Another song from the Odyssey… this one about Telemachus giving his speech to the councilmen, asking that they protect him from the bullies and freeloaders that have overrun his house in his father’s absence.
But, rather than helping Telemachus, the councilmen choose to not intervene, and instead place the blame on Telemachus’s mother.
Which is, supposedly, how things tend to go in real life. When people are bullied at work, for example, and tell their boss about it, in the vast majority of cases the boss sides with the bully. Why?
After I wrote this song, a couple of Baptists told me they had been singing the chorus over and over again as they drove from Kentucky to Tennessee, and for me, that shed a lot of light on the song’s meaning.
Although I do think many, if not most, religions are mind control cults, the biggest cult of all is probably our mainstream culture which hypnotizes people into chasing meaningless dreams, valuing things that have no value, and seeing beauty where there isn’t any. It lures us into believing in a flat but challenging world, and casually dismisses as unreal every point of view that doesn’t come directly from our movies and universities. Nobody is really “of this world,” because the world as we understand it is a creation of our own minds. But we, ourselves, were created by a mind other than our own, and are part of a larger world that may be impossible for us to grasp and define.
So, at least, we could recognize that our view of reality is subjective, and not tell people to “get real” when they don’t buy into our ideas. Telling them to “get with the program” might be more appropriate.
I wrote this while living in LA, before collecting stones became one of my favorite hobbies. At the time, my main association with stones was the world of inorganic beings from Carlos Castaneda’s books, a place where sorcerers would sometimes get trapped forever.
In addition to personal resolutions, I like to make New Year’s resolutions for the group minds that I am connected to. I find they generally come true.
My group mind resolution for 2014 is that we release the idea that positivity is good and negativity is bad. Both positivity and negativity have equal ability to heal and to harm, depending on how they are used. Both can be vehicles for love.
Too often, positivity is used as a screen to hide problems and misdeeds. People who insist on positivity generally have behaviors they want to hide from others, or else painful feelings they want to hide from themselves. Jeffrey Dahmer was by all accounts a very positive person. In the book “1984”, positivity is used as a weapon to keep people from being able to express their true thoughts and feelings. The dark side of positivity is that it conceals and holds unhealthy realities in place.
Goodness is about caring and enabling people to thrive. Frequently this involves the willingness- and even eagerness- to plunge into negativity and stick with it for as long as it takes for actual change to happen. Looking at negativity brings wisdom and empathy. Discussing negativity makes transformation possible. Negativity brings depth to our goodness and keeps it from being an inch deep and a mile wide.
So, in 2014, let’s welcome the dark side into our lives and especially into our relationships, giving us the ability to be there for each other in ways that actually matter.
I wrote this song while living in Nashville, where- just as in L.A.– it was a great struggle to go out and perform every night while living in the grips of extreme shyness and stage fright.
In my Nashville apartment I had two bathrooms, so one of my anti-shyness therapies involved filling one bathtub with scalding hot water and one bathtub with ice cold water and then running back and forth between the two to submerge myself. It was not fun, but as usual I was hoping that causing myself physical pain would make performing less painful by comparison.
The one “therapy” that actually worked- at least in the short term- was putting sage oil on a handkerchief and breathing through it while driving to the venue. By the time I had reached my destination, inhibitions seemed to have magically vanished, and I could walk onto the stage with only a healthy handful of butterflies..But then I read that sage oil is toxic, and that was the end of that.
I feel like I should apologize to the whole world for posting up so many paintings of people who aren’t wearing clothes. I can understand why people don’t like pictures of naked people, because generally I don’t like them myself.
Astrology believes that, on average, half of a person’s life is what they make of it, and the other half is in the control of outside forces. The exact ratio, however, varies from person to person. For some people, the majority of their life is a reflection of the choices they have made. For others, the majority of their life was completely outside of their control. Sometimes I feel that I fall slightly into the latter group.
So, although I don’t wish to tell the story of WHY I ended up painting naked people, I will say this- that I don’t generally enjoy being surrounded by nakedness, BUT once you have begun to paint naked people, it is only a matter of time before they no longer seem naked to you, and they just start to seem like people. Their bodies become a symbolic extension of their inner life and the workings of their minds. And once you reach this point, you have to be CAREFUL- because the figures that have become so harmless and normal in your own mind, still have the power to trip off ideas of perversity and lewdness in other people.
So, in closing, I would like to say that although nakedness is frequently interpreted as a symbol of moral slackness and crudity, sometimes people are naked just because there are no more clothes to wear.
When I first moved to Portsmouth NH, it was summer, the season when Portsmouth is at its most dreamy and picturesque, and I was enthralled by the ocean, the seafood, and the whole nautical theme that takes over the town during peak tourist season. All I wanted to do was go to the beach, eat fried seafood, and most of all SHOP- for oceany trinkets and this and thats in every shade of blue.
I also read books- anything related to the ocean and this part of the country. I wrote this song, Starfishy, while reading “Among the Isles of Shoals” by Celia Thaxter, in which she describes the crazy hooligans who lived on the islands. She wrote about how they loved to sing long songs, with lots and lots of words, in high squeaky voices, and how one of them would always begin the song on a ridiculously high note until another one would say “Too high, too high, Jim… how about this?” and then suggest a note even higher… That is how it is with me, whenever I hear a song in my head and write it down, it is always ridiculously high, and then when it comes time to sing it I don’t know what I am supposed to do.
This song was inspired by the flags in Portsmouth NH, which seem to be kept at half-mast about 200 days a year. It seems strange to me- how do we decide which people and tragedies are worth lowering the flag for? I would probably never lower the flag, because it feels disrespectful to those who passed away on all the other days.
This is another song that was inspired by the Odyssey and also the color black. At the time, I thought rap music was especially inspiring, so I borrowed a few things from it: 1) Sampling phrases from famous songs. 2) Including references to how tough and awesome I am (although it isn’t a song about me), and 3) Including my name in the song (although it isn’t a song about me).
One of the worst things about writing songs is that people tend to assume all the songs are about you, which can sometimes be embarrassing. Although it is even worse when people assume you have written a song about them. That is truly a nightmare.
This is from a series of songs I wrote inspired by Homer’s Odyssey, but even more so, I think, inspired by the color black, which was, at the time, my least favorite color. There may be some truth to the idea that what you lack in yourself you attract in others, because the more I tried to avoid wearing black, the more I attracted friends who wore black exclusively. That’s why it is dangerous to be too nice, too good, or too positive- you will end up attracting serial killers as friends. But if you REALLY love being nice, maybe it’s worth the risk.
