Oh jeez... What is all this shit? Well, i guess one interesting thing about blogging is that if you keep it going long enough, you eventually become painfully aware of how non static a state of being being human can be. One year you have one set of opinions, the next opinions seem like a waste of time. Not sure if I’ll keep blogging. If I do, I will probably be coming from a substantially different, but no more interesting or meaningful, trajectory. Politics is such an idiot spectator sport, as is celebrity. Televisions may as well be replaced by boxes filled with cans of aerosol spray paint dousing all viewers in advertising graffiti.

Why I’ve actually bothered to have opinions about anything besides lunch, music, and my own bowel movements in the blather below is beyond me... It might have something to do with the fact that I spend most nights sitting in front of a spray paint machine... or TV, dousing me in “spray-on tan”, thin skinned, superficial opinions.

This of course distinguishes me not one whit from most.

Eh. I will just stick to music for a while. I like some of what I’m working on now. It should be finished semi-soon... perhaps by the time its sprummer. In the meantime, if for some reason it makes your day more interesting to find additional bits of nonsense hidden and burried throughout this site, then the blog I kept from 2005-2008 is presented below...

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“This is an epic tale of rock n' roll Babylon a story of the evil men do told by the men themselves. "

-Rolling Stone

This hyperbolic gem is part of a great gag on the back cover of Jon Stewart’s “America The User’s manual”. Quotes are listed there from specious reviews. This one mimics the quasi apocalyptic prose of the Rolling Stone record guide .

The Rolling Stone record guide for those who might not be familiar with it is an exercise in blogging that pre-dates the web. That is it’s a book; one which appears in new editions every five or six years full of opinionated blather which is shamelessly inconsistent. So, for example, when I was growing up and impressionable I was profoundly influenced by the heavy handed heroic hagiographic heralding of Peter Gabriel in the 1985 edition.

The guide commented that his cold aural landscapes (or some such... paraphrasing here) were a conjurers efforts to summon the harsh alienation of modern living in sound and then punch through it with powerful emotive singing. Every album got 5 stars.

Of course the current guide gives him 3 stars here, 4 stars there... and commends him on being the former lead singer of Genesis.

We all have our moments of disillusionment. There is no Santa. The tooth fairy doesn’t adjust for inflation. For me the realization that The Rolling Stone Record guide, despite trumpeting itself as being an “authoritative tome” is actually just a ‘whichever way the wind blows’ load of hootenanny was semi-devastating.

Still just as some folks reach middle age and find it necessary to nurse long hidden wounds because Santa never brought them a pony I still find myself revisiting the overblown idealism of that 1985 Rolling Stone Record Guide.

I recall Neil Young was described as a “West coast mysterioso hero.” The guide made a point of breaking up his work into distinct periods, an honor that was accorded only to a handful of artists such as the Beatles, Elvis, Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones.

Wow! My 15 year old brain was profoundly intrigued by this. Periods.

Artists have periods.

This notion has found strange echoes for me in my post aspirational years. Ok... I’m just a schmoo with a job. Why bother making music? Well, the answer to that is there is only the tiniest margin between “Why bother making music?” and “Why bother?”

So music it is and will be for a while, because Neil Young with his “Periods” managed to blaze a sort of trail through life which I think may have helped me. Trails in a wilderness... The wilderness of Our Dreams... can be useful things.

Some trails may lead to dead ends. This can be highly embarrassing for the person blazing them.

“Look at me! Look at me!!! I’m... walking straight into a brick wall... then off a cliff.” Ooops. Let’s not bother writing about him in the Rolling Stone Record guide next year.

Yet aren’t these the most useful trails of all? Isn’t a trail that points the way to a dead end, and highlights it as a known hazard a helpful thing? Come to think of it... how is it our culture came to plug each pitfall a rock and roll star encountered in The Rolling Stone Record Guide with a lepurachauns kettel of gold?

Youthful death... burn out... Misery... GOLD!!! Look kids!!! Follow this trail!!! It leads to an exhilerating demise aspirating on one’s own regurgitate in the exoitc bathrrom of your choice!!! Hmmm.... Something peculiar there. Maybe that’s why I was more drawn to the entries in that Rolling Stone Record guide for artists who had not only periods... but periods spread out over a long period of time. Those seemed like more useful trails to be following than the one’s that ended in riches and either very little artistic output, or death. So I guess looking back on it... it was the prospect of simply blazing a nice long tail and exploring which intruiged me most of all.

Peter Gabriel has a wonderful song on his last album Up called “My head sounds like that.” during which he observes:

Around the axis we all spin
to determine what’s left out
and what’s left in.

Needless to say we all want very much to be left in... say... the Rolling Stone Record guide. Particularly for people of my generation... the generation reading the 1985 edition of that authoritative tome. But in a Web 2.0 world... where blogs and mp3s are a possibility... I wonder if there might not be some worth to continuing to blaze a trail even if it may not lead to stardom.

We all have that opportunity now. We can all continue to share our “periods” with one another, and help provide each other with pictures, songs, snapshots not so much of our lives, but of life itself. This is what life looks like.

Neil Young, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones... all those artists with “periods” had youthful periods of exuberance...later years with over-reaching ambition... then periods of clutter and confusion. Some found their way back... some forward... some nowhere.

Perhaps they were great geniuses worthy of all the over-wrought language and heroic praise the Rolling Stone Record guide could throw their way. Then again perhaps they were simply the first kids to stumble into the candy shop... The first one’s who could marry the then modern marvel of recording technology with what American slaves had discovered was the only thing which made life worth living.

Stardom? Pfffft! No... Music.

That trail turned out to lead to something so fertile, so worthwhile that now there are as many Sam Ash guitar stores as there used to be top 40 rock bands. And in each Sam Ash store there are 10,000 guitars, and these will find their way into 10,000 homes. Does this make the endeavor of making music useless? It does if stardom is the goal. But if the goal is the same as it was for those American Slaves... of whom I may now be one... if the goal is just to make music... well then making music still makes sense. If there is also the desire to leave behind documentation about one’s individual artistic “periods”... to just blaze a trail... and leave some crumbs behind... well then there might still be something to this endeavor after all.

Then again if there isn’t... well that may be useful to document as well. Here I am. Middle aged and anonymous with a day job and making music. Is this a good trail to blaze? Is it a bad one? Time will tell. Either way these are the bread crumbs.


I think I’ll have some new music late this year. Until then I’ll try to keep in touch with the occasional blog post... and of course there will still be some clues as to what’s going on musically every few months.

So, welcome, officially, to the site in 2008.

More to follow.

So I now have a staff. “The Staff of Osonics!” Though this sounds like something which should be made of gnarlled wood, it in fact turns out to be a group of young and interesting people who would probably like me a lot more if they knew about this site. Then again they seem to like me fairly well right now... on my second day.

Ryszard Kapuscinski, a Polish journalist writing during the time of the Iron Curtain wrote a great book called The Soccer War. In it he wrote about how he lost several friends to desks. Paraphrasing him, as I type from the “Business end” of my budget wood frame special, he noted that something just happens to most people, even the best, when they talk across a desk.

One second you are out in front of the desk talking to each other just fine, the next someone has sat behind the damn thing and begun clasping hands behind back of head, hemming and hawing and “harumphing” in an authoritarian matter.

Desks are trouble.

Anyway as careful followers of the site will note I’ve been going through a lot of tumult lately. My mom recently had a stroke, and she told me some things that caused me to reconsider a lot of things about my life, some of which had implications for a relationship I used to be in.

What better time to step up to taking a really hard job and getting behind a desk?

What is rock and roll?

Late last year I was down in Atlanta for the holdiay Christmas party at my company. The party took place in a newly opened upscale club. On the way down I was reading Jimmy McDounough’s biography of Neil Young “Shakey”. In it I ran across these passages from a direct interview McDounough (JM) conducted with his subject (NY).

JM: What effect did Woodstock have on music?

NY: That’s when the market got big enough for the marketers to realize that they should go for it. They could isolate the whole group of people, target them as a consumer group- and they did. They used the music. That was the beginning of rock and roll being used in commercials. That’s the long-term effect.

Later in the interview Neil Young sums it up with a remark of scatological spiritual genius.

NY: You gotta look at these events in Rock and Roll history as shit, okay? Woodstock was a big piece of shit, and there have been several pieces of shit all the way down the line since the beginning of rock and rool - it’s all waste.

The event is nothing, It’s what made the event happen- which is no longer where the event is. The event is the leftovers- it happens so the entity, the spirit, or what made the shit happen can move on.
So all these events, no matter what the hell they are, are nothing. What is meaningful is what is left and gone beyond that. So all we have is people standing around a pile of shit, looking at it. You wouldn’t expect the thing that shit to go back and sit in the shit, would you?

Weekend. Working on music. Right now watching Leonard Cohen I’m your man. Looking back at the week gone by. The week. The days. The cube. I have to spend so much time not being myself in order to still be myself it’s amazing.

Crazy no?

New music soon. Soon means less than six months. Maybe less. Can’t say more. The music will say when it’s done.

Jeez. My traffic spiked today. After all my political blather over the last few months I’m guessing a few folks anticipated I’d go hog wild with the election results. Well, like an alchoholic who is forever quitting, I’m determined to “get off the sauce” of largely uninformed semi-political rambling. This is a music blog. An... And I can quit anytime I want!

I am psyched to see Rummy out. Now he can write a book.

Then he can show up on Oprah, and jump up and down on her sofa.

Actually, here’s a thought. What if Rumsfeld shows up on Larry King Live? Just imagine the interview: “My Skull is drier and looks more like the flying flame heads from original DOOM!” ... “No MY Skull is drier and looks more like the flying flame heads in DOOM!”

Clinton Curtus Testimony Ohio 2004

I sent a link for the video above to a friend earlier today who replied:

"holy shit. And yet... no shit."

Hervé Villechaize parting lush exotic ferns and pointing towards the sky declares: “Boss! The Boredom! The Boredom Boss!” Ricardo Montalban passed out beneath rare orchids with a bottle of Jim Beam spilled all across his Fantasy Island white suit vaguely acknowledges his cohort with a gurgle and raised arm to shield his hung over eyes from the sun.

“The Boredom boss! The Boredom!”

Martin Sheen is here, having taken a wrong turn off the set of Appocalypse now. He’s holding his big fat Machete in his hand, and in a state of homicidal fury he’s confusing Montalban and Villechaize for Marlon Brando.

“Hey man!” Villechaize will yell as Sheen towers over him raising his machete ready to take a mighty lumberjack swing. “What the hell are you doing man! Boss! Boss! There’s some lunatic out here with a machete! Boss!!!”

At which point Marlon Brando himself, eager to be hacked to pieces, will come wandering out of the tropical undergrowth, carrying a bucket of water in which to douse the sponge he continually uses to squeeze water down over his fat bald noggin. “Horror?” He’ll ask a technicolor McCaw while searching for the serated business end of Sheen’s machette. “Horror? HA!... The Boredom... The Boredom....”

“Boss!!! Boss!!!” Villechaize will scream scurrying and scampering around young Martin Sheen’s legs. “The Boredom Boss! The Boredom!!!”

These are the sorts of images than can scoot through a man’s brain when he has little to do at work, but has to be sure to look the part.

James Joyce wrote of a stream of consciousness. A man stuck in a cube can muster little more than a stream of semi-consciousness.

Can it be that I’m essentially getting paid to sit at a desk, keep my legs planted firmly beneath it and maintain a steady and even stare at a screen?

Better be careful what I write. See, those wily rebels have analyzed the Death Star plans and have managed to determine there is a danger.

See there is one cursed search engine out there, (not Google thank the thankable) that will return a posting for the osonics.com web site if my given name is entered. Of course it will also return osonics.com if the names of any one of the handfull of musicians I’ve mentioned on the site is entered so gee... I could get a bunch of people fired.

At any rate, gotta be semi careful in case some of the cubical people from my cubical world happen to look me up using this accursed off brand search engine.

It may not be wise for me to be too detailed about how little there is to do some days.

Still, when using this search engine, a direct hit is required, and only a direct hit will set off a chain reaction leading to the reactor core to destroy the death star... and err... get me canned.

Gotta be careful how much I write about...

“The Boredom Boss!!! The Boredom!!!”

America is a refridgerator. We all just sit on cooled shelves (aka office building floors) during the summer, and pretty much do nothing except remain chilled. Regulated. The trains, subways, buses, all refridgerated. All of us... maintained at a consistent temperature, shuffling from one maintained environment to the next.

“The Boredom.... The Boredom.”

Yeesh.

Saw Henry Rollins last week. Will be seeing Neil Young tonight.

Regular followers of this blog will be aware that I’ve made a couple of positive comments about Pearl Jam lately. I’ve been sort of cringing each time I do it. It’s kind of like saying “Look I know the guy in the McDonad’s suit this year, I mean the guy playing him this year in the TV commercials. I think he’s a good actor, and he wants to do something positive. Ok... I mean... look I know what you’re saying about the food, yeah, I know the burgers are planned out the same way live stock feed is, but...this year’s Ronald is a good guy.”

I guess I feel somewhat emboldened to try and make the case for Pearl Jam since they famously had their chance to make millions hawking burgers and actually walked away from it. In this day and age, when anyone channel surfing can fast feel like a polar bear swimming for miles in melted seas, looking for anything substantial enough to stand on, finding a band out there that took a pass on MTV starts to seem more relevant, possibly even prescient, or cagey, on the part of those involved.

For me it’s simple, I’m giving Pearl Jam another listen because being a fan of music was always a part of my life. I’m writing about this because I figure that has to be true of anyone who loves music, and I assume if you are reading this it’s probably on some level as a result of the fact that you are interested in music too.

Ok, so we all grew up loving music, but when I turn on the TV and see what’s going on, I wonder how I can root for any part of this see no evil, watch a lot of “American Idol” society.

Is being interested in music a wrong turn? Is music, as Lisa Simpson once described, “A distraction from more significant social issues”?

Whatever happened to that other vision of the world a generation once identified so closely with music? The one with echoes of civil rights and indian pop from just a few years before our birth?

Will it turn out, as the Coen brothers once suggested in one of their films: “The war is over Mr. Lebowski and your side lost! The bums lost Mr. Lebowski!”

I say rooting for a musical act is ideally like rooting for a sports team where owners can’t trade the players and keep them from forming real and substantive ties to their communities. Just as sports is sometimes like a competion of the conjuring power between two groups of fans I’m saying maybe it’s time we all stop fussing among ourselves about who’s going to “grow up and be the next rockstar” and start rooting for the one’s we already have.

Oh yeah. This! This is a stand Osonics? “Take care to be good fans.” Frickin' Brilliant Osonics. And exactly why does rooting for rock stars or artists matter at all?

Because THEY GET ON TV. They are a bit like freelance media consultants, talking heads we have a hand in putting in media.

Again why is that important? Because of Stanley Milgram and the research he did which demonstates a majority of people respond to authority. Association with major media, and TV, the contemporary insignia of power, connotes far more to those inclined to defer to authority than all bar bands and one guitar anti-war poets around the world.

Not that I have anything against bar bands or being a one guitar (ok, in my case it’s more like four... and of course then there are the drum machines) anti-war poet. It’s just that there might be more to this whole music shtick than “trying to make it”... Maybe part of the process is also fnding time for being a fan.

So why write about Pearl Jam as opposed to Papa Wemba, or Srinivas, or Tama? or Amit Lissack or PG Six or Jonathan Bright? Is Pearl Jam any better than those musicians? No. Of course not. The differences which result from being outfited with the insignia of power never directly engage the substance of whoever is being decked out with silver eagles on one’s hat and shoulders, or Network Logos emblazoned to the bottom right of one’s feet, or face, during a close up, on a TV screen. Instead they convey that something has been sanctioned by those in authority. This is the very thing which can turn off anyone living in any sort of underground music scene.

It’s also the very sort of thing Milgram demonstrated that the majority of people lving outside of underground music scenes tend to look for before deciding whether or not to give creedence to a thought an idea or speaker. That’s why spekers “In authority” tend to speak with silver eagles on their shoulders, or network logos and seals across their image.

So the point is music fans know there is nothing particularly unique about Pearl Jam apart from the fact that they can get on TV. But since when did being able to get on TV become insignificant?

You can’t fight the results of a good scientific experiment, and Milgram’s showed us that as ridiculous as they are, insignia like TV logos make all the difference in the world to a majority of people.

So as outstanding as my friends and I are, and as outstanding as you are with your act on MySpace, let’s not forget occasionally the governing social dynamics of the world we live in and the power of being a fan.

Right now is the time that should matter to all musicians who have been defering existance to “the day we make it big.” Being a fan is a large part of being involved with music. Hell, here’s the dirty secret most of us ambitious would be stars try to avoid facing, being a fan might actually be the largest part of being into music.

Wesley Snipes' character in Mo' Better Blues famously argues both in the movie and on the Public Enemy Plannet that the reason Jazz died was because musicians stopped playing what people were interested in hearing. Critics and connisouers can kill an art from, they can strangle it and make it so self conscious about out smarting itself that it gets tangled up in knots and ceases to mean anything.

Musicians, and music fans I would argue are a breed, just like sports fans, and athletes. If musicians and music fans become too lost in their own private debates, they will loose sight of what’s going on at the heart of the city.

If we fail to put some of our own in the town square, or up on the TV, if we fail to outfit a few of our ilk in absurd costumes with plumes, and baubles, then the only peole wearing them, the only people Milgram’s majority will respond to, will be the one’s who were hired to be there. The people doing the hiring will be those seeking advantage from the deeply imbeded herd propensity of Milgram’s majority to defer to authority.

So, with this as a background, I think it’s important to have people on TV, right there in that same box that most people gather around like a hearth or an altar, making it the centerpiece of most homes, I say it’s a staggeringly important thing to make sure that there are people in that box, stamped with the same sort of implicit authority conveyed upon anyone who inhabits it, be he Donald Rumsfeld or Regis Philbin, I say it’s damn important to have people in that box willing to to perform this:

So I recently saw a 30 second news blurb on television, one of those promo teasers for the evening “news” which promised viewers a report about the various ways employers can track one’s activities at work. They specifically mentioned the way it’s possible to resuscitate key stroke information from a system, and in essence reverse engineer anything and everything one has ever written on the job.

This is one of those things I’ve known all along, but it’s also one of those things it seems silly to care about. When and why would anyone bother to actually go to all that effort with my machine? Still, paranoia runs in cycles, and since I just saw that spot recently, I’ve been nervous about writing another blog posting from work.

I’ll get around to it later from home I’ve been telling myself.

But here I am at the end of the week with a slow day and memories of an eventful weekend, and so I say if anyone is ever going to bother to pick apart my machine, I may as well show them a good time.

First things first, July 10 will be the date for posting the Q2 site update. Needless to say your life will never be the same afterwards.

Second things second, this past weekend I went to Pittsburgh to see Pearl Jam with a friend. After the show we went to a techno trance festival on a plot of land deep in the woods on the border between southern PA and West Virginia. It was an odd juxtaposition... country road and cows leading to dirt road, leading to gravel path in the wilderness... followed by pulsing pounding high tech trance beats.

But it was amazing. There was a main circle, like a miniature Stone Henge for dancing, a large open field with a mini Kabuki stage which doubled as a sort of psychedelic drive in / projection TV, and then down a hill in a gully by a stream something dubbed a “chill out area” with neon fabrics run in patterns around frames and cables which suspended them above the ground and a sort of secondary DJ station where ambient music held sway.

The whole thing had the feel of a planet set for Star Trek. My friend and I joked it was the sort of place Kirk would have messed with in a big way. “What do you mean you have no LEADER? You... You people just come out here in the woods to listen to MUSIC??? Scotty.... Phasers.... Destroy the PA!!!... Now you people are going to have to learn to work for a living... Organize yourselves into a community with a LEADER! Build a society with rules!”

The Pearl Jam show was pretty amazing. It started off slow. At the NJ show I went to, audience worship was a given. The band could have turned in a Kazoo only set and the bleachers would have been enraptured. Pittsburgh was a bit different. People started out standing around, drinking from Olympic pool sized tubs of beer sometimes doing a low key white man’s pogo while the band tried rocking the house.

It was kind of cool seeing the band have to work for it. Midway through the show Eddie Vedder came out and insulted the crowd. “The world is an awfully big place.” He said. “You’ve got Europe, the Tropics... ok... we’re all friends now right? We’ve sung some songs together... Ok... Pittsburgh is not our favorite place.” This got the crowd booing, and throwing things at the stage. But the main thing is it got the crowd making noise. From that point forward it was a different show entirely with the crowd now knowing how gratifying it was to yell, shout and sing along.

Pretty smart move that insulting the audience thing.

The drive to and from the various events was kind of interesting as well. The friend I drove with has been working a dead end job in retail banking and we were talking about it. Somehow the conversation turned to history, and the history of religion. We started talking about the central story of Judaism, of how Moses lead the Israelites out of slavery, and it was kind of unnerving to be reminded that slavery predates the old testament as we were both reverberating with anxieties about having taken Friday off from our jobs. Later that evening watching Pearl Jam give rock star heroic speeches about the perils of our political age before launching into a titanic version of Neil Young’s “Rocking in the Free World” the human propensity towards slavery started to emerge as a sort of recurring theme for our trip.

As we walked around Pittsburgh late at night it was striking the way the whole city appeared to be like a cored apple. The city is clean, and there is a lot of striking architecture, but there seems to be something missing at its center. Although it has recovered from the loss of its steel mill culture it seems to have done so the way someone lives on past the loss of a loved one. The wound was healed, but the vitality was missing. A town which was once the hub of mighty industry now seems a propped up house of cards held together by tenuously leaning the retail buying power of Starbucks employees shopping at Home Depot stores, against the buying power of Home Depot employees shopping at Starbucks (with a few Sears and Borders mixed in).

With just a few stores going out of business it seems as though the whole city could collapse.

As we wandered past one closed franchise store after another in a downtown full of skyscrapers raised to hold up lantern like neon signs commemorating the names of once mighty Steel titans Carnegie and Mellon my friend and I went back to our drive through conversation about what the Israelites must have made of the Egyptians.

In Pittsburgh we stood on the shores of Blue State America and we could smell the sea salt air from the Red state Ocean.

At the Pearl Jam show in the Mellon Arena we sat next to two guys who’d driven East from Ohio who were generous in offering to share their jam jar full of crystal clear moonshine with us. For a couple of hours we were all working class stiffs reveling before the conspicuously messianic coiffeur of the 2006 incarnation of Eddie Vedder as he rallied us to vote and get involved.

Oh. So this is religion. This is the tradition. People have been working stiffs since as far back as the time of Moses, and people have been heading out to the wilderness, or rock shows, or techno trance parties in the woods, to try and get in touch with themselves and who they are apart from the crushing realities of building pyramids, working in steel mills or Starbucks.

With our blue state fear of faith and crazy Christians it began to seem compelling to consider there was a way of looking at many religions as structures and systems for giving weary slaves a framework or outline for trying to develop a personal identity.

Religion is bound to seem awfully limiting for people who have been to college, and who think the system can work for them, if those crazy cow tipping Christian yokels would just stop making waves. But from the edge of the Red State divide it looks different.

For people who have never had spare time to practice arts, or do much besides work at the plant, or stone quarry, or starbucks it’s hard to argue against the value of hanging on to a story that says “thou shalt have no god before” one that comes ahead of Pharos, Romans, or regional retail branch managers.

From this perspective, religion becomes more a time honored metaphor for maintaining some vestage of personal identity as a bullwark against enslavement.

Bullwark against wuh??? I think this was the point at which we wandered into an all night convenience store somewhere on Grant St. not far from the Liberty bridge and tried in vain to find something that wasn’t a Slim Jim or distibuted by the Coca Cola company.

Ahhh Whatever!

It was interesting provocative open ended speculative Road Trip talk.

Lord only knows what the cashier thought of us as we wandered around his shop noting that “Moses led the Jews out of slavery, the story of Jesus was at its most relevant when contrasted against the Romans... and Dude! Eddie got us to take a day off from work and undertake a pilgrimage to Pittsburgh!!!”

WOOO HOOO!!! EDDIE!!!! EDDIE!!!

Ok, thats idiotic. But as I noted this was all Road Trip talk. The point of Road Trip talk isnt to be self-conscious. Road Trip talk is about throwing things up against the ceiling to see what sticks.

Needless to say Eddie Vedder as Rock god came tumbling back to the ground.

But the idea of western religious traditions evolving as a response to a natural human tendency towards slavery got left back in that convenience store because we couldn’t scrape it down.

In Pittsburgh we were two blue state birds waddling in the shallow waters of a red state tide. Suddenly the clash between religion and “Secular humanism” seemed just as arbitrary as the civil war re-enactment of a color-coded America.

It seemed to us as though all of these perspectives that have been clashing against one another could easily find common cause. Blue State academics recognize the historical fact of slavery, and want to stamp out any recurrence of it. The bible is a non-stop reminder of slavery, and a cautionary tale against it. Why is there so much division between these two groups we wondered while transitioning to trance from troglodyte rock?

Who could possibly benefit from all this counter productive squabbling among people who should be united by their convictions that the natural human tendency towards slavery should never be allowed to reassert itself?

It was a really fun rambling trippy dippy Road Trip conversation. It would have been interesting to see where else it might have gone. But we had to cut things short.

After all we had to be back in time for work on Monday.

So it’s early in the day. ‘The cube of Osonics’ looks that much Grayer early in the morning, when all the lights are out. Right now the office is like a sunken submarine. Wandering to my desk before anyone else has arrived is an experience between visiting a stark industrial space and some sort of wreckage. I’m surrounded by desks covered with picture frames of anonymous loved ones, or the occasional “Dilbert” cartoon, hung on a cube wall as some weary form of protest, a vague attempt to establish a personal identity by someone too tired out and too besotted with junk food to manage more than a floundering trip to the kitchen for scissors to cut out a cartoon from a Gannett newspaper.

I may as well have had a flash light as I made my way to my cube to carefully position a handful of old business cards I acquired over a year ago beside my phone in an attempt to make things look as though I’m on top of my professional shit.

Looking up above my phone I see the Laundromat sign I’ve affixed to my cube wall, my vainglorious effort to outdo the Dilbert cartoons around me. Should I take it down?

Would-be big time covert incognito counter culture resistance figure that I sometimes imagine myself to be, an artist subverting the system from within, it’s not lost on me how mad it is that I should consider folding like a house of cards at the first whiff of trouble. To hell with it! The Laundromat sign stays. You may be having a tough day at your job but be advised, at 7:23 am on a Thursday morning Osonics tried for your sins, to hang on to some thoroughly preposterous vestige of personal identity while firing up his computer in the sunken sub light of an office space before anyone else arrived.

The new boss is flying in today from San Francisco.

Where once I reported to a genuine character from that city of free thought and invention I now await one of the many actors to have played Ronald McDonald in TV commercials after a few years have gone by, the pot belly has been added, and the makeup, fright wig and yellow suit have all been removed in favor of Pierre Cardin, Armani and a blue tooth earpiece.

As someone who is passionate about art and music there is nothing more frightening to me than people who have poured all the passion I have for rock and roll into ... Quarterly reports. Not the silly sort of quarterly reports I have up on my site, but the ones that come polluted with straight faced Orwellian ‘Newspeak’ and dipshit phrases like “Action Items”... “Revolutionary new metrics”... “Purchase continuum”... and “Human Resource Reallocation”.

Today is the day all the news channels are ballyhooing the death of al Zarqawi is Iraq.

Fanaticism. I know fanaticism.

I’ve played in Rock Bands.

I played in one where the drummer looked at me in all earnestness and said the reason he wanted our band to be called “Modern Fate” was because he thought it would look great on the Marquee at Madison Square Garden.

Fanaticism is angry... it’s a furious bid for control in the face of what Kant called a Manifold, and trippy hippies call the Universe, and techno ravers might name check as something “like the ‘Matrix’” which cannot be controlled. As a musician I’m a fanatic. I understand this urge and impulse, and more to the point, by choosing to channel this energy towards something as profoundly meaningless and useless as the arts I’ve found a way to come to terms with the fact it’s a futile, and more to the point highly dangerous impulse.

It’s possible to chew up people’s lives, ruin them, blow them apart if as a fanatic one focuses one’s energy on things which are “practical” concrete or real.

Office eccentrics such as myself tilting at online windmills and musical pursuits are merely modern day Don Quixotes. Drummers dead set on skipping past club dates and crummy demos to dive straight to Madison Square garden are idealistically self-destructive. Religious fanatics are dangerous. Corporate office managers, on the other hand, well it has been my experience they are the real life incarnations of Woody Allen’s tin pot dictator who announced in Bananas “From now on every day will be Tuesday!”

They take the office Submarine office analogy literally. They talk about “Target audiences” ... they ask people to “Lock and Load” before meetings and sales calls. They want help “Taking down” rivals and opposition with “Clean Kills”. There is a persistent irrefutable current of seething violence and hostility underlying the language used in offices and corporations. Violence is at the root of everything we do in business.

But it’s the only way I can think of to be able to afford the electricity for my electric guitar.

Anyway, I’m here early to do what I can to impress the new guy.

Our jobs may be on the line, PG Six' and mine.

A little drama makes it’s way into “The Blog of Osonics”.

Will we bring a smile to the Cold Creamed face of a veritable former Ronald McDonald? ... Will we have to go acoustic because we can no longer afford the electricity for our electrics?

More to follow.

Ah the day job. There is something about the idea of Clark Kent and Superman that really cuts to the core of the work a day world. As much as I might want to present the comic book exploits of Osonics there are still ways in which the day to day Clark Kent reality of my alter or altered ego must impact upon everything. For example I would like to write transparently about all that is going on behind the scene as I finish off Walking Music but some of the details need to be rendered wholesome just in case someone tracks me down here in my fortress of solitude.

Lets just say that over the Thanksgiving holiday I was focused on playing bass parts. Id already laid several bass parts down but had a hankering to hear more so I holed myself up in my apartment for a few days and simply played bass.

Its taken me until now to wade through most of what I played over those few days. I still have a couple of takes to go. Having to fly from the east coast to the west has helped out considerably in that regard, giving me large blocks of time to set aside for nothing but listening and taking notes.

Oh that rascal Clark Kent. Give him credit. Hes doing well enough to afford all the Mics and synths and things. For my day job Ive gotten to do a smattering of travel and so right now Im writing from an all new cube out in San Francisco. This one is a slightly more tan color than the gray of my New York cube. No worries. Ill be back at that desk within a couple of days.

Its Christmas in San Francisco. Yesterday I went ice skating down by the Embarcadero. I cant skate. Now everyone in the San Francisco office knows that. Klutzy Clark Kent. Ha! If only they knew about these amazing super powers I have!

Er

Just a quick note I wound up seeing Depeche Mode at Madison Square Garden twice last week. I was never a fan of theirs. I wound up going to the shows more by accident than anything else. I have to say I was massively impressed. Its an amazing thing to be just discovering a band with such deep roots this late in the game.

Well, thats the latest in this neck of the woods. Im looking forward to the Christmas and New Years time off to provide me with an opportunity to make edits in Walking Music and mix in the bass parts I recorded a couple of weeks ago. Then it will be a matter of living with, and tweaking whatever mix I come up with in the last week of this year during the first month of the next. After that I should be done, and Ill be posting Walking music to my site.

Until then I hope you will consider continuing to forage around on my site for the various things Ive recorded up until now. Thanks again for reading.

Hi. Happy holdiday week. I’ve ported this blog by and large over from another host, so to anyone rejoining the thread here, welcome.

Spent part of the weekend at a post “Burning Man” party in Brooklyn. It was interesting. I met a few people who were wide eyed and wily fresh from a period of boundless self discovery out in the desert. I handed out a few fliers for this site with the help of a well lubricated friend.

I’ve been fairly pre-ocupied with the nuts and bolts of the site for a few days now.

It’s frustrating having to channel all one’s creative energy and output to the margins of a work week. I can spend time getting a site up... OR writing music ... OR recording music .... OR mixing music... but I can’t really enojoy a mode where I’m free to do a bit of all these things simultaneously. The result is it’s becomming necessary to be incredibly “on point” and focused to be an artist these days, which is rather at odds with what I think the prevailing sterotype of an artist is.

A friend of mine was telling me about someone he knows who is moving to Nashville in pursuit of “The Dream”. I’ve known a few people who have done that. It’s strange. All one has to do is take a few minutes to poke around here on My Space, or a site like CD Baby to realize the awful beauty that we have all grown up wanting to be, and becomming musicians.

I think the new reality is that as musicians we are all communicating with an audience of musicians. Well, if we aren’t communicating with an audience of musicians then we are communicating with an audience of musicians, and writers, and painters, and film makers.

I believe (but am probably mistaken) that it was Thomas Jefferson (it was John Adams) who said something along the lines of “We are soldiers now so that our children may become industrious tradesmen, and our grand children poets and philosophers”.

Well a mere four generations on from that era it seems as though that prediction has largely come to pass.

Ok, perhaps not. After all we all have to work 50 - 60 hour work weeks. I certainly do. But I think there may be an element of outlook involved. The classic question of whether or not a glass is half full or half empty comes into play. Sure, it’s hard to find time for making art, but at the same time we have the option of working well into the night with something better than candle light, and what else is there worth pursuing anyway?

I think the film American Splendor does a great job of capturing where pursuing art is at these days.

So I think that communicating with an audience doesn’t mean trying to attain the left over echoes of a big mega stardom coporate rock fantasy from the 70’s or 80’s. I think it means coping with the reality of today, and still managing to make art.

As I type all of this, I’m finishing off my lunch hour at my cube at work.

If you want to reach an audience, you have to reach them where they live.

If you want to reach an American audience, you have to reach them at work, because that’s where we all live these days. After that there is nothing left to do but hope your audience has broad band at the office

Well, I hope you have broad band at your job.

And I hope you’ll consider exploring my site, and hearing all the music I’ve done on the margins of my job, and that it will help give you an interesting way of passing time at your own.

More soon.