Last Night's Performance (March 28, 2009)

Bart and I performed last night at Wired in Bethlehem. Our friends, Drei and Ritter, also played. It's nice to play these smaller, quieter shows, where there is a different dialogue with the audience. More than listening to the songs, perhaps, the audience listened most attentively to my chatter in between songs. I welcome this. I recall speaking about Woody Allen's SEPTEMBER, Lyndon Larouche's Youth Movement - both of which are premises for songs - and somehow I got to talking about Kurzweil, although I didn't play any songs last night about him or his theories. In fact, I forget how the subject of Kurzweil made it into the performance. But what I really like is that the audience added comments and questions and there were actual quips and brief discussions. It was really nice. After the show, some of these discussions continued, which was equally nice. And thanks to my friend, Nate, for pointing some of the above out after the show.

Further, there were children in the audience. You get the sense that it doesn't matter what you're playing when there are children present - just that you're playing. There's this sense of innocent dialogue. Some of the children were dancing or about the place just being kids with the adults in the room. And they paid attention at times to the music. That attention or the dancing says that what the performers are doing is pretty neat. And sometimes it's refreshing to self-analyze your work in that way. If ever I get lost in what I'm doing, it's always pleasant to know that whatever it is I am coming up with, that it's just pretty neat. And sometimes, that's simply what we're doing and, yet, it's so very important and significant.

For all those who came out last night, thanks.

TRANSCENDENT MAN

The movie TRANSCENDENT MAN, a documentary about Ray Kurzweil, is set to premier April 24th. I have been reading up on Kurzweil on occasion for about five or so years now and am greatly excited for this film. I am both fearful of the Singularity and am excited to be living while it is nigh. But I get this great feeling of pressure right now, that everything on which I have been working relentlessly - music, novels, writing in general, studying, all sorts of relationships, etc. - has a deadline. It's almost as if once the Singularity occurs, we will be living in an afterlife of sorts, where I fear all we have created in our age will become obsolete and irrelevant. I am pressured by the idea that I have to become so radically novel to the point of impossiblity for what I do to matter in the very near future. Sure, it might matter in the present. But that's the point. The Singularity is so close to happening that the present time-space shrinks more and more and at a quicker rate up until the point of Singularity where maybe all of this we are doing will simply no longer be of relevance. It's like, I imagine, I have some fatal disease and I must hurry to complete my life work. Perhaps this is my misconception. It probably is. But what happens to Whitehead's creative advance if we get to a point where our novelty and nuance becomes irrelevant? What will concrescence mean? All things, after all, organic or not, fuel concrescence. But as Pynchon tells us, "Paranoids are paranoid not because they are paranoid but because they deliberately...put themselves into paranoid situations." Check it out: www.TRANSCENDENTMAN.COM.