A neo-renaissance, eco-epicurean savors, curates and shares slices from the surf's edge on the inspiration, imagination, the art of living, the living of art - and anything that screams Life.
M. Scott Peck: The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace Just started, but compelled by the model of moving from pseudo-community (where everyone is fake nice) to a true community where no one is trying to change anyone else; and collaboration truly flourishes.
Michael Scott: The Alchemyst: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel Just checked out of library. Adore fantasy, fairy tales, and myth. And when the jacket said that Michael Scott was an authority on mythology and folklore, I was hooked. Plus I still have designs on writing my own mythic tale down soon.
Steven Johnson: Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation Really intrigued by the title. Fabulously diverse in examples. If you ever felt like a square in round world, this book will make you sing for joy because that's what life is about--growing, moving, evolving.... The book is much stronger for being in Science section and not restricted to business innovation alone.
"Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
After watching this video "The Dare of DIY" by Tara Gentile, on how the handmade, DIY, artsy, "why not?" culture is akin to entrepreurship and tying the two into a tapestry, I'm adding Tara Gentile into the ally category, too.
Tara shares that a common thread among the handmade, DIY, indie set is the burning question:
Can it be done?
The business of sharing your stuff out in the wide world can also be looked at in the same adventurous spirit of the creative act. Tara, quoting landscape designer Steve Gerischer from the book, Made by Hand, shares, "Look at it as an opportunity to try stuff out, "Ask yourself, "What do I get to do?" not "What do I have to do?""
And loving this sentiment, from same book, Made by Handby Mark Fraenfelder (a few sample chapters in PDF here): "I am at my most creative when I do something I have no experience with." says Andrew Anker, SAY Media (SAY Media is behind Typepad, where this blog is hosted, btw).
Another gem from Tara's video presentation at the Etsy Labs gathering: "You have no preconceived notions about how something is going to turn out, you have no specific expectations, you have no instructions, you have no role models,--you just kind of give it a go. That's really the crux of experimenting."
Once I communed in foreign languages that translated into a computer's DNA of zero's and one's. Eventually executable applications made way for executing marketing campaigns - it was a stepping stone to being with beings (although computers are a strata of existence, for instance, they purr when you play them fractal animations).
My marketing stint was an exploration into what made humans tick, why we needed what we needed, desired what we desired after my first career cranking out virtual 3D metaverses to Internet shopping carts. Marketing, though, bringing me much closer to the mark, still skated the surface with regards to genuine no-strings-attached intimacy and the depths of connection.
The words that caught my eye in Herd's [hmmm, why do my fingers want to type Heard!?] neon rose jacket were: "...we are at heart a 'we-species,' but one suffering from the 'illusion of I'." Flipping through the book, another quote pops out: "Interaction is what jazz music is all about. - Stan Gertz." Nice.
Let's toss out the marketing consultant/guru/pundit angle for a moment although it's all inextricably integrated, and peer at the cartoonist. The artist. (And Hugh considers himself a cartoonist foremost.) What truly imprinted for me about Hugh was the spontaneity with which his pen flowed out stream-of-consciousness cartoons onto business cards during a group picnic lunch at South Park.
No pre-meditation, no wrangling and tussing about with words and contorting shapes over and over with revisions and drafts until just the precise perfect note was hit in some long-suffering artiste pose. Pure flow.
His flow-ering pen inspires me to more ephemeral art. If you can't pack it and carry it with you and blurt it out and give it away on the spot, then - maybe you're holding onto too much. Maybe you're holding back too much.
Maybe we're confining art too much? To canvases, to mausoleums, to bound leather journals.
The artists that stop me in my tracks are the ones that inspire me to create on the spot myself. Wow! Give me a sketchpad now! Where's my camera? Oh, a poem is jiggling out. I must jot these rushing lyrics.
A Twitterista friend (one of those secreted away in protected mode, so I'll not say whom) wrote today:
little boy watched saul's
children of night w/ me. asked "did he say dragon did he say monster" i
explained saul wanted those words in poem
then boy composed 2 of his own poems
I have a hard time articulating what I felt when I read that tweet. This little boy, a very little boy indeed, wanted to do his dance after hearing a poet play his pipe. That's seldom the response, really. The spectator may think a lot of things, from: "wow, wish I could do that" to "I can't ever enthrall like that" to "now that was the shit" to "that's just his hobby, right" to...
I smiled at two poems writing a little boy, because the little girl within me had the very exact same response, though mine was a singular longer one. After an evening of YouTube and Saul Williams (I also adore When the Clock Strikes Me) with a bit of La Bruja (and here's an interview with hip hop poet Caridad de La Luz) thrown in, I wrote the most amazing poetry - you'll just have to take my word for it as I prefer to share the first reading aloud at an intimate face-to-face open mic night.
I haven't quite placed the magic ingredient that separates the artist that dazzles from afar, with a charmed audience drooling at their genius, with the ones whose brilliance extends to kindling a fire in ourselves...but that's what I am personally aiming for.
So I wonder aloud that if passion is fire is hearth, then if it doesn't have something to do with its anagrams too: hearth -> heat, heart, Earth, art, hear.
Especially heart.
On Saul's MySpace page, he writes a very endearing open letter to Oprah sometime after an Oprah segment on rappers and hip-hop. (Saul Williams is an indie hip-hop/punk spoken word artist and musician I wrote about in the last post.) This is the excerpt that reallllllly grabbed at me, although the entire letter is exemplary in its warmth and candor. It may also explain why I'm no longer interested in busyness anymore, rather out to live my making as art:
"On your show you asked the question, "Are all rappers poets?" Nice. I
wanted to take the opportunity to answer this question for you.
The genius, as far as the marketability, of Hip Hop is in its
competitiveness. Its roots are as much in the dignified aspects of our
oral tradition as it is in the tradition of "the dozens" or
"signifying". In Hip Hop, every emcee is automatically pitted against
every other emcee, sort of like characters with super powers in comic
books. No one wants to listen to a rapper unless they claim to be the
best or the greatest. This sort of braggadocio leads to all sorts of
tirades, showdowns, battles, and sometimes even deaths. In all cases,
confidence is the ruling card. Because of the competitive stance that
all emcees are prone to take, they, like soldiers begin to believe that
they can show no sign of vulnerability. Thus, the most popular emcees
of our age are often those that claim to be heartless or show no
feelings or signs of emotion. The poet, on the other hand, is the one
who realizes that their vulnerability is their power. Like you,
unafraid to shed tears on countless shows, the poet finds strength in
exposing their humanity, their vulnerability, thus making it possible
for us to find connection and strength through their work. Many emcees
have been poets. But, no, Ms. Winfrey, not all emcees are poets. Many
choose gangsterism and business over the emotional terrain through
which true artistry will lead."
When we awaken our heart, perhaps then, we awaken as art.
ART YouTube video of Saul Williams orating "Children of the Night" (that's Ken Wilber introducing him in the circle); I cannot recall source of this Brooklyn, NY graffiti whatsoever, if you know, fill me in
p.s. As I've said trillions of times, I don't regard creativity as a segregated aspect of life, I regard it as every moment's expression of life.
"My
mother said to me, "If you become a soldier, you'll be a general; if
you become a monk, you'll end up as the Pope." Instead, I became a
painter and wound up as Picasso." - Pablo Picasso
"Each of us are on the
spiralling journey of our Soul, and conspiring (beathing together); it
only seems we are here buying and selling," I twittered earlier today. I was thinking about how to answer a request from a young marketeer who is going to begin blogging for their company.
I don't write about marketing as a separate music genre any longer. I see this entire universe as music, birthed from primordial sound. Being poetic, I'm being quite literal as well.
"Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument." - Carl Jung
I see trios and intimate bands drawn together the way tuning forks quicken. Interlocking with other bands the way the flower of life mandala twines. Resounding resonance amasses in waves of mass movements. All is vibration seeking to sing in tune, in harmony. Melody harmony rhythm arises in symphony, each crescendo and finale fluidly leading to the next improvization with perhaps a fluxing dance ensemble of instruments, a new merry band of pranksters. The music goes on and on, even the gaps, the silence, the shuffling of feet is incorporated into the river of music.
"When we are dreaming alone it is only a dream. When we are dreaming with others, it is the beginning of reality." - Dom Helder Camara
If you had to pin me to define 4D, I'd say that's the imaginal realm, or wherever it is you deem your ideas come "from." If you had to pin me to define 5D - well, honestly if you're pinning and I'm defining we've definitely left the realm of 5D - I'd say that's the realm where your soul is singing in a conspiracy of beauty, a concert of One with a kaliedoscope of sacred mirrors.
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars
This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius - "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In", The Fifth Dimension
Regardless of appearances in flatland, we are never mute.
Yet what is the soundtrack of our lives humming?
I sing the body electric
I glory in the glow of rebirth
Creating my own tomorrow
When I shall embody the earth - "I Sing the Body Electric", Fame
I'm not sure how long I can keep up the 3D tone here at this blog.
Some people claim they don't understand when I write 4D. This is an example of the way I write when I'm firing all 4Dcylinders:
Nonlinear sworly soup w fractal laser fog and buzzing prana and ringed
torus serpentine infinitudes of delish delight de light.
The vibration is moving, morphing and will probably end up of its own accord somewhere else. Kind of the way I just started adding photos from Flickr one day, and that morphed to art from my friends and famous artisans, and finally that sashayed its way into what you see today.
And you'd think looking backwards with 20/20 hindsight that I planned this as some master strategy seeing as most of my new blog readers come from Google's image search function.
No calculation. No strategy. All I did was glide with the music.
We might say that the group Fifth Dimension won the musician's lottery in recording the hit classic "Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In" if you ascribe to randomness.
We might say that they were astute marketers following their strategy marketing plan if you ascribe to MBA theories.
When you flow with the Tao - that's living in 5D. Following instinct after instinct, that divine music within collaborates with the divine music without until the seam is seen through and through as a construct, a figment of the imagination, so "within" "without" is simply "with" - that's living in 5D.
The Fifth Dimension was simply jamming with the universe, in five dimensions:
Florence said, "It was a real fluke. We
were performing in New York City and Billy lost his wallet in a taxi.
The man who returned it invited us to see a play he produced. [Interesting how the music weaves together perfectly.] The play
of course was Hair. Well we heard Aquarius and we all just looked at
each other and said 'We've got to sing this song. It's great.'" It was
producer Howe who suggested splicing Aquarius together with lyrics from
another number in the musical which became "Let The Sunshine In". [No coincidence: If you've become aware of 5D, you'll know how the solar star fits in.] He
got together with arranger Bob Alcivar & put the two songs
together, making them work as one single. "We recorded that song in Las
Vegas, in this small studio," says LaRue. "Our voices were all tired,
we'd been performing there for over a month. It was the quickest thing
we ever recorded and it was one of our biggest hits." [Yup 5D simply glides.] They were very
close to the railroad tracks, and while they were singing the final
chorus, a train rumbled by. You can still hear the locomotive, though,
just barely, on the final master.
"Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In" remained in the #1 spot on
Billboard's chart for 6 straight weeks and remained in the Top 40 for
16 weeks. Both the single and album "Age Of Aquarius" went Gold and
received two Grammy Awards for Record Of The Year and Best Contemporary
Vocal By A Group. They were also nominated for Album Of The Year. The
song was also nominated for Best Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist. The
song eventually sold over three million copies, making it the biggest
selling single that year. The original song was over 7 minutes long and
it was Bill Drake of a Los Angeles radio station who suggested the song
needed to be shortened to about 3 minutes; so Howe released 2 versions,
one just over 3 minutes and one under 3 minutes." - The Fifth Dimension, profile from ClassicBands.com
p.s. Nope, multidimensional and hyperspace art is not a throwback to the sixties. I'm just playing with the 1969 Fifth Dimension mythos. Much hyperspace art has not been created yet, although it's all been created too, and at the same time simultaneously. Here's a modern hyperspace artist, Paul Laffoley's work, The WORLD SOUL of Plotinus - travel between two and three-dimensional forms(2001).
Art: A multidimensional Buddha photo, by Celia Fenn, from her newsletter, Earthlog May 2007: ("This image conveys the feeling of the Buddha energy in the 21st century, for me. It is a
"multi-dimensional" image. It was taken into a shop window, in a street
in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, when I was there last month. There is
the image of the Buddha "floating" in the foreground. Then, the
reflections of the buildings in the shop window, and if you look very
closely, you can see me, taking the image, with my friend, Jeanne.
There are layers of imagery creating a "holographic" image of the
Buddha energy in a specific place and time."); Fifth Dimension 1970 album cover, Portrait; Dawn Grace's "Soundtrack of Our Lives" concert poster via the interdimensional ezine, Turntable + Blue Light); Hair original publicity poster (looks like infinity symbol, eh?); Paul Laffoley, The WORLD SOUL of Plotinus - travel between two and three-dimensional forms (2001).
"Why
must art be clinically “realistic?”[Even artists have confined Reality.] This Cubist “revolt against
perspective” seized the fourth dimension because it touched the third
dimension from all possible perspectives. Simply put, Cubist art
embraced the fourth dimension. Picasso's paintings [just a coincidence that I started this post using a Picasso quote, and later in a Google image search for "fifth dimension poster" found the science and cosmology blog...and found this article...yes, it's all One Co-incidence fluidly fluxing] are a splendid
example, showing a clear rejection of three dimensional perspective,
with women's faces viewed simultaneously from several angles. Instead
of a single point-of-view, Picasso's paintings show multiple
perspectives, as if they were painted by a being from the fourth
dimension, able to see all perspectives simultaneously. As art
historian Linda Henderson has written, “the fourth dimension and
non-Euclidean geometry emerge as among the most important themes
unifying much of modern art and theory."
Bonus Deux: Snippet from Ascension Magick (not Christopher's complete description of Age of Aquarius): "The fabled Age of Aquarius is promised to be the Golden Age reborn. The reason for this is that Aquarius is the sign of universal sisterhood/brotherhood. Aquarius is the sign of freedom and individuality, where all are able to freely express themselves.
"The conclusion is always the same, love is the most important and still the most unknown energy of the world." - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
That's the quote on the Toubab Krewe CD surrounded by images of the band members with local musicians and children in West Africa. I had the pleasure of seeing this Asheville band's labour of love at the Maple Leaf Bar in New Orleans a week ago Sunday.
Pure devotional music. Not everyone would describe Toubab Krewe's music as thus, yet I do.
The intensity of love and light was beating loud. So easy to close your eyes and sway to the rhythm. Best meditation I'd had in months: I know that when the diamond tingles in my head in that sweet giddy way. They were enchanted too.
"Human beings, vegetables, or comic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune intoned in the distance by an invisible player." - Albert Einstein
I'm shifting focus slightly as I promised to the active side of inspiration for remainer of the series.
Active? (Uh, does that sounds like drudgery?) Don't get me wrong, if it smacks of work even a tad, it's not inspired. It's closer to rejoicing - being propelled by joy. It's closer to dancing. What makes your heart dance?
If you can't whistle and sing and tap dance while you work, start resurrecting a few of the practices that do make you dance - baking homemade sourdough bread from stratch and maybe your own yeast from the ether, listening to the morning dove's coo coo coo, throwing stick for your dog into the gurgling creek while you two hike, planting sunflowers, basil and eggplants into the earth, writing love letters and leaving them in a library book for someone else, lingering over a cafe au lait and almond croissant in the courtyard at Rue Pagan as sparrows congregrate, or literally dancing, or whatever, oh, you know what wiggles your bones into dance.
"There was a star danced, and under that was I born." - William Shakespeare
p.s.It's the spring equinox tomorrow. I may not write as I'll be gutting a house in the Lower Ninth Ward, assuming I can get to the ACORN building by 7:30 a.m. that is. Try: Bask as much in the sunlight as you can. Walk more outside instead of driving. Hold meetings at outdoor cafe (weather permitting) instead of the conference room. Open up the windows.
Bonus: Am I advocating irresponsibility - if it feels like work - do not do it? Hmmm, quite probable, yes. But, then again, I don't exactly see the virtue of puritan work ethic like everyone else. I believe a labor of love isn't labor. It's that power of love that works miracles all of its own.
For instance, here's a comment I wrote a while back in response to Tara Hunt's post, What Boutique is: Part I:
"Sometimes I also call boutique artisanal, or right now as I’m back from Sundance Film Fest, indie spirit. (Indie: independence alone does not guarantee a ’boutique’. I noted that Krups sponsored the New Frontiers on Main cafe with local Salt Lake Roasting Company’s coffee. The owner is devoted to scouring the globe for the best coffee in the world for over 40 years, and the Krups marketing guy said that’s why they chose them as a co-sponsor. Nope, not every independent coffeehouse is boutique.) [BTW, I used to live in SLC and can testify to Salt Lake Roasting Company's devotion.]
Some luxury stuff is boutique, and vice versa. For instance, in Saratoga, CA I adore the jewelers Deja & Co. Astronomically pricey, yet I feel a boutique vibe there whenever I go in. Deja herself is charming and warm and the space is warm and inviting rather than pretentious and ‘exclusive’. Who else has baby blue walls, fresh flowers and an adorable chandelier — and that’s just the bathroom?
This level of devotion, not just attention, to detail stratifies the boutique from the mere luxury. A boutique is typically a labor of love for the owners. And I find it’s the owners that I also fall in love with at boutiques. Luxury alone all too often is a sterile, cold beauty rather than the effusive, gracious beauty of boutique.
The small production runs I find are typically because of this devotion to detail - for instance, the butter for the chocolate might simply taste better hand-churned, and thus it results in small batches. Small production is the result, but not the objective necessarily."
Bonus Deux: Toubab Krewe live on YouTube (ah, still have to be there to truly feel the presence)...
Day 9 of everyday inspiration.
Glancing over the last week's worth of posts, it's easy to surmise inspiration is stuff for the tea and crumpets crowd. Maybe, one too many nymphs, goddesses, faeries, eh?
Too girly? Fair enough. Oh sure, I brought men into this (Graves, Keroauc, Yeats) but for godsakes, they're poets! So this post is for the manly man in all of us.
Inspiration ain't sissy stuff. She's manna for the bold and hearty. Think exploration, expedition. Ernest Shackleton. John Wesley Powell. Everest. Yet all that terrain isn't terra incognita anymore. Where you go shall be.
"I saw a delicate flower had grown up two feet high between the horse's feet and the wheel track. An inch more to the right or left had sealed its fate, or an inch higher. Yet it lived to flourish and never knew the danger it incurred. It did not borrow trouble, nor invite an evil fate by apprehending it." - Henry David Thoreau, Walden Pond, Chapter 4
There's something compelling about someone who unapologetically is true to themselves. They live with gusto without hesitation, without wavering. Unshakeable. It's really quite captiving, alluring.
I know, I know it seems paradoxical that yielding, that being open, is strength.
There is a directness, a power in that unimpeded flow that looks like strength and integrity to others. And it is. It's not appearance.
I used to have a type of man I went for. The kind that hurtled themselves down tumultous Class V rivers. Launched themselves without a care in the world down a vertical notch zigzagging down a cliff on skis. They test the limits of their endurance in triathlons and ultramarathons each time topping the last adventure.
"The adventure of the hero is the adventure of being alive." - Joseph Campbell
They exuded that Outside magazine kind of rugged strength. No wusses here from the Outside view. Yet, feeling they had to be "in control" counterintuitively led to a walking on eggshells strategy that rippled through from the Inside out in everyday matters and life. You'd never know it from the Outside, but Thoreau knew what he was talking about when he stated, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
Courage and perservence takes the finesse of inspiration.
That photo still of Matthew Barney and Bj?rk (in this post, abandon self to The kiss). Wow. I love it for its frank eroticism. I love it even more because they've laid aside the battle agenda, softened the firm grip on the knives, and surrendered to a deeper call even though it didn't exactly make a lot of sense in context:
Hey, we were supposed to... The warrior gives way to the adventurer.
"A 'warrior' shaman tends to personify fear, illness, or disharmony and
to focus on the development of power, control, and combat skills in
order to deal with them. An 'adventurer" shaman, by contrast, tend to
depersonify these conditions (i.e., treat them as effects, not things)
and deal with them by developing skills of love, cooperation, and
harmony." - Serge Kahili King, Urban Shaman (comprehensive review/summary at Innovant blog)
Marketing guru Seth Godin has a few themes in his writings, much circles around being original, and thus abolishing mediocrity. Uniqueness inherently stands out. And so it follows that you can't be unique in the way I'm unique. (Duh!)
There are no best practices for product development, innovation, marketing, etc. contrary to what you may hear. That's following the herd. Rather, follow your inspiration.
That inner strength rippling outward that comes from following
inspiration, in that, mediocrity vanishes. It's mutually exclusive.
"What is mediocrity in life? It is the failure to let the inner
brilliance shine. Medieval theologicians described this personal
brilliance in the Latin word scintilla, the spark that lies
at the heart of a person. When that inner glow shows itself in
personality, way of life, values, and expression, mediocrity
disappears.
...Mediocrity covers over this life-giving scintillation in yourself
and the world. But the person alive to life and calling and love
responds and shows herself. She makes every effort to let that light
shine, whether it is within her small family or in the greater world.
The arc of scintillation depends on fate and destiny, but the spark is
important to everyone." - Thomas Moore, Dark Nights of the Soul
In a separate section of the article, we learn that ?uestlove of The
Roots song "You Got Me" (on YouTube) with Erykah Badu (and she is something herself) was "overtly positive" and summarily
rejected because as the labels and stations are "intent on investing in
songs with sexual and violent themes." They ponied up one million dollars to
encourage airplay on the radio (oh, that kind of payola is nothing new in the music world, what's new is they defied the prevailing judgment of 'this is what sells'). The song won an Grammy.
In a Stereo Warning interview (that clearly shows us The Root's roots are embedded in inspiration) with ?uestlove, the interviewer states:
"He also told us most hip-hop artists are broke, both financially and
when it comes to meaningful lyrics, which of course we know is at least
party caused by a rotten attitude of "sell big or get out" at major
record labels."
In an ode to James Brown, author Steve Palopoli in writing about his song "The Payback" notes Brown's compelling originality:
"Possibly the height of James Brown cool, this is where he let his unique street lyricism get right up in your face. This song contains several of his most mind-boggling lines, including "I don't know karate, but I know ka-razy!" Theoretically that last word should be "crazy," but only a phonetic spelling can even begin to do justice to this lyric. Who knows if he meant to say "crazy" -- it seems like in James Brown's mind, "ka-razy" might be a real thing, like he had to make up a new word just to describe how much crazier he was than everybody else. Even when his poetry went that far out, Brown was able to take the listener along with him..." - "I Ain't Talkin' Just to Tease", Metro Silicon-Valley, January 3-9, 2007
Thomas Moore recommends taking a look at biographies. "There you will see how differently the spark shines in people. There you may also discover, as in a mirror, your own spark, and you may find the motivation to unveil your own numinosity. Too often the modern man and woman allows that spark to remain outside, in someone else's life - the cult of personality and celebrity."
"If we were to start now and talk about our boat in Miami, people would
look at us like, 'you ain't got no boat in Miami, get out of here!' For
us, it's just more believable to be ourselves." - ?uestLove
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
Yesterday, I shared a snippet from "The First Word", an essay on writing by Jack Kerouac. Jack can be pretty forthright (and I adore him for that): "If you don't stick to what you first thought, and to the words the
thought brought, what's the sense of bothering with it anyway, what's
the sense of foisting your little lies on others, or that is, hiding
your little truths from others?"
"Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself." - Richard Bach
I'm so inspired by ?uestlove, that I just have to quote this snippet from the Stereo Warning interview. Note that how he follows the beat of his soul, whether or not it is in vogue:
"Even though hip-hop is a genre, it's just an amalgamation of all types of music. That's something the godfather of hip-hop, Afrika Bambaataa taught me. He would DJ a party in the Bronx and he could play the Commodores in one moment and then turn around and play Sympathy for the Devil by the Rolling Stones. You do that today at a hip-hop party, you're liable to get beat up. But Afrika Bambaataa felt there was hip-hop in that song because there is a long percussion break in the beginning. That's how I approach my music now when I present it live. There is rock stuff that we can do that can still have a hip-hop feel to it, as in something that you feel in your soul. There's a way to talk to different audiences. By day I can do a song with Mobb Deep and then by night I can do a song with Bob Dylan and it will still all make sense." - ?uestlove
Another musician with cojones (see video below ;-)) is Michael Franti. Julian Walker just saw him in concert, and is thoroughly impressed: "Though the man is all himself, what ensues is a concert that leaves me
making comparisons to Bob Marley, John Lennon, and Peter Gabriel." This interview with Michael Franti blew me away (check out video). Another man of inspiration for sure, and thus a man of strength:
Bonus: (Exercise should you choose:) Follow the clew that seems the most outlandish to you now. Pay attention to what sparks you when you read about other's inspiration and courage. Entertain the possibility of this way of perceiving your hero's journey:
"Amor Fati – "Love Your Fate", which is in fact your life." - Friedrich Nietzche
"Nietzche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain
moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called "the love of
your fate." Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say,
"This is what I need." It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though
it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment —
not discouragement — you will find the strength is there. Any disaster
you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and
your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own
nature will have a chance to flow.
Then when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments
which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the
incidents that shaped the life you have now. You'll see that this is
really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even
though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is
not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit
strength, it comes." - Joseph Campbell, Reflections on
the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion
images Wright Barker's Circe via GoodArt.org; 13th Warrior via Free Land of Fantasy; painting of Lancelot origin unknown: "On the battlefield, he is almost unbeatable; as seen here
where he spares Arthur's life. In his adventures,
Lancelot slays all manner of annoying evil knights, and is granted, due
to his purity of heart, a vison of the holy grail"; african dance photo via dance.net
Regardless of the category, I'm completely won over by shops that are uncompromising in their conviction to follow the beat of their own drummer.
While I have my leanings toward a personal style and aesthetics (Anthropologie gives you a clue), I can sense and feel and appreciate any place that embodies their own version of Emerson's dictate: "Insist on yourself; never imitate."
I guess I'm picking up the company's indie spirit. Not my indie spirit, their indie spirit. ("To me, indie means your impetus is a vision, and typically one you cannot shake off. The impetus chose you, grabs you, and not the other way around.")
An example of a store that's faltered in following the beat of their own drummer is San Francisco-headquartered The Gap.
One retail expert attributes their current problems to fact that "the company stopped meeting the needs of its core
customers, whom she described as "ageless, classic, all-American.""
Another retail expert notes they swerved from their vision of classic to fast fashion "trying to compete with
youth-oriented, flavor-of-the-month brands like Abercrombie & Fitch and
American Eagle Outfitters."
"For me, the epitome of Gap cool was a campaign the company rolled out in
1993 featuring a series of unposed, black-and-white photos of cultural icons
like Jack Kerouac, Miles Davis and James Dean dressed in chinos." - David Lazarus, "Gap lost its basics instinct", San Francisco Chronicle, January 26, 2007
Sure this isn't a company, but I think the moral works, and it's the first story that came to me when I thought of epitomizing "following the beat of your own drummer":
"For three months he was a dishwasher for $9 a week in a second-rate Harlem restaurant. Sometimes he didn't even have a horn to play on. "I was always on a panic," is one of his best-known quotes. He slept in garages, became completely run down. "Worst of all was that nobody understood my music."
...[Charlie] Parkertells: "I'd been getting bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used all the time at the time, and I kept thinking there's bound it be something else. I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn't play it.
Well, that night I was working over 'Cherokee', and, as I did, I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I'd been hearing. I came alive."
p.s. I recommend these two embodiments of following-their-own-beat marketing blogs: Kathy Sierra and Tara Hunt.
Bonus: "Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can
present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's
cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an
extemporaneous, half possession... Shakspeare will never be made by the study of Shakspeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much... Abide in the simple and noble
regions of thy life, obey thy heart, and thou shalt reproduce the
Foreworld again." - Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance" (via Brian Johnson's comment over at my friend Siona's blog)
"Direct Marketing by the Numbers", "E-Mail and Online Marketing", "Marketing Writing: The Art of Persuasion", "Copywriting That Gets Results", "Sales Lead Management", "Power of Market Research"...reads the list of courses when I flip open the UC Santa Cruz Extension in Silicon Valley catalog lying on the dining room table.
I scan the abstract for "The Power of Market Research" (historically one of my favorite marketing tasks) and a few bullet points pop out:
Assessing and defining market trends: segmenting the target market, trends driving user demand, market risks and opportunities and market forecast
Profiling the customer: surveys, focus groups, user perceptions of products and demand for specific features
Using market research to drive the business plan: investment analysis, program risk, profit plan
A new course piques my interest:
NeoMarketing (new!) ...explores the emerging paradigm shift from traditional push marketing to consumer-driven, anytime-anywhere pull marketing... Participants will learn about new techniques (online word-of-mouth marketing, viral marketing, and social networking) and new tools (forums, wikis, blogs, podcasts, RSS feeds, and wireless). Based on the fundamental principles of marketing, NeoMarketing utilizes new technologies for even greater competitive advantage. Emphasis will be placed on how to integrate the new techniques and tools into traditional marketing plans and how to measure the results..."
I close the page, and set the catalog down. Glumly.
I'd royally flunk these courses.Purposefully.
I don't market many of those ways anymore.
And that probably explains why I'm not writing much these days about marketing. I enjoy doing marketing but not explaining hows since.... I'm on the lunatic fringe.
That's not necessarily meant to be a derogatory term, the lunatic fringe catches onto future trends way ahead of the alphas and the alphas adopt ahead of the bees whom really spread the buzz (according to The Anatomy of Buzz-speak) to the mainstream.
Lunatic fringe: kinda edgy and hip-sounding, but let's face it, everyone thinks you're looney as they sidle away (as if it might be contagious).
Eccentric, witty artist to me at Web 2.0 party last week: You're probably the only person here who'll talk to me for any length of time.
Me: Probably right.
Lewis Carroll's imagination took flight I imagine precisely because he didn't give a hoot if you thought he was looney. He mastered a coy blending of logic and fantasy that slipped in confoundments and startlements.
Carroll always leaves me feeling saner in a world that irrationally worships the rational. Carroll always leaves me questing: Is the universe a comedy?:
"“Its jam every other day. Today isn’t any other day, you know”, said the Queen.
“I don’t understand you,” said Alice. “Its dreadfully confusing!”
“That’s the effect of living backwards,” the Queen said kindly. “It always makes one a little giddy at first … ”
“Living backwards!” Alice repeated in astonishment. “I never heard of such a thing!”
“But there’s one great advantage in it … that one’s memory works both ways”, said the Queen.
“I’m sure mine only works one way. I can’t remember things before they happen”, remarked Alice.
If you would ask me what kind of death sends shivers down my spine -
it is not a demise from an illness like cancer, nor being hit by a bus,
nor being mauled by a shark, nor being bowled over by the freight train force of a tsunami.
Nope, none of those. I have a fear of being burned at the stake.
The only salve I have found to keep this fear at bay is to hang out more with artists - they're all loonier than I. (Don't restrict yourself to living artists in your hood. Try Salvador Dali. Jack Kerouac. David Lynch. We could go on and on.) In their presence, a welcome mat unfurls, "Finally, girlfriend, where have you been hiding?"
one a.m. in December, wyatt texts: whoA! slow down...endorphins!
me: what r u talking?
wyatt: movies in my head gotta write to music
Ah, so it works the same way for others too.
I saw the stunning Chasing the Lotus at X-Dance Film Festival last week. I knew right then and there that surfing was my true heart's sport. (In my tangible life, my sports have mainly been endurance-related: ultrarunning, hiking and backpacking, river running.)
When I changed my blog's descriptor a few months ago, I don't think it was an accident that I used the words "from the surf's edge on innovation, design, marketing, the art of living and anything that screams Life."
radical: from 1970s surfer slang meaning "at the
limits of control."
The etymology of radical also means getting to the root, going to the essential. The essence of.
With 20/20 hindsight I realize it's been my saving grace that I'm too lazy to mess around with focus groups and stats and playing the numbers game (whether that's tossing out 10,000 flyers or scoring a link on Engadget's blog or an invite to Oprah). So I stumbled onto a marketing that suited me and a marketing that distilled to essence. A marketing that got ultra-specific right down to the individual human rather than sending out blasts in hopes that 2% of someones, anyones, might bite.
So I haven't gotten around to answering the thin-slicing your brand, thin-slicing stores, tag (yet).Because I don't thin-slice. ("What we feel as intuition is really
the result of unconscious rapid cognition", opines Paul Marsen's summary of Blink. Thus thin-slicing is a 'neat cognitive trick'.)
About six years ago I took a course on intuition because I honestly didn't know what 'intuition' really meant or how it really operated in my own life. I was guided by my intellect and rationale and control and will. All I knew going in to the course is that I must have really been out of touch with my intuition and ability to 'read' people when I took the dot-com CTO position with founders that wildly blind-sided me.
So maybe Blinkis about rapid cognition. That's a fine subject.
But that's not at all what I'm doing. Ease is my byword. Sounds so easy, ease.
Ease sometimes finds me surfing the edge between exhilaration and terror (as if screaming through the roller coaster ride does anything). Oh, yes, the Queen foretells that living backwards (that's the codeword) will be giddy at first.
And radically, dude, I'm ceding control more and more often to a non-cognitive (yet not supernatural) intelligence that I cannot define. Let the ocean do the work, man, rather than bracing myself at the limits of control. (Drag isdecidely not ease.)
Neat cognitive tricks are just that. Far far too much efforting. I am a supreme surf bum, alright. I'm not killing myself manufacturing waves when there's gorgeous blue swells coming to me all the time.
Anyhow, not like I'm going to reveal my radical looniness all in one swell, but this is a bit closer to how my intuition works in practice:
"...Alice started to
her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never
before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to
take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the
field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop
down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.
In another moment down went Alice after it, never once
considering how in the world she was to get out again." - from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
p.s.Probably not the smoothest post I've ever written. But considering I started off typing this post with tremoring hands and hyperventilating, well...
One can never be certain that burning at the stake is passé even in this day and age.
I was admiring the manmade waterfall at Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco last Friday when it occured to me that there were quotes etched into the granite box canyon.
Aha, it's a Martin Luther King Jr. memorial I realized for the first time (I do live 50 miles away). One quote using the metaphor of black and white keys on the piano particularly moved me. I have tried and tried to find it via Google, alas, I'm not feeling lucky.
There is a threadbare scatter rug in the living room, two chairs protected with plastic, and a couch in need of a new slip cover. One of the keys is missing on the old grand piano. [Martin Luther] King likes to play the piano although, as his wife says, "he starts off the `Moonlight Sonata' as if you're really going to hear something, but he fades out." - "Martin Luther King: Never Again Where He Was"
I find a few melodies reminiscent of Dr. King's vision:
"In terms of Dr. King's clarion calls for Blacks and Whites to sit together and break bread,
that noble notion had been echoed in the 1920s by another Black hero
from Africa, whose name was Dr. James E.K. Aggrey. To Dr. Aggrey, a
graduate of Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina, the
harmonization and cooperation of Blacks and Whites are similar to what
happens when one plays the piano. This African educator underscored that hitting on black notes on the piano can produce some music, and that it is likewise in hitting on the white
notes. However,for a true musical harmony, a pianist has to hit on the
black and white keys together!" - A.B. Assensoh lecture
So easy to say. The tendency is to stick close to keys just like us. We want to be surrounded by kindred spirits just like us. Marketers splice and dice us into just like us'es.
I tend myself toward the chi chi cafes. You know, the ones with cafe au lait in big wide porcelain bowls and that charmingly aloof French sidewalk cafe waiter attitude. Everyone is wearing the black uniform, reading the Times on Sunday, and checking their Mac or Blackberry.
Last Wednesday, I followed a young Latino with low-riding black jeans and dangly chains into The Hard Knox Cafe situated in a supposedly "sketchy" part of San Francisco. There weren't many folks of my complexion. And besides Theresa, the Vietnamese owner from Texas, I was the only woman present.
And perhaps I was dressed too vintage Bohemian: Whom would walk in to a joint with sheet metal tin walls and red vinyl leather seats and recycled gymnasium floors wearing a green velvet jacket with leopard print faux fur? Nix that - maybe the coat did fit in.
"That's a tough neighborhood," a male friend responded when I squealed with delight he just had to go check out the place for himself.
It took a bit longer than a New York minute, but The Hard Knox Cafe's warmth enveloped me quickly. I was head over heels with this rare gem: an inviting space of radical inclusivity.
"They get an interesting demographic," Joe, the accountant whose parents immigrated to San Francisco from the West Bank, seated in the stool to my left tells me.
(He doesn't know I'm in marketing. Thus far, we'd only yet discussed oxtail soup and my grandmother.)
"Last week, I saw two women, maybe in their 50s, walk right in and sit down at a booth," Joe continues. From his description, you knew they felt as comfortable as if they'd waltzed into a four p.m. seating of a Victorian tea.
From my own impression, I knew I felt at home. Maybe I'm not alone: "please don't tell anyone about this place. please!! i am not
encouranging anyone to come here so that the lunch wait time gets any
longer (is it too late with the 99 reviews?)"
If you want to truly honor Martin Luther King, Jr. on this holiday entertain the thought of engaging with someone 'different' from you today... and tomorrow... and the next day...it could be as simple as talking to the person seated next to you on the bus.
"With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our
nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood." - Martin Luther King Jr., "I Have a Dream" speech
Fair warning: you won't be able to stop once you start.
"That was the beginning of the fight for civil rights. St. Louis started
it. And there are six other cases, but I'm not asked to go into that
question. But I am only saying that St. Louis, the story of civil
rights could be written entirely from the history of
St. Louis. But I think, more important, the story of American music.
Call it Afro-American, Negro-American or Black-American music, the
fusion of it started in St. Louis and is an important story. And let me
tell you this. My research shows that it was a fusion of the
German talent in St. Louis, its musical talent, the refugees from
Germany driven out of Germany, seeking freedom, who came to St. Louis,
who set up their sing-alongs and their music clubs, and their
appreciation for music, and do you know that the music, the Germans who
came to St. Louis invited Wagner, the great composer who also had been
exiled and was living in France, to come and live in St. Louis. And
there's correspondence between the St. Louis Germans and Richard Wagner
inviting him to come to St. Louis and live and finish his composing.
And I have often wondered, if Wagner had come here and composed his
Ring of music, his great background of German mythology made into music
and into drama,
what he might not have done with the situation here with the Negro on
the steam boats and the music that he was making. So there was a fusion
between German technique. Listen, all the early teachers in the west
were German teachers, music teachers. All our famous black musicians,
Tom Turpin, Scott Joplin, all went to German music teachers to get
their formal education. Mr. Handy, who do you think in his book he
gives credit to as the man who moved him into music? Down in Henderson,
Kentucky, when he was a janitor there and still trying to play and get
his band going. He was so interested, this was W. C. Handy, was so
interested in his music until he became a janitor in a music school.
And the man who ran this music school his name of all names was Bach.
Not the great Bachs of Germany but his name was Bach and he was a
German. And Handy in his book tells you that he got his fundamental
music composition from Bach. So the Germans infused their technical
music into the stream of Negro beat and rhythm. And soon we had rag
time and the development
of blues. And later jazz. That to me is the real America. Negro music
is not all African. It is not all tom-tom, they knew nothing about the
piano there and the other instruments that have been mastered. The
clarinet, the violin. Mastered by Negroes in New Orleans and St. Louis
but put to the use of fusing the feeling of the Negroes on the
technical basis of German music. And that's why it's lasted. And that
to me is the real picture of America. It is the fusion of cultures, not
one culture alone, standing and growing by itself. But many cultures
being fused and in the background is that fine African feeling of "What
race
am I? I am many in one. Through my veins there flows the blood of black
man, white man, Britain, Celt, and Scot. In tumultuous America. I
welcome them all but love the blood of that kindly race that swathers
my skin, crinkles my hair, and puts sweet music into my soul." - Judge and historian Nathan B. Young, Oral History Interview by University of Missouri-St. Louis
They
had no idea if they were right. Everyone told them they weren’t.
Everyone told them not to quit their day jobs. Everyone told them they
would fail. They figured they wouldn’t be grandiose. For opening day
they baked about 30 loaves of bread, 2 dozen muffins and 12 cinnamon
buns. When they opened their doors at 10 o’clock … there were 200
people lined up at the door." - "Tall Grass Prarie Bread Company", CBC.ca's Vinyl Cafe (via Siona)
"When is a bakery not a bakery? When it’s a political statement, an
architectural pioneer, and a bit of performance art, all wrapped in one." - "Mystery Muffins", New York Magazine, January 26, 2006 (next time I'm in NYC, I'm checking out Birdbath where the walls are made of amber waves of grain)
"In ancient Egypt, the word for bread meant "life," the force of which still shows remarkable staying power, according to the scholarly English food writer Jane Grigson, who, roaming widely in the groves of academe, observed that her scattered archaelogist friends all gave place of honor at their tables to small Near Eastern flatbreads, edible talismans keeping them in day-to-day physical touch with earliest recorded times." - Michael Batterberry, founding editor of Food Arts and Food & Wine magazines
"Surely it is more than coincidence that the ancient tradition of Hebrew grace before the meal begins with the prayer of thanks for the wine and immediately follows with the prayer of thanks for the bread -- the only two parts of the meal thus honored. Though I don't speak conversational Hebrew, these Hebrew prayers are ingrained in my soul. And I think of bread and wine as the foundation of my culinary existence.
My first experience of eating home-baked bread was not until I was seventeen [she grew up in NYC] and a freshman at the University of Vermont. A local resident paid my boyfriend with a loaf of bread for mowing the lawn. It vaguely captured my attention - he was so pleased about it. He made fried egg sandwiches for us for a hunting trip - something I would normally have rejected on concept (both the fried egg and the hunting) -- but I was in love, it was so cold, and I was so hungry... and it was an epiphany. My first school vacation back in New York I borrowed "The Joy of Cooking" from Rosalind Streeter, a neighbor and friend of my mother's, and made my first bread." - Rose Levy Beranbaum, "The Bread Bible"
"As an elementary human need, bread runs a close third to air and water," says Michael Batterberry. There was a time I zoomed past the elementary.
There was a time I subscribed to practically every technology and business magazine under the sun. (Yes, you could have gawked at the heft of the daily cache in the mailbox.)
There was a time I belonged and participated in nearly every local business and technology organization like NAWBO and the local chamber and the Utah Information Technology Association. There was a time I belonged to quite a number of environmental activist groups like Greenpeace and Sierra Club.
There was a time I didn't want to miss a beat of what was happening. And, so, I missed my life.
This time I belong to one dues-paying organization and it's called Slow Food USA.
p.s. I'm very serious when I say that 2007 will be the year that folks get that social media will be likened to a communal table rather than a printing press. That social media has more in common with barbershops, trading posts, village bazaars, coffeehouses, piazzas and plazas, eighteenth century Parisian salons, troubadours and minstrels, theater, and Homeric poetry than it has with newspapers and television.
Bonus:Of course, there will be a bakery with the teahouse. (I just ordered book "Breakfast, Lunch, Tea" recently about the Rose Bakery in the U.K. with recipes. Also available at many Anthropologie's.) Locally, I am a big fan of Bay Bread and Crepe & Brioche and you can find both in the South Bay at farmer's markets.
I don't want to give away the name of the book I began last May 2nd, but bread is a huge, overarching symbol. One day I was writing during my morning tea ritual in the garden and the Virgin Mary kept wanting to be writ. (I must confess sections read like Christian erotica both literally and in the sense that Rumi writes of the Beloved.)
It's later I learnt that Bethlehem, "the old Hebrew name bêth lehem, meaning "house of bread", has survived to this day." And, recently, I went to see the SF MOMA exhibit of Anselm Kiefer titled "Heaven and Earth" (highly recommend, through Jan 21st). Born in 1945 post-war Germany, Kiefer's studio was "once in a brick factory with massive brick kilns, reminiscent of the gruesome ovens of Nazi concentration camps and 'athanor' the alchemist's "cosmic oven, where spirit and matter are in an ongoing process of creation and destruction."
I'd set my book aside for months and months. It was one famished day in late September while driving around with my friend David that we pulled in to The Taboun because it looked like a quick, healthy falafel meal. It wasn't quick. I had time to learn that taboun is Hebrew for the little beehive ovens. And my order of falafel took so long, I had time to let the outside mural of the monastery nestled in the hills of the Holy Land speak to me and it was clear as a bell it was the time to start the next draft.
One day last week I contemplated that "that miraculous metaphorphosis of flour, water, and yeast, becomes a living thing shortly after the introduction of the yeast, the metabolic action of which is fermentation. Rising bread is a warm and companionable being, if you listen to Rose, who, after a couple of decades of pulling loaves from the oven, can still pose the question, "Could it be that I'm only completely happy now when a bread is happening [the italics are mine] somewhere nearby?"" (- Michael Batterberry)
And I contemplated, "[M]y serious interest in wine began about eight years ago, the same time I started working seriously on this bread book. It was at the Huia vineyard in South New Zealand, when the vintner was explaining to me why he had to cool down the fermenting wine to prevent undesirable flavors, that it hit me how incredibly similar the process of making bread is to that of making wine. Both rely on yeast fermentation, time, and temperature to produce fantastic flavors in the end product. The wild yeast for wine is present on the grapes' skin; for bread it is present on the wheat." (- Rose Levy Beranbaum)
And after months of open-ended inquiry regarding the book regarding the symbolism of the Eucharist, it came upon me like a wisp that wanders to reveal the sun.
Dan asked me about said book recently. Ah, it's fermenting. No wine before its time.
imageshomemade potato bread "
Oh, and the wine was bottled by my uncle!" says my_amii and Hearth by Mooch (who lives "in the City of Dreaming Spires" and posts an image a day) and Bread and Water, A.D. 1999 by Carol Cole, sculpture made with found objects (138 plastic bread bag closers and 98 plastic water bottle caps)
I must say I think this post marked a turning point - and if you know how much I cried two days later, a watershedmoment would be more apropros term - in this blog.
Not sure we will ever be going back to regularly scheduled programming here.
I am counterintuitive, outrageous, "unreasonable" (as my friend Ruby loves to quip, and she encourages unreasonableness) - and myself. And that's just the way it is.
I heard Sally Clough tell a story and maybe she was quoting from Sue Monk Kidd but I don't really remember about how in Africa the villagers would journey on foot for three or more days to attend a wedding feast. After a few days, they'd need to rest so 'that their soul would have a chance to catch up.'
People used to tell me after they'd first meet me, "You are just like your blog voice." As if that were a surprise - isn't that the point?
But I don't think my blog voice reflected 'me' anymore.
Much of 2006 I'd find myself far yonder skipping merrily on the wedding trek and my blog voice trailing further behind. The last few weeks the flurry of prolificity (writers make up words willy-nilly you know, but I'm startled to find prolificity is an actual word and get this, it means power or character, rather than abundantly spewing words like there is no tomorrow) has allowed the blog voice to catch up a bit.
I don't know what this means, but it doesn't mean that it won't be relevant to business, or relevant to blogging, or relevant to putting the social in social media, or relevant to marketing, or relevant to innovation.
My main focus is visionaries and visioneering, because when you act from that inspiration the rest falls into place. And when you don't, all the advertising in the world couldn't right a sinking titanic.
One topic I'll be delving into more is voice. Here are a few tidbits I recently read:
"Al Gore has often struggled to get his timing right. He ran for President in 1988 at just 39 years old, too young for many voters. He ran again in 2000, took forever to find his voice, and when he did, it was too late. Last year, however, the former Vice President and but-for-chads winner of the 2000 race timed his swing perfectly, teeing up on an issue that has long been his passion: global warming." - "People Who Mattered: Al Gore", Time Magazine, December 25, 2006
"In eight months, Bennett (real name: Anthony Dominick Benedetto)...has become one of the top record-sellers in the U.S... Tony makes his stage entrance in a breathless vaudeville lope. When the applause and giggles have died down, he begins his act, swaying his loose-limbed body, singing in a style derived from several of his colleagues...BENNETT'S VOICE, HOWEVER, IS DISTINCTLY HIS OWN; IT HAS A DIFFUSED, SAND-PAPER SOUND, A QUALITY THAT HE FEELS HAS ENDEARED HIM TO HIS FANS. Says he: 'At first, I tried to eliminate things like that from my voice. But I've decided now to let it all alone.'" - "Tireless, Timeless Tony," Time Magazine, December 25, 2006 sharing snippets from their January 14, 1952 issue (Capital letters are present in the 2006 print version)
"And I think we rediscovered that the medicine we've been prescribing - that successful companies and brands are the ones who stay truest to who they are - is also good for ourselves." - Ben Stallard, Deskey Marketing Services Director, on the volunteer brand makeover effort for Dave's Gourmet, "Is Dave Insane?: Inside a Brand Makeover" Inc., January 2007 (recommend this well-written, and humorous, article)
image my alter-ego Evelyne Axell's La conductrice et son double (The conductor and her double). Paxell was once quoted as being "Life incarnate." I'll write about her some day soon.
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