part of the scenery.

In the eye of someone who's vantage point of reality is somewhat different, most us "normal" people are probably just floating around, clinging to nothing solid or real, but to whatever illusion we happen to get ourselves tangled in, and then as soon as we've realized it as real, *poof* it's gone, and we continue our aimless floating until we get snagged in the next version of a solid vision of how the world works..

Anyway, so one day, Wouter and I are having a beer and Aldrico walks by. If anything your day just gets a little more odd with Aldrico around, which is better then normal and boring. So he comes and sits down with us, and we all have a little "therapy" session/philosophy symposium, (actually Aldrico did most of the therapizing, with me giving random input when I could get a word in.) After all that, I decided to try a little experiment: I would wake up in the morning and say to myself something like:

"I am Love. Universe, you have given me this day to live and I take comfort in the fact that you will provide me with exactly what I need. Whether I perceive it as good or bad bad, I take comfort in the fact that You know it is exactly what I need at this moment and I will continue to love everyone and everything I come in contact with. I am Love." Like a daily positivity priming mantra.

(Also, on a side note, I've been into Neuro-Linguistic Programming [NLP] and self-hypnosis for a while, and in one recording, I remember a hypnotist talking about how "... if you do not step up to your rightful task of programming your own mind [reality], the world will do it for you. The thoughts in your mind are knowledge; you are the one responsible for choosing which thoughts you are thinking, because the conscious mind is only capable of thinking one conscious thought at a time. The subconscious mind is like a sponge; soaking up whatever your conscious mind saturates it with. The thoughts you are thinking impregnate the subconscious mind, and then your subconscious will set about creating your world [your REALITY] by the nature of the thoughts you have allowed to enter. Think positive, happy thoughts, and you will feel positive and happy. Think angry, or hostile thoughts, and you will immediately feel angry, or hostile." Pretty simple idea, but it all lines up with what I'm about to share next..)

So the next day, I say this mantra to myself (as well as always being aware of what that hypnotist said) and almost at ONCE perceived a difference in the people around me. All of the sudden, I was bombarded by text messages, approached by girls I didn't know, met with smiles and handshakes from guys who had been typically cool to me, got on well with the people selling fruit and cheese in the open air market, got a free beer that night, etc etc... and everyone saw that stuff, and reacted positively to me again, which made other people see, and that made me feel awesome, and this cyclical receptivity started to occur which created this exponential feedback loop of good vibes and positive energy. (coincidentally, or not, this is the day I met the nice Irish girl.)

This got me thinking about the whole "reality" thing. What is your reality? Is it really possible to create your own reality? I'm becoming more and more convinced of this everyday I experience things like this. Mind you, there is fear associated with this... because going out of your way to tell that girl across the street that you think her she did her hair really nicely today is fairly non-traditional, the fear of social rejection is present; yet in someone else's mind this could be totally normal, like opening a door or brushing your teeth. But we don't live in a time where you'll get thrown out into the Savannah if you happen to compliment the Alpha-Male-Of-the-Group's wife and he didn't like it too much. So the fear becomes irrational, and transcend-able.

Likewise, this is the fear of creating your own reality, (even more fear when fear its self guides and molds your consciousness) where you don't have to ask permission to do the things that make you happy. How many people do you know who are free? Maybe this is the definition of freedom. I never really got the quote "the truth will set you free" UNTIL I put it into a handy-dadny (yet non-intuitive/organic) equation: ((Believing=seeing) + (Believing is truth)) • Truth= Freedom.

But on the flip side, once you've experienced this positive frame of mind, it's amazing how most people, even me, for most our their/our lives are programmed to think negatively, or are stuck in these hardwired, deep set ruts of obstructive, negative thinking. How hard is it to consciously block negative thoughts from entering your mind? I tried it for a day and sometimes it was like trying to run in five feet of Pacific Ocean coastal waters on the ebb tide. I guess it seems to natural to get pissed off at stupid stuff and have something to complain about rather then a solution or a lack of attachment to a certain outcome. Strange.

Yet when you instead filter out negativity from your mind and replace it with optimism, you bombard your subconscious equally with positive thinking rather then typical negative thinking and thus slowly rewire your consciousness to create new channels of constructive awareness. Like having worn sunglasses for a long period that were tinted blue, so everything you saw was blue, and you could see the deepest shades and most amazing blues ever.

But it therefore also eliminated the chance of seeing the color red, and many other colors. So a diversion if the flow of mental energies is like changing your proverbial sunglasses to sunglasses that are not red, or blue or gray, or yellow but CLEAR. I think clear is most likely color to bring you the things in life that make you happy, the things that you want and need. :D When that kind of thinking coming from a place of positivity, creativity, and love starts to occur on a larger scale, I wonder how the external, worldly affects will manifest themselves. Maybe that day when all the great things happened was a first taste of the new reality I'm trying to create for myself.

So anyway, I guess since I've arrived back in Europe, I've been reinventing myself in one way or another... or maybe not reinventing, since no need to reinvent the wheel ;-) but maybe refining. Or redefining. Attuning. Something of this nature.

Either that or "dammnnn! My new haircut, Tsubo shoes, new grey striped euro-pants, blingy socks covered in stars and dice, beachy-leather bracelets, an awesome new button-up crimson shirt, and dark sunglasses, all topped off with a dash of Armani Code cologne gives me a real edge!"


hahaahahhaaha well, wow. So now that you're thoroughly confused, I'm going to have to give you a proverbial pat on the back!

And for those of you who just skipped to the bottom, well.... you're not going to get the new car or home kitchen suite. But thanks for playingg!! We'll be back next weeekk...

jaaaayysus, who knows anymore.


Maybe I should just read this email while the ensemble plays aleatoric music at mezzo-mezzo.


OK! You're done. That's what's going on in my life, and now its your turn to inform me I now require you to get me in the loop of whatever is happening in your diverse and varied lives.


I love you all and wish the best for you in your pursuits for... [select one or all] Today/Tomorrow/Next week/Next year/Next 5-10 years/Next life...

-e

PS Ya'll have been BCC'ed, in case anyone was touchy about that kind of thing...






Now, let's watch the Brazilian dance company Grupo Corpo blow our proverbial socks off in a while ride of viewing pleasure:


And, lets be reminded of what an amazing ending this is for a concert, and yes, even a long winded blog post: