I am a delicate boy. Strong, loud, and at times as difficult as a pamphlet, but slender, tender, and as light as a feather too. When I am in transition people tend to stay away from me. What can you say? What can you do? I called a friend yesterday to say “Hey, let’s have coffee tomorrow” and he agreed. I need a friend today, and it’s a blessing to have friends, but what I meant to say was “Hi” and “I love you” and somehow what I said was something else entirely. Where are these words coming from? Who is this person in raybans walking downs pierce street in the sun laughing and wiping the tears out of his eyes? I need a nap.

Yesterday was a huge day for me. I connected with my mother. I came out of the closet. I found myself drowning in so much light… so much space. There is so much love in this world, and I am so happy I can barely keep my feet on the ground. So I let the snot run free, and grip the asphalt below me with all the strength my brittle fingernails can muster and laugh, and sing, and cry, and recoil in horror at how my mind responds to the wilderness. I could say, and have been saying to myself all night between dreams that there is no new frontier… there is only fear. But that’s bullshit isn’t it? What’s the use of exploration of fear? That seems stupid. I’ve spent way too much of my life already tromping about in my own muck. No. No way. But then how are you supposed to contain all the feelings which come flying out of the bright, bright light? Who can you tell? Whom does one confide?

Oh I write furious little inventories. Yes I do. And it always helps to talk with my mentor, my friends, and as long as what I’m working out in my head isn’t about them then it’s usually pretty useful as a tool. But somehow my own minutia has grown rote. I’ve written this horeshit before. I welcome the wisdom and insight of my friends and family. My sponsor amazes me — although he doesn’t seem to like me — My mother astounds me, my sister tickles me, my cousin grounds me, my friends and associates are here, calm and clear. And my love.. oh my love. I guess I save the treasures for you. Lucky you.

It seems I have difficulty with connection, disconnection, and reconnection. The love in my heart, and the presence I feel always is beautiful and empowering. But how does this translate into real life? It is most curious to be fourty three years old and find myself just about ready to take a stab at growing up.

Delicate Boy - Luckystars listen

I am in a relationship. I am seeing someone. I am deeply in love. It is something which has been growing within me for years. Something I have had mixed emotions about admitting, and sharing with anyone. Fear, my strangely wide open, but curiously protective and private nature, and the unsureness of my footing in this world have collaborated within me and left me unable to admit my truth, unable to look at it openly in the light of day, and unwilling to announce the changes I have been watching come over me. They come, dance in my heart, and thrill me. I wait and watch them fade, and return to trudging a path off into the distance which believes I will never be loved, have never been loved, and suspects that there is no love whatever in this world.

Today the world has changed. I had a brief talk with the co-parent of my son, and have officially come out of the closet. After a period of silence, in which I asked myself thousands of questions and patiently meditated on the answers, felt the strong hands of a man on my stomach, the aching eyes of a woman less than an inch from my own, imagined myself making the decision to remain alone for the rest of my life, allowed the fears of alternatives to paralyze me, welcomed all the hope in the world to rise through me, felt the sting of tears and the warmth of other people’s tears, lingered in the dank waters of a Eurasian carp pond of identity, and years of letting go — Just loving, and letting go — I have emerged, for better of for worse, with courage, love and respect a changed man.

And so, in the beautiful light of this early afternoon, and with all the trust in my heart I admit it to you now — whoever you are — that the Queen of my heart is alive and well and living in San Francisco. I am seeing someone. Her name is Megan. She lives and breathes and I believe she loves me too.

And so come what may, and I trust you with this information… something I rarely do, I am embarking today upon a new path. My love is present, vibrant, and nurturing, kind, beautiful and honest. I invite you to join me as I sally forth into the light as I emerge from my closet. Out. Out into the world. Free.

forward to where the music makes us dance
Lightly, with joy, together
forward where the moment finds us
revel in this very moment, breathe, live, thrive
forward where love exists
and there is more than enough to say, lips to kiss, and lives to build
forward into a new frontier
because we’re stronger together
and nothing can stop us now

I was surprised beyond belief for my birthday with a trip to Alaska last week. It was a small piece of what I would call the best day of my life so far. I woke up early, but decided to meditate, reflect, and read instead of stumbling into the kitchen and slouching over the laptop. I took it easy because typically my birthday and I are in an unpleasant relationship. I hide under the covers, fake happiness on the telephone, and it takes about a week to recover. In the spirit of saying yes to life and not falling into these well-charted pot holes in my heart, I went down town to have lunch with a dear and treasured friend. I surprised her with flowers… well, she busted me trying to surprise her with flowers… and we ate crazy salad on a bench in what turned out to be the sunshine. After I went for a roaring scooter ride across San Francisco and arrived home with a grin on my face. Jaime called and we both moaned and groaned a little about how neither one of us wanted to go to the meeting we typically go to together. Naturally since neither of us wanted to go, we made plans to meet up and went. It was a superb meeting, and a radiant man told my story. That never happens, but I guess I can’t say that any more. I walked out of the meeting blown away, and inspired. The middle of the day where I was of service to friends, didn’t let it show that I was about to burst, and my difficulty with remaining in the moment all seemed behind me now.

When I arrived at my apartment I was surprised by Megan. She had flowers everywhere and desert on plates with candles burning. I love surprises which take me by surprise. I asked if she had eaten dinner, she hadn’t. I cooked dinner and we ate it on the floor surrounded by a beautiful orchid, and roses, and these spikey, blood-red flowers which seem like the new symbol for my heart these days. When we were done I opened my card, a growing card you can plant and it grows into flowers… and then she handed me a tiny little piece of paper with a pretty little star on it. I opened it expecting another trip to the nail salon, or a massage.. but it was a plane ticket to Alaska. It blew me away, and I was delighted. I needed to be pinched because I was so full of heady happiness that it didn’t seem possible. Then we danced to Louis Armstrong into the wee hours of the morning.

See the whole set here

The trip up was easy. Despite the early hour, everything went smoothly, and we flew from SFO to Seattle, enjoyed a little snack at the airport, then flew without incident — mostly because we were asleep — into Juneau. Megan’s father met us at the airport. His easy smile disarmed any fears I had about my hair, or my face, my age, my clothes, or questions about what I might actually be doing in Juneau immediately. We laughed a little, and I was outside photographing the sky and smoking a disgusting cigarette in no time. We rode to Megan’s father’s house and heard the story of a bear attacking the family’s Toyota hybrid. We witnessed the family’s sail boat come out of dry dock and be re launched into the Gastinau Channel. I wept for the sinking Strider. I discovered that there are vicious anti-republicans in Alaska… it wasn’t anything I’d expected to find there, but once I did, I relaxed and knew everything was going to be ok.

After years as a vegetarian I ate some salmon. the phrase at the time was something like “your descent into meat-eating” but I thought of it as a return to being an omnivore. Something which felt right, and still feels right. I sat at the family table and listened as Megan’s mother, step mother, father, brother and Megan all talked and talked. I couldn’t tell if it was the soul of the salmon swimming upstream in my veins, or perhaps our plane had crashed and I was flickering the last sparkles of Valhalla before expiring, but I felt immediately as if I’d known these beautiful, natural, and brilliant people all my life. What I had questions about later was how in the world this modern, fractured family were able to sit at the same table with so much love and communion. It all seemed like something that happens now and then and is actually very nice. Never seen anything like it.

But that’s no surprise because I’ve never seen anything like Juneau, Alaska. While it bears some slight resemblance to the pacific north west… Blaine, Linden, Deming, Bellingham… it is more the wet ground, the pale faces, the stillness in the trees and little else. The sky is amazing, overwhelming, something I could have sat and stared into for years without growing tired of it. The air is so crisp and pure and fresh that it makes smoking cigarettes seem like a crime. I walked the oldest road in Alaska, looked into an old mine shaft, watched the beautifully stacked houses flit past like the flowers at the side of the road. I crunched on freezing cold beaches, listened to soft waves lap at the crisp curl of land’s end, and stared in disbelief at the mountains resting in the distance.

I also went to several functions, met so many people, asked a lot of questions, watched drunk people play with fireworks, attended a wedding in the rain, and found myself in a panic at the thought of being the only person actually dancing at the reception. I reassured a man I’d only known a minute or two that his son’s hassle over his smoking a cigarette was only love, and nothing more. I kept quiet, and observed. I meditated, I prayed, I was kicked out of bed and slept on the floor. I fell in love with the past, met it… peered into it without fear… washed myself in pungent feelings which were something like arsenic or a potent mixture of wild herbs meant to end my consciousness and let it softly recede and dry in what little sun there was in the sky. I learned a lot about Alaska, and a lot more about my companion. And it seems that despite the ocean of her, and all the seaweed of my thoughts and feelings now pivoting within those waters, I am closer to Megan. The truth is all we ask, and as the result I can only love you more for having made this journey.

At the end of the trip I did not want to go. Something within me whispered “stay” so sweetly that I had to reflect on it for a while. Like Maui, this place you can only arrive at by plane or by boat, where everyone knows your history, your business, your status, your politics, your preference, and may or may not have an opinion about it is the heart of a land mass, a glacier’s destination, the oasis at the end of ice sheets. Her magnetism is powerful, and is both difficult to leave, impossible to forget, and somewhere to return to.

Home, after a reckless journey back, I remember walking out to the end of the observation point with Deborah at my arm, listening to Spencer’s fun facts about Juneau, watching Megan slip and fall to the hard, cold ground in slow motion, scaling wet slopes, and hiking narrow trails in my birkenstocks, laughing and talking, and sticking my camera into the faces of the most beautiful flowers I find that while the ghosts appear to whisper night and day, and the sun barely seems to set, I found another view of love and family in Juneau.

Long before europeans arrived, the Gastineau was home to the Auke and Taku tribes — today known as Tlinget Indians — where they lived, and thrived for thousands of years. The native cultures are rich with artistic traditions including carving, weaving, orating, singing and dancing, and Juneau has become a major social center for the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian of Southeast Alaska.

In 1880, when the lust for gold ran through the new world like a plague, Joe Juneau and Richard Harris were ordered back through that Gastineau Channel in case they had overlooked something. At the head of Gold Creek the two men found nuggets of gold the size of peas and beans. From there, the area known today at Juneau, Alaska (originally Harrisburg) exploded as the heart of the Klondike era. The end of the gold rush in California, the birth of dreams which streamed north through Canada, up river, over glaciers, and into valleys who’s sky was so full of light that the lonesome dreamers forgot their former lives, fell in love with her wonder, and never left.

Sunday Soul is a weekly digital transmission this week from Juneau, Alaska
10pm until 1am Eastern Time this week (-5 GMT)
on 90hz.org

Read more about Sunday Soul at Sunday Soul
Listen to the weekly archive here

I was rounding the corner of Webster onto Haight street. I live in the lower haight, and this is my neighborhood. It’s a complex situation here these days… new life, fancy people with money awkwardly blended with the life long residents and hold outs from a time when the lower haight meant anything but pubs, automats, and easy parking for your hybrid… but somehow we manage to live together in relative peace. My head was down, and I was buckling under the pressure of all that’s been weighing me down so heavily lately. In truth, I was mumbling “I wish I was dead, I wish I was dead” over and over to myself. Not that I actually wish I was dead, rather, I want this pressure off my back, I want these negotiations resolved, I want to relax, I want a lot of things right now, and on saturday it felt like none of them were going to transform for me any time soon, if ever.

I approached the middle of the block, just a step away from Rookie’s Records when I head it: This amazing bass line blasting out of the speakers. Man was I moved. I stopped dead in my tracks and cocked my head to the sky… a grin spread across my face, and helplessly, without any self consciousness I began to shift my hips and shake my head. Against my better judgement I was dancing… a guy coming out of the shop clutching a bag of records paused, looked at me and started to dance too. A man who had been parking his shiny cadilac emerged from the driver’s side of the car and said “Is this some old Gladys Knight?” I grinned at him. He said “Her royal yo’mammaness!” I laughed and said “Fuck yeah.” He joined us in front of the speakers… shaking his head and shuffling his feet. Almost as soon as he joined us, three homeless people gathered beside us and started to dance. In a sweaty shimmy, low to the ground, we shook it tightly right there on the sidewalk in broad daylight.

When the 11 minute song eneded, The homeless people walked away, the man from the cadilac nodded and strolled up the street, the guy with the record bag made a right turn and disappeaered into the people walking along the sidewalk toward Fillmore, and I headed straight into the shop and bought th record for $5.

Glady Knight and the Pips - Love is always on your mind
Save your own life!

After Nixon, many presidents set similar goals for energy independence. Every target was missed.

Our future is electric ?
An excellent article on the future of energy, oil consumption, energy independence and more from The American’s Andy Grove.

I was hanging out at Simon’s house for about a week. We had a wonderful time.
I love this song, and it was so much fun to be so light, and free… to not take myself so seriously. Just dancing, and laughing, performing with friends in the warm sun.

If you said something to me, something true… maybe… sometimes I wonder if I could even hear you. It’s like the world is filtered through everything that’s ever been said, or all the crap I did when I should have been in high school. Maybe through the innocent eyes of a very young me, standing in the kitchen doorway watching my parents fight to be heard, or my brother slugging me in the arm while I did my very best to take it because I wanted his love and friendship. I learned some really fucked up things about the world, and like a famous anthropomorphic egg-man, I am quite sure the pieces of me will never come back together again. So the words I masochistically want to hear are all I come away with, and then we are broken again. Undone.

I remember playing telephone as a kid. Remember telephone? Where we all sit in a circle and I whisper “Johnny is a punk” in your ear… and it’s exciting because I get to touch your hair, brush it back over your ear, smell you a little and then feel my own warm breath against my face as it rushes against your soft ear. You look at me like I’m crazy, and then whisper something into the person’s ear beside you. the message goes around the circle until the person on the other side of me smiles and says “Potty in a funk” and everyone laughs.

When you are telling me you are in pain, sometimes I hear you saying “Help! I am in pain.” On less than perfect days I hear you saying the words which are actually coming out of your mouth. On bad days like today I hear a distortion of the words, and sometimes I retaliate.

If I were to really break open, I wonder if it would be so bad. It would certainly give all the King’s horses and all the King’s men something to do for a while.

Somehow there has to be a little more room in this world for just a little more compassion, and a tight, chocolate smudged fist full of open conversations.

Join me?

There’s a sneaky little party on Saturday July 12th in San Francisco.
Sunshine Jones will be spinning a Sunday Sunset set featuring vocalist Jennifer Johns and some guest percussionists from just before sunset and into the night.

I’m sorry, it’s actually a private event, but if you’re personal friends with Sunshine and you wanna come, let him know and he’ll sneak you in under his jacket, or hide you in my record box. Oh wait… I don’t actually play records any more. Hmmm. Well, it’ll have to be a very big jacket, but let’s see what we can do k?

Join me on Sunday July 13th 2008 at 10pm pacific time for Sunday Soul:
an overwhelming feeling of prosperity and love

Gather in the chat
Listen from the index page of http://90hz.org

Radiate
Celebrate
Hurray!

I came home tonight to find this waiting for me on my desktop.
I can’t tell you how thrilled I was.
Yaay!

Well that was quite a weekend. I have to say that I haven’t felt this alive, loved and beautiful in longer than I want to actually admit. Heading in, things were looking grim. I was heavy with emotion. I met with my father for the first time in years, lots of my friends were having stress and strain and I was getting nowhere with a remix I’d been working on for much too long. The same frustration was true for my ongoing, and prematurely announced contract negotiations. So by the time Friday rolled around my head was getting too heavy for my neck and shoulders to carry around anymore. I needed both my hands to keep my chin up. I was ready to retire for the weekend and just rest.

But then something wonderful happened. Yep, something wonderful. I packed up my back packs and rode my vespa through the 4th of july firecracker tossing competition going on along Webster street as the sun began to set on San Francisco.

“Get the guy on the vespa!” A voice shouted from the blur of smoke and little light flashes. I twisted the throttle of my p200e and ran the red light. “No thank you.” I said to myself smiling. When I got to the corner of Hyde and Golden Gate I realized I’d forgotten my power supply for my mac. “Fuck!” I said to the homeless couple standing in the street. They smiled at me. I grinned, and turned around and headed for home. I really didn’t mean to challenge my friends back on Webster chucking firecrackers back and forth across the street, but my reappearance was taken as a temptation they couldn’t resist. The popping of the firecrackers made the sky look curiously grey, brown, and light with the flashing of report. I zoomed through the battle again, left my bike running, and ran upstairs to grab my power supply. I’ve always wished my battery would last longer than an hour, but never more than in that moment.

I arrived at the 222 Club and Jenö was all set up. I set up quickly and we embarked upon my debut evening playing one for one. I don’t usually like spinning like that. Somehow I turned out to be such a sensitive plonker that I want to feel the journey of a DJ set, and the push-me-pull-you challenges of two points of view at once is usually more than I can really get my ass around. I wanna dance, and as soon as something get’s in the way of the flow I become thoughtful, want to sit down, and then want to go home. But this, yes here’s the exception, was remarkable. It took us about an hour to find one another, but we did. And the night was challenging, Jenö bailed me out of a couple tricky mixes, and I was ready with the loop button to make sure there was time for his mixes as well. It really came alive. It worked. I loved it.

After it was over, and it went much too fast, I was ripe and wide open with the music, a smiling Tim, a sweaty and beautiful Mollie, a sweetly smiling Nikki, a grinning and radiant Carmen, a beautifully grooving Zephyr, a cheering man who really hoped I’d play ‘Mother Earth’ (so I did) and a room full of people dancing, and cheering and feeling the musical collaboration, I packed everything and headed outside. On the sidewalk were all my friends, delighted, and ready to go to breakfast. So we raced across town and had a wonderful time eating, talking, laughing, and just hanging out. It was 5:30 am before I got to bed. As I lay my head onto the pillow I was grinning because I was the best kind of exhausted. I slept like a log.

Saturday was a little blip on the radar screen. I completed the last touches of the Soñando Contigo remix I’ve been working on for Kiko Navarro… my second completed remix this week. It’s never really done until you’ve played it out in a club. I learned a lot about the remix by playing it on Friday. The synthetic toms were too loud, the looping theta wave chords were actually not repetitive enough, and the vocals could actually be about 2 db louder, but it was the cheering of the audience in the last 1/3 of the song which really taught me the most. So I spent the day re hydrating, and adding the last touches to the mix. Then I had pizza on my living room floor with Bob, and we went out to see the Hulk with Abel. What I thought about the Hulk movie isn’t worthy of an entire journal entry, but it was wonderful to reconnect with Abel, and to really spend some quality time with Bob. Good friends, and really good times.

Then sunday was a dream. I had been waiting for days for Megan to come back from her trip up to lake county, and a yoga retreat and by sunday at 1:30 pm I was fed up. So I took a walk and pulled up a chair at Café du Soliel and dug back into my third read of ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife.’ If you haven’t read it, and are anything like me, you should read it. It’s the best read along these lines I’ve found in many years. So there I was laughing, bothering the people around me, and then I burst into tears, which sent the people at the tables closest to me packing. Crazy-boy is laughing and then crying, and they were outta here. I smiled, and read on. Megan returned, we met up on the corner, kissed and kissed, and walked a while together. We went to delicious Indian food, and talked and talked. We hung out until moments before Sunday Soul began.

The show was amazing. Great turn out, loving and beautiful conversation, and loose mixing of music I love. Loved and loose. That’s the way I like it. It was a joy and a pleasure to rage thoughtlessly through music I’ve come to adore, playing my own remix twice, and singing a few of my favorites, making up junk, and just trying to radiate some of the love and relief I was feeling. I felt a reciprocal flow of energy, and after three and a half hours I wanted to play another three and a half hours. Brett showed up at the last song, and he and Tre begged me to keep it going. I had already offered the dedication, something you miss unless you’re in the chat, and had to excuse myself.

By 2:30 am my face was washed, teeth brushed, in cargo shorts and a clean t-shirt laying on my living room floor with my eyes closed. A smile broke out over my face as I realized just how changed I was from Thursday evening. There I was, loved and beautiful, done meditating and ready to drift off to sleep. All I had to do was get up, and get into bed.

Is it the release of energy? Is it the exchange? How is it possible that the world can change, without the circumstances of my life which I deem to be a “problem” having shifted in the least? It is not an illusion… because it’s monday afternoon now and I am light as a feather, clear headed, rested, and listening back to Sunday Soul, working hard, and with purpose. These dreams are real, and I am loved, feel loved, calm, centered, and beautiful.

Whatever it is, I want to say thank you. I wish you all of this lightness, and happiness in return. I want to be the agent of that light in your life. If not from my conversation, then from my lips. If not from my kisses, then from my music. If not from my recordings, then please let light come from my words. Not as a surrogate, or any kind of object for your use, but as a voice in the breeze, a rush of energy in the passing wind, or a distant sound to remind you that you are loved, and you are beautiful too.

Soñando Contigo - Kiko Navarro - Sunshine Jones Extended Remix listen

Kiko Navarro asked me about 6 months ago if I would be interested in remixing a couple of his songs. Soñando Contigo is one of my all time, hands down, favorite house tracks. I insist on playing it at -4 (or slower) and often spend much longer than I really ought to mixing in in and out of my own Do It Now. I did ten or eleven different remixes of this amazing song… proving once again just how hard it is to remix a song I actually love… ranging from 118 broken disco — live bass, live drums, and vocals — to 128 bpm techno without any vocals at all… in the end I decided to deconstruct the song in a way which might be most useful to the most people… I tried to honor the arrangement, but stripped it of it’s latino completely and reveled in electronic sounds, and techno. It’s hot off the press right now, so I have no perspective at all.

Enjoy!

Dreaming of you

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Journey to http://90hz.org at 10pm pacific time and click the big huge play button.
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See you in my dreams

Love,
Sunshine

At the end of his life, Senator Marchese Guglielmo Marconi, president of the Royal Academy of Italy, Member of the Fascist Grand Council wondered if he had done the world some good, or if he had added a menace. The Nobel Laureate invented the radio, operating a two-circuit transmitter he commanded the Italian Military radio corps which gave the Fascist movement a strategic advantage for a flicker in time. Later, working against his own party’s beliefs, Marconi shared his technology with the British government who in turn shared it with the Americans. In the end it turned out that it wasn’t who possessed the technology first, or even who held the highly contested patent which made a lick of difference. Typically, it was the people who made the more effective use of radio that prevailed.

It was Germany who developed the quintessential message which was to be transmitted over the wireless. In 1905 the SOS (. . . _ _ _ . . .) signal was agreed upon and sent into space by sinking ships, failing aircraft, lost travelers and those in distress ever since. But calling for help wasn’t enough… certainly not when there was no help to send, or the distance to travel was to great to be of any real use. In the end, the final transmissions of many an errant vessel were recorded in ledgers, replied to with prayers, and made for tidy books and nothing more.

It was Order of the White Lion member Nikola Tesla who would inevitably refine Marconi’s original untuned spark-gap radio design into a four circuit, tunable contraption which allowed for virtually unlimited numbers of radios to be in operation by allowing them to be tuned in to different frequencies. Tesla, along with Oliver Lodge, and John Stone Stone claimed rights to the unique circuits and designs, plans, and schematics for radio transmission.

While Tesla went on to become the father of modern alternating current, the transformer, and more — notably remembered for saying simply “I have harnessed the cosmic rays and caused them to operate a motive device.” — Marconi had no other ideas to offer humanity. No other ideas beyond the doubt that transmission of signals from the vast expanse of the sea, or the unseen reaches of otherness may have been, in the end, a mistake.

The brother’s Gibb have returned as a little theme in my life this week. A string part from somewhere way down deep inside my head… A passing Lincoln blasting Night Fever — three women in sunday dresses singing along — left me walking and spinning and singing along hours after the car was gone and the streets were silent… Cole Medina sent up a re edit and it blew my mind — right on time — and now I’m doing a remix of the re edit. I’ll post the results when they’re in, but for now let’s see what you make of all this magic.

Love you inside out - The Bee Gees - The Pinches Re Edit listen

Love you inside out - The Bee Gees - Sunshine’s Hustle Up Remix of The Pinches Re Edit listen

you are my reflection
so here i stand with you in mind
and anytime someone smiles at me or gives me warmth
i know that you are here
you are my sears portrait with no sitting fee
no time to rest when the world is at its knees
no time to make appointments
no time to take notice
no waiting for your name to be called
i move to the rhythm of your heartbeat

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Join us!

I really like what Orlando Patterson and Glenn C. Loury have to say about affirmative action in America. With mixed feelings on the subject, I am delighted to sing the praises of anyone who I feel is spot on. Moreover, I am delighted to find myself so surprised, and in such complete agreement with anyone on the subject.

Gentle friend,
It isn’t fair or true to continue to compare your insides to other people’s outsides. Through the delusions of your heart’s hunger, your mind’s hatred, and all that television has done to you, I propose that you are so far removed from the truth that the only thing left to do is rest. Rest well, and then regurgitate your hips… let your legs slide carefully out of your dislocated jaws until your toes are past your lips. Let the blood return to them, slowly bringing tingling, and then searing pain. When the sensation begins to pass… correct your back, place your hands upon the asphalt of the alley where you have been laying for years, and press your self up toward the light above you. Rise. Wipe the filth from your hands, and learn to walk again.

And while I hate explaining myself, it seems like we live in a knee-jerk world and maybe some explanation is a loving thing.

In my view, there’s nothing wrong at all with beautiful women, well dressed men, laughter, lightness, or cosmopolitans. The world is wide, and strong. Be inspired by who you are and what you choose to do. Oh I hope you are. I hope you will.

That said, in the heart of babylon, where we sell things without thinking, and put money and instinct ahead of community, content, and just how brief our time can be here, it is easy for people who’s hearts cry for love, value, purpose and refuge to look outside, into a glass of alcohol, the last drop of a tube of lotion, or anywhere but the mirror. I believe this because it has been my experience. And so I ache for my dear friends who kick the shit out of themselves every day, and every night by comparing their vulnerable insides to the frosty outsides of people, places and things. Having been both the hipster just trying to have a good time, and the brooding egoist which never measures up, it has become my point of view that only through transformation are we ever found in the present tense with our feet on the ground. Sometimes these moments come with violence or illness. Sometimes they come with the gentle tap of a finger on our foreheads.

So did I mean “you?” when I wrote this? No. Certainly not. But if the shoe fits… relax. Walk around the sales floor a while. How does it feel?

I took notes during a phone conversation with King Street this afternoon. I sent a three CD set containing 21 of the 24 demos for my new album, and today we talked about the possibility of putting together a second album for the label. The last three weeks have been high pressure for me, listening, recording, tracklisting revisions, plotting, planning, budgeting, tentatively approaching vocalists, wondering if this is the right thing to do or not — afraid that maybe the best tracks developed over the last year or so from my live sets, and on Sunday Soul would be snatched up by King Street, and then there might be nothing left for the Treehouse Muzique, community supported album.

After a good conversation about bpm, techno, and the importance of female vocals I was relieved to find that Hisa only selected 2 of the “best” tracks from the collection which I had hoped, and was positioned to insist remain with me, for us.

And so it seems that the two albums at once project continues. The King Street album will be largely uptempo, synthetic, and aimed at the main dance floor. the Treehouse Muzique album will be hand made, new balearica, heady and personal. It’s a beautiful solution. I might not have been able to make such a clear choice by myself.

The contracts are expected today, and work is already under way. Hurray!

To listen

Head over to http://90hz.org at 10pm pacific time and click the big huge play button. It’s as simple as that.

If you prefer to stream your music through iTunes or some other audio player please follow the directions on the index page at 90hz.org and hook it up.

Community

We gather and get together in the chat during Sunday Soul.
Register with the 90hz forum and then click the “chat” link, or the big “join us” button from the front page over at 90hz.org and you’re in.

Join us!

I’m not sure what it means to be truly liberated. Having long been a man who will naturally resonate with someone’s pain before being anything close to capable of approaching real joy or remaining in the presence of true happiness I work up this morning almost entirely changed.

I stood in the kitchen, making my morning debut — stark naked, fresh from dreams, switching on the espresso machine and glancing out the window at the buddhists looking in at me — and grinned at the bright sunlight outside. Lighter, loved, and beloved. Kind and calm, the world whispers sweetly into the tiny hairs on my ears and says simply “yes.”

Blessed with friendships too many to think possible, music… always music… and motion, dance, film, photographs, and a sea of run-on sentences for your pleasure and mine. I am not interested in pain, though I am touched by beauty, and moved with empathy, I do not wish to drink from the well, nor hurl myself into the canyon below. Today, markedly unlike other days in this mind set, I choose life, and say yes to love, to partnership, to laughter, to tenderness, and this path I have suddenly discovered I am already walking.

Thank you. Thank you for my blessings too many to mention. From the birds, the beautiful lights, the laughter of children in the garden across the street, a light and silly conversation with my mother, an after hours message for my sister, the work at my fingertips, and the blessings which they produce.

I am in your loving debt. And gladly remain at your service.