THE NEW PARADIGM

Poem After Carlos Drummond de Andrade

"It's life, Carlos."

It's life that is hard: waking, sleeping, eating, loving, working and dying are easy.
It's life that suddenly fills both ears with the sound of that
        symphony that forces your pulse to race and swells your
        heart near to bursting.
It's life, not listening, that stretches your neck and opens your eyes
        and brings you into the worst weather of the winter to
        arrive once more at the house where love seemed to be in the air.

And it's life, just life, that makes you breathe deeply, in the air that
        is filled with wood smoke and the dust of the factory,
        because you hurried, and now your lungs heave and fall
        with the nervous excitement of a leaf in spring breezes,
        though it is winter and you are swallowing the dirt of
        the town.
It isn't death when you suffer, it isn't death when you miss each
        other and hurt for it, when you complain that isn't death,
        when you fight with those you love, when you
        misunderstand, when one line in a letter or one remark in
        person ties one of you in knots, when the end seems near,
        when you think you will die, when you wish you were
        already dead -- none of that is death.
It's life, after all, that brings you a pain in the foot and a pain in the
        hand, a sore throat, a broken heart, a cracked back, a torn
        gut, a hole in your abdomen, an irritated stomach, a
        swollen gland, a growth, a fever, a cough, a hiccup, a
        sneeze, a bursting blood vessel in the temple.
It's life, not nerve ends, that puts the heartache on a pedestal and worships it.
It's life, and you can't escape it. It's life, and you asked for it. It's life,
        and you won't be consumed by passion, you won't be
        destroyed by self-destruction, you won't avoid it by
        abstinence, you won't manage it by moderation, because
        it's life -- life everywhere, life at all times -- and so you
        won't be consumed by passion: you will be consumed
        by life.

It's life that will consume you in the end, but in the meantime...
It's life that will eat you alive, but for now...
It's life that calls you to the street where the wood smoke hangs,
        and the bare hint of a whisper of your name, but before
        you go...

Too late: Life got its tentacles around you, its hooks into your heart,
        and suddenly you come awake as if for the first time, and
        you are standing in a part of the town where the air is
        sweet -- your face flushed, your chest thumping, your
        stomach a planet, your heart a planet, your every organ a
        separate planet, all of it of a piece though the pieces turn
        separately, O silent indications of the inevitable, as among
        the natural restraints of winter and good sense, life blows
        you apart in her arms.

Marvin Bell

I just found these videos of the Evangenitals at the Eagle Rock Music Festival on YouTube. The sound is pretty awful, however, if you play the album you can watch us prance about and get the feeling of a real, live Evangenitals show. :-)

The Hole (from the album Everlovin)



Bad Town (listen a live version, here)



The Work Song (from the album We Are The Evangenitals)



F*ck 'em All (from the album Everlovin)



Sergio (from the album Everlovin)

That blind man, standing on the bridge, as gray
as some abandoned empire's boundary stone,
perhaps he is the one thing that never shifts,
around which the stars move in their hours,
and the motionless hub of the constellations.
For the city drifts and rushes and struts around him.

He is the just man, the immovable
set down here in many tangled streets;
the dark opening to the underworld
among a superficial generation.

translated by Robert Bly

my glorious stay in VENICE BEACH :)

Today I was drumming on USA Today and LA weekly newspaper stands. The USA Today was so warm and busty I felt like taking it to my studio and putting it next to the floor tom of my drum set. FOUND PERCUSSION OBJECTS are nothing less than miraculous. Everything from the slides of playgrounds, to walls in the bathroom of the SAE Institute, to streetlight poles can be turned into haunting and beautiful instruments. In The Triplets of Belleville, the triplets used a refrigerator, a vacuum cleaner, and a newspaper as their primary instruments. Even using the built in microphone on my Mac Book with Garage Band to capture the sound, I recorded an amazing track using the book MOBY DICK as a drum.

My obsession with found art was super charged when I happened upon GLANK at the Eagle Rock Music Festival. GLANK is a found-percussion ensemble with 10-15 drummers in radioactive jumpsuits banging on drums, saw blades, sheet metal, empty tanks, and much much more to create intelligent and rivetingsoundscapes that make you want to dance. At one point they handed out massive home made shakers for the audience to get in on the action. The industrial vibe with all the shimmering metal and dark tones, mixed with the ominous appearance of jump suits and the earth shattering rhythms, all make Glank The Product highly recommended. It's like witnessing the mutiny of an assembly line.

The heightened sense of creativity and the profound sense of resourcefulness; of recycling as innovation and music are just some of the many glorious benefits of readymades. So next time you buy a newspaper remember you are a midwife, witnessing the birth of an instrument out of another instrument. Pay your respects.

ever desireless, one can see the mystery
ever desiring, one can see the manifestations...
-TAO TE CHING

when you trust your television
what you get is what you got
and when they own the information
they can bend it all they want
-JOHN MAYER

There is no real estate in Tuva.
Tibetan sand paintings.
The internet has made music free.
This is a paradigm shift.
It's a new era! OPEN SOURCE.

Check out "my" painting below :)

I am sitting here the Ramona Mainstage Nightclub to support fellow Evangenital Juli Crockett who is June Carter in the San Deigo based Johnny Cash cover band, Cash'd Out. This place looks like a church, a ski lodge, a living room, a movie theater, a funeral home and a hunting lodge all in one. This is Ramona, California people! We took the 5 South freeway down from Los Angeles, past the oil rigs of Long Beach doing their incendiary choreography against the burnt sky of a city sinking into the sea? Yesterday I saw a Billboard (not a myspace music billboard) that was two empty check boxes; next to one box it said "cross fingers." Next to the other one it said "Fight Global Warming." Hmmmmmm. These are all these mulling around in the rock tumbler of my mind. All things eventually sink back into the ocean. In Maharishi's Science of Being and Art of Living He says that even the personal God will dissolve into the unmanifest Impersonal God. In spite of this existential swoon I pull up this Poem from St. Theresa to spur me back to the practical matters at hand :)

People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centred;
Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you've got anyway.

You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God;
It was never between you and them anyway.

So I'm here doing it, (too bad I'm not wearing Michael Jordan Nikes that might cancel out my state of mind?) blogging like an idiot in public, a poster boy for Apple; my little white apple levitating in the orb of blackness that is the booth I'm sitting in. The Cash'd out guys and girl are sound checking over another track of pre-recorded music that is also playing in the background. It's quite a polyrhythm. As a drummer, I've often fantasized about being able to play convincingly in two different tempos at once. Let me tell you that I am someone who is DEEPLY affected by music. Deeply deeply deeply affected. I am hardwired to respond to music as if I am being kissed.

One night when I was working at the Redwood Bar & Grill, going back and forth between the Mariachi music in the kitchen and the perpetually and violently eclectic music on the jukebox was an emotional roller coaster for me. Haha. And I was a food runner so going back and forth between the kitchen and the dining area was my job. All night I was a slave to tempos continually adjusting to new rhythms new grooves, It was a massive perpetually unresolving collage of sound with the progressive yelling and cursing mixed in as the night carried on. At one point in the night to my utter amazement the tempo of the music in the kitchen was the same as the music out in the Bar. I was ecstatic imagining what kind of formula would be necessary to assess the odds of something so magnificent happening. I tried to explain this to the other employees who were only mildly impressed. How many miracles go unrecognized? :)

I'm a novice, yet monumentally in love with free jazz and experimental music. John Cage says that music is just the organization of sound. That got me thinking about pre-organization of sound; Duchampian; FOUND SYMPHONIES of the universe? The entire stream of life; inalterable and completely musical if you radically change your definition of music. Basically any vibration is music. Yet when the pre-organization coincidentally aligns with the preconceived and conditioned notions of organization, it can be thrilling. This is what happened at the Redwood, a DJed free jazz miracle of accidental and thrilling correlation.

Even now as I sit here waiting for Cash'd Out, there is loud country music on the horrible PA system. That music is interacting with the typing of my fingers and the chewing of the popcorn and there is a Tag Cloud of voice; a blanket of white noise full of the Carbon Dioxide of people collaborating. Collaboration is a big signifier of the new paradigm. Groups like improv everywhere, 1 second film, Laughter For a Change are good examples of this. The amazing thing is that collaboration is continual and involuntary in addition to the voluntary bouts. We are all collaborating right now. Collaboration is happening. The postal system, the airlines, the ozone, the ants, the telephones, the traffic lights, the digestive tract; there is a massive network already in place and in motion, but deeper than the mundane practical and biological aspects is the actual totality of the content being generated all the time. Every thought you think is a collaboration, everything you eat is a collaboration with the entire network. The network, the internet, the matrix, maya, is evolutionary and Darwinian. It is a learning machine that each of us is steering and contributing to perpetually. This is exciting and terrifying. What are we creating?

What are we creating? What for? This involuntary collaboration is as ubiquitous as time yet governed by free will? This free will can be steered, and collective phenomena when not based in self sufficiency and allowance of diversity leans towards fascism? Couldn't we all steer in the same direction? The power of collective phenomena is amazing. I have thoughts like what if everyone in Los Angeles decided to go to the Redwood Bar & Grill on the same day at the same time? We are in a narrow strip of predictability and yet in these volatile times it seems there is an opportunity for a radical shift of prioritization. This all will happen naturally involuntarily, but let's ask ourselves without the big NO voice of the head, what is it that you really want for yourself? What kind of life do you want to be living, wiithout excuses that are groundless and based in insane assumptions? Start steering the collective with your involuntary collaboration. Fireflies can take over a whole tree and start flashing on and off in unison. This is music. A spontaneous collaboration of the collective making decisions based in the heart and yet allowing for diversity within that collective heart beat. We all share a a heart what do we feel? Authentic and healthy rhythm is based in saying yes to life. Every time you hit a drum it says Yes. A heartbeat is

Yes Yes

Yes Yes

Yes Yes

Yes Yes.

In the stunning words of Henry Miller,

Death is wonderful too-after life. Only one like myself who
has opened his mouth and spoken, only one who has said Yes,
Yes, Yes, and again Yes! can open wide his arms to death and
know no fear. Death as a reward, yes! But not death from
the roots, isolating men, making them bitter and fearful and
lonely, giving them fruitless energy, filling them with a will
which can only say No! The first word any man writes when
he has found himself, his own rhythm, which is the life rhythm,
is Yes! Everything he writes thereafter is Yes, Yes, Yes,-Yes in a
thousand million ways. No dynamo, no matter how huge-not
even a dynamo of a hundred million dead souls-can combat one
man saying Yes!

The fog machines release a huge billow of smoke as Cash'd Out begins.They are playing "Walk the Line." The Line. Between the new paradigm and the old paradigm. My guess is that there is no new paradigm it's a just a deepening of the old paradigm. How can we build anything when our only material is a unified vibration? It is most surely a forgetting of what we are not, rather than building anything new. And yet walking the line is the willingness, the spontaneous devotion and self sacrifice to the happiness of love that is bigger than picking a side. It is an integration of opposite values and that integration is the new paradigm that embraces the old paradigm and yet points towards a reality based in happiness and self sufficiency of the individual and the collective. Boo Yah!

My discovery today is that smiling makes music louder and fuller. Try smiling with headphones. It will make you smile?

Completely in love with this guy. :)

"If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it.  Is there any other way"   -Emily Dickinson

www.fashionweekla.com/calendar.html#tue1017

Check it out.

This is the link for LEILA's fashion show. 

I AM SO EXCITED FOR HER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 

I had this idea!
This person did it.
It's a truly exciting time to be alive. hehe
all love,
David

Here is my spoken word version of David Banner's Hip Hop classic "Get Like Me"
D

I can't help it. Here is a video of the EVANGENITALS at Mr. T's Bowl.  God bless the music.
D

Cruisin down the 405 with the REVEREND

JUST configured my live journal to receive texts! Yay! Ultra pro!