Definitely one of the greatest posts I’ve seen on Craigslist…

2 tickets to the Rat Pack/Tonight (Burbank/Sherman Oaks)

Reply to: sale-croonercrazy-1133778864@craigslist.org [Errors when replying to ads?]
Date: 2009-04-19, 6:00 AM PDT

I have two tickets to The Rat Pack at Orange County Performing Arts 7:30 tonight
Orch Row S side by side FREE
I can’t go so if you want them let me know soon

Location: Burbank/Sherman Oaks
it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
PostingID: 1122591825

…apparently there is an individual who has two tickets to a concert venue in an Orange County, California in some parallel universe or OCPA is a clever name for heaven, because Dean Martin, Joey Bishop, Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis, Jr. and my personal favorite, Frank Sinatra are all there. I imagine that gig will be standing room only…

 

Jetway

I’m eighteen minutes and forty six seconds into the film Hard Candy. So far, in a word, CREEPY. But somehow in the midst of watching a conversation between Patrick Wilson and Ellen Page the word “Jetway” popped into my head.

This is the perfect title for my first album. Done. A keeper. Finally, after years of thinking about phrases, strings of nouns and verbs to describe it, I’ve got it all in one single word. It’s about time.

It fits. I mean, I can tell you what it means to me, but they say it doesn’t matter what it means to the author, only to the reader, or in this case the listener. You’ll have to decide for yourself. But then, you always do.

More updates on the album once I put a band together and start rehearsing it. At this point, it’s words on a page and melodies in my mind.

Thanks for reading. Have a great rest of your day.

 

The Facts of Ancient Greece

A good friend of mine is a classicist and came across this list of FACTS. These are indisputable pieces of information people. Enjoy:

I too have had it. Just one too many times this week someone has made a statement that is so ridiculous and irritating that I must put the record straight.
The following are FACTS. There is not room for argument here, as you cannot argue against something that is primarily true.

FACT: Odysseus is the best superhero. Nope, no, shut up. I have no interest in debating this.
FACT: Greeks are better than Trojans.
FACT: Zeus is the best God. He has everything the other gods have and more, including the ability to transform into animals to fuck women and create mythical beasts.
FACT: The Iliad is the greatest novel of all time.
FACT: Fresco is the greatest art form of all time.
FACT: Parthenon is the best representation of culture in Greece. The Temple of Hephaestus is amazing, but its not better.
FACT: Hercules would lose in a real fight with Hades. Half God vs. full god of death and the underworld.
FACT: Ambrosia is ABSOLUTELY better than that liquid plutonium you call goats milk.
FACT: It is never acceptable to call Achilles or Apollo a bitch. They should have their own Mt. Rushmore you fucks.
FACT: Figs simply are the best natural food. Olives are a close second. Fish doesn’t have a place in this category as they are not fruits, but fish. Duh.
FACT: Pork is better than Pheasants. Grow a pair you baby.
FACT: Odysseus blinded the cyclops first and his name is pronounced Odysseus, not Ulysses.
FACT: Wall Painting is the greatest art form of all time.
FACT: Lamb is better than anything else on Earth, ever.
FACT: Wearing a toga does make you a pimp. Zuess never looked stupid, and neither did Homer.
FACT: Zeus is the best god. I said it before and I’ll say it again. If you say that Athena was, I swear to whatever god you worship that I will find you and eat you alive with my ear. AND THATS IMPOSSIBLE.
FACT: Apollo flies in a sun chariot, but its technically a carriage and anyone with a brain knows that. Wilder.
FACT: Lightning CAN be directed at people by gods who want to kill, don’t believe the hype.
FACT: Lute is better than a flute.
FACT: You can’t cross the river Styx if you are alive. If you do – you are either dead, a god, or being carried by a god. Go on. Try it.
FACT: Homer isn’t a sellout. Go choke on a dick if you think he is.
FACT: Apples aren’t better than Pears. In this case I am willing to accept that it is impossible to prove either way. But they aren’t better.
FACT: Roman’s suck.
FACT: Paris could and would get away with sexin your girlfriend.
FACT: You wouldn’t mind if he did.
FACT: He already has.
FACT: Twice times.

If you really, truly believe that any of these are not FACT, then I hate you and no longer want to share this planet with you. Expect actions of my part to ensure that happens in the near future.

 

The Joy in Suffering

Schadenfreude: {shah-din-froy-duh} (n.) pleasure derived from the misfortune of others.

- from the Middle High German words Schade (damage, harm) and Vreude (joy)

As you know, since the mid-1990’s America has had an ongoing and increasingly passionate love affair with “Reality” Television. This love affair really stems from the physiological response documented in a landmark study. Just thought this was fascinating and decided to share it. I’ll leave it up to you to pass moral judgment. Peace.

A New York Times article in 2002 cited a number of scientific studies of schadenfreude, which it defined as “delighting in others’ misfortune.” Many such studies are based on social comparison theory, the idea that when people around us have bad luck, we look better to ourselves. Other researchers have found that people with low self-esteem are more likely to feel schadenfreude than are people who have high self-esteem.

- Warren St. John article

A 2006 experiment suggests that men, but not women, enjoy seeing “bad” people suffer. The study was designed to measure empathy, by watching which brain centers are stimulated when subjects inside an fMRI observe someone having a painful experience. Researchers expected that the brain’s empathy center would show more stimulation when those seen as “good” got an electric shock than they would if the shock was given to someone the subject had reason to consider bad. This was indeed the case, but for male subjects the brain’s pleasure centers also lit up when someone else got a shock that the male thought was well-deserved.

- Singer T, Seymour B, O’Doherty JP, Stephan KE, Dolan RJ, Frith CD (January 2006). “Empathic neural responses are modulated by the perceived fairness of others”. Nature 439 (7075): 466–9. study

Brain-scanning studies show that schadenfreude is correlated with envy. Strong feelings of envy activated physical pain nodes in the brain’s dorsal anterior cingulate cortex; the brain’s reward centers (e.g. the ventral striatum) were activated by news that the people envied had suffered misfortune. The magnitude of the brain’s schadenfreude response could even be predicted from the strength of the previous envy response.

article

 

Oh mercy, mercy me…things ain’t what they used to be

I downloaded the new free iTunes song tonight. It’s called If U Leave and it’s by a singer named Musiq Soulchild. It also features Mary J. Blige. So, yeah, I haven’t really been listening to R & B since…well, since I was a kid really. I grew up listening to Motown on the radio and random LP’s – things like The Fifth Dimension and The Supremes Greatest Hits. Yes, I listened to vinyl as a kid, I’ve just dated myself. I have always loved Rhythm and Blues and Soul, ever since first hearing artists like Otis Redding, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin and Martha and The Vandellas at the age of six or seven. So hearing all of that incredible music left this indelible mark on my brain.

That was R&B to me – the classics. I never sought it out, it was kind of always there in the background, the soundtrack of my life. And I drifted through my phases of music. In junior high it was stuff like Heart, The Police, Pink Floyd. In high school I really got into Bob Marley and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and even Pearl Jam during the whole grunge explosion. In college I got way out there – art school will do that for you – and listened to Einsturzende Neubauten (New Exploding Buildings), more electronic stuff and really odd obscure things that I could find dirt cheap in the used racks at Amoeba Records in Berkeley. By the time I turned 21 I had heard and digested everything from A-ha to Frank Zappa. I hadn’t forgotten about R & B. It was still there, still being flipped to life when I dropped my quarters into the jukebox at my local diner. Still in the background of the city where I lived – but all of the current stuff stayed there because to me it was totally lacking in that quality that made it so amazing back when I was a kid.

I’d heard more of the vintage stuff along the way – working in record shops was a real treat – and I got to listen to early American blues, hits from the Chess Records vault and lots of the Stax collection. The more I heard of the classic Rhythm and Blues the more I was convinced that any of the singers coming up after about 1980 were just being fed into some kind of vast sonic grist mill. Like all major label music most of it was subject to the kind of pre-fabrication usually reserved for houses. It wasn’t that there weren’t good singers, people who had perfect pitch and adequate projection and sustain, it was just that the voices were accompanied by weak, really half-assed backing bands. No Funk Brothers here. No seasoned session players who could work a fretboard the way a great surfer can work a wave. Instead there were a couple of generations of producers and seemingly lazy musicians cranking out syncopated mediocrity. A grand parade of lifeless packaging to borrow from Peter Gabriel.

And hearing If U Leave just confirms my long-nagging suspicion – R&B is officially dead. Maybe it’s me, maybe I just don’t get it. Maybe I’m too old-school, too set in my ways, maybe I’m just too picky.

In college, I once sat through a two-hour class once where really all we did was watch a documentary about John Cage – the composer touted as being a god amongst the avant garde. Really, aside from the fact that John Cage was playful and clearly reaching for something, even with my willingness to try new things, I couldn’t get to like it. It was atonal, it was seemingly without tempo, or even a point. It wasn’t going anywhere, it simply came at you, like the cacophony of rush hour in Times Square that you get the moment you leave a car or bus. Sadly, Times Square has better resonance and melody than John Cage’s music.

And that’s how Rhythm and Blues is, lots of noise, well-produced, but totally without substance or weight. How can you listen to Otis Redding and not relate to what he is singing about? How can you hear Chain of Fools and not want to get on the floor and dance? I listened to If U Leave and thought – the voices are fine, good vocal technique, somewhat engaging, but the music is totally uninspired. Without the instruments to reinforce the vocals, you’d be better off with an a capella composition and in this case you’d wind up with an odd, struggling sort of duet that never really arrives anywhere. There doesn’t seem to be any emotional honesty left in R&B. I’m not saying the singers don’t have emotions, but the delivery is always the same – throw in some wavering phrases and dynamics and that crying out ending to each line in the chorus, make sure they are projecting well and sustaining the notes just so and you’ve got it – damn near every R&B song of the last thirty years.

Don’t get me wrong, Mary J. Blige and Musiq Soulchild are very good singers. So why the hell are they wasting their time lending their voices to tired phrasings and lazy accompaniments? The record labels it seems have given the listeners what they feel like producing and not necessarily what the listener wants to hear and it’s like the people buying the CD’s and digital downloads have just been programmed to think it’s good. There’s that psychological effect whereby you play something enough and eventually people will hum and sing along, it doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be repeated enough times. That isn’t to say there aren’t some outstanding singers out there – people like Jill Scott, Erykah Badu and Ben Harper spring to mind. But by and large from that sea of music, the Jill Scotts and Ben Harpers are like rogue waves and mostly what washes to shore is the becalmed and uneventful ripples of water that’s lacking in salt.

I remember a few years back – I think it was 2003, when I was living up in the Bay Area, I went to visit an associate of mine named “Bill”. Bill was a music producer responsible for some great R&B albums and he’d been in the business since the early seventies. After we finished our meeting I told him I wanted to play something for him because I thought he might like it. So I put on Room For Squares, the John Mayer album. We listened to a couple of songs and here’s the conversation that followed:

Bill: Who is this?
Me: This guy named John Mayer.
Bill: Tyler, I haven’t heard stuff like this in a long time. This is good R&B.
Me: It’s pretty amazing. I first heard him on the radio in Connecticut.
Bill: This guy can play and sing. This reminds me of old Stax songs.

I knew just what Bill meant. Even though you could easily place John Mayer in the pop section, all of his songs have the one quality that made the R&B of the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s so timeless:

They have soul.

 

Save the “Bay To Breakers”

For 98 years some of the fine folks of San Francisco, it’s neighboring cities and in fact the world at large have been running this little race called Bay To Breakers. It goes just 12 kilometers (7.45 miles), starting at the Embarcadero and ending at Ocean Beach. The event started as a way of blowing off some steam after the very scary and stressful earthquake of 1911.

A few years back, a group of revelers joined the other runners and started to do the race in their own style. They run, walk, get drunk, wear some interesting costumes, build some really eye-catching floats, and generally just have a good time. And I say “LET THEM GO ON HAVING FUN!”

This year one of the main sponsors of the event ING, in response to complaints from local citizens has pressured the organizers into adopting a Zero Tolerance policy. That means no drinking, no littering, no floats and most likely not much fun. ING (and some San Franciscans) have forgotten the very spirit this race was founded on. That spirit is the need we all have to cut loose and have some fun from time to time. I can understand not wanting litter. That’s totally understandable, as the folks that live along the route would like to keep their sidewalks clean. Fine. No argument there.

But no drinking? No floats? No nudity? Come on people. You live in San Francisco!! (Except for ING which was started in the Netherlands and has it’s home office in Amsterdam – a city where soft drugs and prostitution are legal, can anyone say hypocrisy?) Everyone knows that historically the “City By The Bay” has been all about Laissez Faire – you know, letting people express themselves how they see fit. Besides, it isn’t like the participants are asking to drink alcohol and go around in their birthday suits all year round. It’s one day! For one day you can let them fly their freak flags and then make them live by the buttoned down rules the other 364 days. Every city needs to vent, especially in these tough economic times. Let the people play. Let them have fun as they go from the east shore to the west and remind the onlookers that they don’t have to go through life being so square. Isn’t it bad enough they live under the Governator’s regime in a state that has the world’s sixth largest economy but is billions of dollars in debt? Isn’t it enough that a whole bunch of them are currently unemployed and struggling?

Don’t ruin a nearly one hundred year old tradition because people are upset about litter and noise and nudity. If people litter, then make it the responsibility of them and the race organizers to clean up after the event. That’s all. As for the noise and the nakedness, suck it up. It’s one day! One solitary day in a whole year!

I’m urging everyone who reads this to sign the following petition, write letters to the editors at the San Francisco Chronicle and the Examiner and ING, send emails, call them, just make sure they understand that they are making a bad decision. Every city needs to vent, every city needs a few days a year to de-stress, recharge and just have some fun. It’s great for morale, it’s great for the economy and it serves as a reminder that we can all live together happily and healthily and not have to worry that we all need to forgo our own personal brand of fun because some major corporation and a few mean-spirited neighbors think we should.

That’s all I’ve got folks. Peace out.

ING Contact Info:
Joseph Loparco
(860) 580.2677
Joe’s Email

B2BPetition

 

Fearless

Hello everyone and welcome to 2009!

I feel positive. I feel good. Empowered to make this year better than the last one. The last two in fact were the hardest of my life. I look back on last year and I can draw no other conclusion than I am much stronger than I previously thought I was since I did not break.

This year I have a much broader and more accurate perspective on things and I am once again able to apply the approach I have always taken to life – be in the moment. The moment is warm, exhilarating, fine. Each moment falls into the next with a fluidity, a supple sort of grace unseen before.

I feel that I have a much better grasp on fear. Fear seems now to be an anxiety about change, a blindness to our actual capabilities. We fear because we do not look. We fear because we do not think. We fear because we do not remember who we are; where we are; how far we have come. We fear because we see only the solitary woods and not our fellow travelers.

We fear because we have been trained to fear. We have been trained to get “educations”, to get jobs, to stand in line and be counted among those who are living “the dream”. I have my own dream. I have my own line. I walk it with a much greater understanding than most people I have met. I have no ego about it. Only humility. Greater understanding comes only through greater sacrifice.

I have been willing to give up everything I was to become everything I am. That is my journey.

And my journey emboldens me and makes me feel more alive and more free.

I tend to think many more people would be happier on a journey similar to mine. Sadly, I can not compete with an entire culture of parents, friends, educators, politicians, consumer goods companies and advertisers who are selling the middle class myth.

My sincerest hope is that my life and career will ultimately serve as an example to others and that once I have more time set aside I can do something to inspire people en masse.

Until then, I hope all of you find your way to happiness, success and satisfaction.

 

Gratitude

So I’ve been thinking about writing this for a few days and just decided I should get it down here. I’ve been going through one of those phases where I really miss my friends. Having friends in different parts of the country and being poor and super busy means I don’t often get to see my friends. Some of them I see once a year, some I haven’t seen in a number of years. And even though I know that they know how much I love them and how much they mean to me, I’m going to tell them again right now.

I love all of you. All of you mean the world to me. I can not begin to express how funny and meaningful and wonderful and sublime it has been to have you in my life. There probably are no accurate adjectives when I think about the vast contribution that all of you have made to, well, let’s see, my growth as a human being, my growth as an artist and businessman, and just to my life in general. Everything you have given to me -the love, laughter, support, advice, good cheer and yes, sometimes even tears – is a treasure of inestimable value. For that and perhaps more than I can even eloquently write about I want to say:

THANK YOU

Also, even though I know you know this already – even though I may not talk to you or see you every day, you are in my thoughts, my prayers and in my heart everyday. I wish each and every one of you love, success, health and happiness.

 

identity

So, I was taking a break from my work day just now and checking email. I subscribe to one of those “What’s going on around town” newsletters and today’s had a link to a photo exhibit. So I looked at the photos and then looked up some of the featured artists’ work and this led to a general search on amazon.co.uk. All the photography was erotic in nature and I happened upon an ad for the latest Suicide Girls book. If you aren’t familiar with Suicide Girls it’s a website and now series of books of tattooed and pierced women, generally in the 18-25 year old demographic. It was started by a woman either, depending on your viewpoint, as a celebration of the tattooed/pierced subculture or as a clever way to cash in on said subculture. Looking at the pics made me think, ‘Standing out is impossible’.

Maybe it’s just me. And I don’t mean to sound cynical or jaded or blasé here, but to me nothing is shocking anymore. I remember when I finally got my hands on a copy of Madonna’s photo book Sex I flipped through it and thought “This is really boring. I’ve seen all this stuff before and this is disappointing considering Madonna’s flair for the sensational.” At this point given all the art and “art” I’ve been exposed to it takes an awful lot for me to be stunned or impressed. I do have somewhat peculiar tastes to begin with, leaning toward modernism and within that category, being a big fan of minimalism. But with people it’s the same thing – no one really stands out.

At least not in their identity. There really is no way to differentiate yourself because we all feel the need to put ourselves into various boxes.

There’s the box for how you dress – preppy, goth, emo (which is really just sad and compassionate goth), punk, don’t care.

There’s the box for your religion/philosophy – christian, jewish, hindu, buddhist, sikh, scientologist, atheist, agnostic, nihilist (as in “We are nihilists Lebowski, we believe in nothing!”)

Let’s not forget the box for your career – salesman, doctor, lawyer, teacher, ditch-digger, stand-up comedian, etc.

Then there’s the box for your hobbies which puts you into more subcultures – extreme sports enthusiast, stamp collector, cyclist, bowler, fly fisherman.

Political box comes next – right-wing, left-wing, moderate, conservative, republican, democrat, libertarian, anarchist

And on And on. More boxes. Climb on in.

Ultimately, or right off the bat, you realize as you look at all your boxes, that there are millions of other people in the box with you.

Um, wait, didn’t you put yourself in the box to stand out?

Why did you even bother?

There are obviously reasons for boxing yourself (er, you know what I mean). On the one hand, we have a natural tendency to want to belong, so we eventually align ourselves with one or more groups in order to fill that oh so human need. Sometimes we do it because of who we are intrinsically – e.g., we are lovers of the outdoors from birth so we take up hiking and then decide to always wear hiking clothes, thus getting into two boxes for the price of one (no pun intended). Sometimes we don’t realize we’re in the box until someone else points it out “Wait, is that unusual? I thought everyone liked midget porn…” But most of the time it starts as a pre-teen or teen and it’s all about being distinct.

I used to think I was distinct because in high school I wore Doc Martens (still do in fact). Years later I noticed that gamers, geeks, goths, punks and preppies were wearing them too. But there is no distinct, there is no different unless you meet one or more of the following criteria:

A) You design your own clothes or just go naked because obscenity laws be damned
B) You’ve actually created your own unique political system
C) You think god is one of the salt shakers at your local diner
D) You actually prefer sex with animals over people (in which case you are different but you are also creepy
E) You have some wonderful set of eccentricities that makes you stand out in a crowd

And E) is really the point I suppose because underneath all of our chosen associations the only things that make us really unique are the little foibles that can’t be put into boxes. Only the strange folds in the fabric of our personalities, the contours we only reveal to a select few people. That’s all we get to be different. Everything else is just posing.

 

Tuesday, July 29, 2008, 2:43 a.m.

This moment finds me struggling hard to appreciate the things I have and to not be consumed by the things I’m missing. The word abnegation comes to mind.

abnegation: the act of renouncing or rejecting something; self-denial

And what do I deny myself? Everything you need a car in Los Angeles and money everywhere to get. And how long do I deny myself? Time and circumstances mostly beyond my control determine how long.

The serenity to accept the things I can not change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. Good words. Still, right now they ring a bit hollow.