Music is My Paradise

I've been a musician for more than half my life. Music, in many ways, allows me to tell love stories.

I have played the alto saxophone at a SuperBowl:

I have played the piano at numerous recitals (those pictures are a wee bit too embarrassing and will not be viewed by the general public).

My love and passion for music has taken me around the world. I have met so many wonderful people and done so many great things. But the real joy I derive from playing music and performing in front of crowds is that feeling that the audience gets. That's my paradise.

(In fact, I'm actually listening to famed composer Hans Zimmer's Pandora radio station as I type).

I ride a motorcycle and while I know it is "illegal" I still listen to music as I ride.

For me music obtains the same kind of aura that Walter Benjamin's writes about. Music is art. Music is element and emotional. Music provides people with feelings of both sadness and happiness, much like any sculpture or painting. Music can be composed as a painting. That has aura of its own. And in that sense music has that lasting effect, that aura.

A Party Bus and a Diet

This weekend I traveled to Miami to meet my Nephew Norman and his wife Diedra who was celebrating her 30th birthday (oh, yes, my nephew is about two years older than me) and their friends.

I think the drive to miami from just about anywhere else on the map is about as close as you can get to pure evil. That said, I love Miami. I love my family. And I love to party.

I recently started a diet, it's called the "Ketogenic diet" It's similar to the pale diet except cheese and dairy are encourage. Being bound to this Keto diet and not being able to eat birthday cake (because of the sugar) and French fries, chips and dip (because of the carbs) I found myself consuming and lot of meat and liquor.

By the time I had reached Miami, I was already one week into this crazy ass diet. And let's just say that before I started Keto that I pretty much ate like a fucking goat.

And then came the drugs, I mean weed, which is not a drug. Or is it? Hmm....I used to think weed is a "drug." But perhaps, as Deleuze and Guattari write, “If the experimentation with drugs has left its mark on everyone, even nonusers, it is because it changed the perceptive coordinates of space-time and introduced us to a universe of microperceptions in which becomings-molecular take over where becomings-animal leave off.”

In all, I had a great time partying and celebrating with family and friends on south beach. I survived my first party bus, too. And nobody got shot, stabbed or arrested, you know, because those things tend to happen episodically in South Beach.

Fashion and Music as Medicine, or Something

“When people say 'there are other fish in the sea' I say 'fuck you, she was my sea.'”


― Jen Faulkner

It's Saturday, 7:32p.m., still suffering from a shattered heart I decided that lying in bed in fetal position (Just imagine that I am Kurtz, insane, lying on my side chanting "the horror...the horror...) listening to The Boxer Rebellion's "If You Run" on repeat... 

...probably wasn't the best way to spend my night. 

I cracked open my eyes just enough to see my iPhone. I found Daft Punk's Random Access Memories and pressed shuffle (the song didn't matter much because in my humble opinion, the whole damn album is one hit after another). 

I rolled out of my kings sized bed, (boy that thing seems bigger now) turned on the light and began to gaze into my massive closet much the same way we stare at a refrigerator when we're trying to find something to eat. Sixty seconds passed. Then three hundred. It was ten minutes into this little dance when I said fuck it and took a shower. I already knew what I was going to wear and where I was going to wear it. 

An hour later, I sprayed on some Perry Ellis 360 Red, grabbed three cigars,  jumped on my motorcycle and revved my engine extra loud in some sort of act of rebellion-like escapism. 

With Daft Punk playing in my ears (yes, I know that's illegal) I was off to Level 8 Lounge. There I came across all kinds of fashion and the DJ played some Lana Del Rey. Three shots of Patron Silver, a Vesper martini and two Gran Habano cigars later, I was feeling a whole lot better.