they say music soothes the savage beast. i know it has soothed me many time when hope seemed far away. i haven't been playing too much lately (or blogging for that matter) and i hope to change that soon. on the other hand, sometimes you just have to put it down for awhile and not force it, and hope the muse will return when she's ready.

in the meantime, i recently came across some youtube videos of my favorite guitar player of all time, an acoustic thrash master called michael hedges. i had the extreme pleasure of seeing him play several times and even had a beer with him at blueberry hill one time before he died in a tragic car accident. his passing effected me almost as a family member. hard to believe its been 10 years.

his music, beyond being technically challenging and wonderful to listen to, just inspires me. one man, one guitar - no layering, no fixing up in the studio, just a musician going off the hook with his art.

in looking for my muse i am reminded of something he once said, “…the path to yourself may be through others.”

so if you're in the mood to watch and listen to a different path for a bit i offer up some tidbits here, enjoy...

this is him playing a harp/guitar instrument
harp


this is a version of the dylan/hendrix song all along the watchtower which was the first thing i ever heard from michael late one night watching austin city limits on public television.
watchtower


and lastly, since you will never have the opportunity to see michael play live again, i leave you with a still living artist who definitely has some michael influence that you should check out if you get the chance. his name is ben lacey and my friend tim burke's buddy shot this video of him playing an old led zeppelin song in nashville.
benlacey

posted by bluematrix at 02/29/08 21:05 | link | comments (5)

sorry i'm late. typically i do a once a week blog post, usually sunday night. i'm late because....drum roll please...i've accepted a full time position and have been bizzy getting things together. yep for the first time in a decade i will have a real job, with a real office and a real boss and most importantly, a real paycheck every two weeks.

i've enjoyed my time as a contractor/freelancer/small business owner - the freedom, at times great money, the sense of controlling ones destiny. but working for myself, usually out of my home office, i have missed the daily interaction with my fellow humans, the benefits both monetary and non-monetary (like company paid training) that come with large corporations, and last but not least, knowing how much you're going to make every week... makes budgeting a heckuva lot easier.

i have a feeling i will be one day revisit working for myself again. there are two books (one already started) that need to come out of me someday. and i keep envisioning myself being a motivational speaker sometime. oh and there is the movie i promised myself i would make someday. but for a few years at least i'm jumping back into the corporate scene and putting aside the professional creative gig.

the position i've accepted is one that happily corresponds directly with the masters in instructional design (elearning emphasis) i will attain this later this year. my official title is 'senior consultant' in the training department for a large midwest hospital system employing 30,000 people and over 4000 doctors. it should be fun and challenging and well, stable for a change. bring it on.

posted by bluematrix at 02/20/08 21:23 | link | comments (3)

some heavy, but enlightening thoughts on death from the epilogue of 'zen & motorcycle maintenance' that remind me of what i struggled with after my sister jacquie died two (hard to believe its been that long) years ago. Chris, the authors son who took the motorcycle trip with him, was murdered a few years after the book was published and below is an excerpt of the author pondering his sons death.

'Where did Chris go? Did he go up the stack at the crematorium? Was he in the little box of bones they handed back? Was he strumming a harp of gold on some overhead cloud? None of the answers made any sense.

It had to be asked: What was it I was so attached to? Is it just something in the imagination? Do real things just disappear like that? If they do, then the conservation laws of physics are in trouble.

But if we stay with the laws of physics, then the Chris that disappeared was unreal. Round and round and round. The loops eventually stopped at the realization that before it could be asked "Where did he go?" it must be asked "What is the 'he' that is gone?" There is an old cultural habit of thinking of people as primarily something material, as flesh and blood. As long as this idea held, there was no solution. The oxides of Chris's flesh and blood did, of course, go up the stack at the crematorium. But they weren't Chris.

What had to be seen was that the Chris I missed so badly was not an object but a pattern, and that although the pattern included the flesh and blood of Chris, that was not all there was to it. The pattern was larger than Chris and myself, and related us in ways that neither of us understood completely and neither of us was in complete control of.

Now Chris's body, which was a part of that larger pattern, was gone. But the larger pattern remained. A huge hole had been tom out of the center of it, and that was what caused all the heartache. The pattern was looking for something to attach to and couldn't find anything. That's probably why grieving people feel such attachment to cemetery headstones and any material property or representation of the deceased. The pattern is trying to hang on to its own existence by finding some new material thing to center itself upon.

Some time later it became clearer that these thoughts were something very close to statements found in many "primitive" cultures. If you take that part of the pattern that is not the flesh and bones of Chris and call it the "spirit" of Chris or the "ghost" of Chris, then you can say without further translation that the spirit or ghost of Chris is looking for a new body to enter. When we hear accounts of "primitives" talking this way, we dismiss them as superstition because we interpret ghost or spirit as some sort of material ectoplasm, when in fact they may not mean any such thing at all.'

posted by bluematrix at 02/10/08 15:24 | link | comments (1)

know what a meme is? one my favorite authors, richard dawkins, coined the term in his killer book, 'the selfish gene' in which he theorizes humans may be merely vessels for gene replication. he describes a meme as a kind of cultural 'gene' - an idea or piece of information that spreads throughout a society. think of a song, or a catch-phrase (e.g. '24/7') that becomes popular and spreads across a society.

wikipedia gives us a rather dry definition: a meme constitutes a theoretical unit of cultural information, the building block of culture or cultural evolution which spreads through diffusion propagating from one mind to another analogously to the way in which a gene propagates from one organism to another as a unit of genetic information and of biological evolution.

a short story written in 1876 by mark twain, 'a literary nightmare', describes his encounter with a jingle so "catchy" that it plays over and over in his mind until he finally sings it out loud and infects others. this is a particular type of meme called an 'earworm'. like genes evolving, some memes will be unsuccessful and become extinct while others will not only survive but spread and mutate.

in her 1999 book, 'the meme machine' psychologist susan blackmore tells us she thinks the study of memes should be a legitimate branch of science. she sees the meme as being able to explain and shed new light on such diverse topics as origin of language, the origin of the human brain, sexual phenomena, the internet and the notion of the self. she thinks memes provide simpler and clearer explanations than trying to create genetic explanations in these fields. indeed she suggests memes may now in some cases be driving actual genetic evolution. she notes that human brains began expanding in size at about the same time that we started using tools and suggests that once individuals began to to imitate each other, selection pressure favored those who could make good choices on what to imitate, and could imitate intelligently.

perhaps you've noticed the name of this blog 'assimilate - innovate'. it comes from the best definition of the creative process i've come across so far which is 'first we imitate, then we assimilate, then we innovate'. meme theory raises imitation to a whole 'nuther level. cool stuff.

posted by bluematrix at 02/03/08 22:54 | link | comments (1)