When FEVER strikes!

How does inspiration find me? All of a sudden I am slammed with a compulsion to create... My senses have gotten so splashed with new experience and color and elemental depth over the last couple of weeks that I am bubbling over with energy attempting to process and replicate or approach many of the incredible visual and musical encounters that I have just had...

Returning Man...the return from this year's Burning Man, an arts and music festival and experiment in community that takes place a few hours North of Reno, NV, in the Black Rock Desert. Aside from an otherwise challenging readjustment to urban life, the music and installation art out there this year got me going on a very deep level. Within a few days of being there I was exploring the desert and various art pieces constantly. I stood awestruck by some of the pieces and their beauty as well as technical execution and scale, especially in such a remote location. The artistry and vision I continue to experience out there is mind-expanding. I always come back realizing that I don't really know much at all. There is so much more that I don't know and so much AMAZING creation out "there" it literally astounds me.

Some of the music this year was incredible, magnetic to such a point that I walked across the entire desert in search of a sound...the sound that would define this year's festival, only to turn back and follow my ears back to an art car that I had heard in the middle of the festival's outlying area (ie: mid-deep playa, beyond the Temple). I also had the opportunity to do a Mystik DJ set (for more info and downloadable dj mixes see www.mystiksound.com) out there also (thanks to Loic at Tetropolis!) and tag-teamed a 2 hr set with my friend Spacelotus through the sweltering heat of the afternoon. Looking out over the inner desert with all of the people on their own paths was a totally musical and meditative journey, taking my cues from the other DJ and interweaving our musical styles in a cohesive mix and creating a deep afternoon soundtrack for the unfolding festival.

Upon my return, I have been dusting everything off, for sure, but I have also been stretching my creativity and resources to capture some of the precious essence from my recent experiences and attempting to truly understand it, partially by opening my creativity to encompass new and diverse influences as well processing and learning to recreate aspects of it on a technical and production level. My attention has been raptly fixated on these experiences, soaring on the afterglow and gliding back to "reality."

This kind of inspiration is priceless and can be hard to summon at will. However, when it strikes, this fuel from beyond propels me further along my path, boosts my energy levels, heightens my perception and directs me from within. Even when I don't recognize it, but especially when I do; things become more meaningful and clearer in many ways. I am now and *always* processing and channelling insight and guidance from the Great Spirit into being and manifestation.

Fortunately, probably as a result of my recent inspiration and blast from the deeper Self, I have been able to remember this much more and embrace many more moments of beauty and friendship recently. This is one of the lessons I will attempt to hold on to from my 12th journey to the desert. That only now, when the moment and all of the conditions are just perfectly right, can my experience be fully awakened and realized and contain the most depth and power to influence my very own present, past and future. That I absolutely must value and appreciate every moment as fully as I possibly can in that moment, because soon it will be the past and not accessible except in memory, which fades and becomes illusory, for the rest of time.

Red Bird Cinema Image Development

PERSONE DESIGN and Red Bird Cinema have just teamed up to develop a series of iconographic images for the production company’s roster of upcoming projects.

Of the Red Bird productions, PERSONE has already completed a poster for the upcoming film “3 Nights In August” a story based on a book called “Three Nights In August” about baseball’s 2006 World Series Champion St. Louis Cardinal’s manager Tony La Russa which was written by Pulitzer Prize winner H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger (who also wrote “Friday Night Lights”). Actor and writer Kevin Pollak did the screenplay adaptation. You can see the "3 Nights In August" Poster on the PERSONE website.

Also forthcoming from Red Bird Cinema are a biopic about boxing legend Sugar Ray Leonard, who has endorsed the production. Bissinger will also be writing the screenplay. In addition, PERSONE will be exploring graphical treatments for a film called "Waiting for Helen", and "A Different Shade of Rose" about former baseball player Pete Rose. You can find out more about these projects on the Red Bird Cinema website.

Red Bird Cinema was founded in 2006 by producer John Loar, St. Louis Cardinals former manager Tony La Russa, producer, managing director, actor and writer Kevin Pollak. They have also begun developing projects with Billy Bob Thornton as well.

TRANSMUTATION: Analyzing change from the inside

Change—the inevitable, as we know—often brings itself about through mutations, arising out of stressed or unnatural development environments. Alternately, it can also arise out of purely random happenstance.

Mutations can be positive growths as much as negative blockages or episodes just as well as abstract energetic or concrete physical manifestations. Some quantum leaps in thought, technology, or other forms of innovation or development require constricting, pressurized situations which ultimately create a seemingly super-creative state in the participants, where interactions and thoughts are heightened around a certain focal point. These revelations or breakthroughs might not have been possible given a less intense developmental environment when the thought cells and molecules started firing in more symbiotic and additive ways.



Often we can’t control these things, that which we can control or at least attempt with some realistic hope of achieving our ends pursue would be attitudes, efforts, inputting our own resources like quality attention, time, energy, thought and creativity. In the absence of other resources what we do have to offer, and yet more importantly what we can continue to offer over time is undoubtedly our greatest asset towards creating our own extremely sustained and thus change-enhancing mutations and quantum leaps in our own life conditions.

One of my own personal journeys in understanding the complexities and depth involved in confronting change through every day efforts and the composite effects came about through my own contact and involvement with Nichiren Buddhism and the discipline and strength I have found through my own studies, practice and faith. The practice—already a key fundamental aspect towards developing anything—is incredibly re-assuring and grounded, being based on the law of cause and effect, in other words, creating causes inevitably results in effects. So, by directing energy towards "positive" causes, and sustaining them—especially through periods of trial and difficulty which are also inevitable—one WILL, over time, create a longer overall climate conducive to a malleable or direct-able change.

Now that’s something I can believe in.

Enjoy local art at Spring OPEN STUDIOS in the Mission!

PERSONE DESIGN & MYSTIK SOUND - studio #403 - will be open this Friday evening from 7-11 PM for Mission Artists United Spring Open Studios!

Friends and guests are welcome to stop by the studio #403 for a fresh taste of PERSONE’s graphical & web goodies and the latest MYSTIK tracks, DJ sets and live arrangements during an opening night kick-off party THIS FRIDAY evening at ActivSpace. STUDIO #403 is on the 4th floor. Come on up! Refreshments will be provided!

Also, there will be many more participating studios open at ActivSpace and around the Mission Friday evening, as well as Saturday and Sunday from 11-6 PM for the Mission Artists United Spring Open Studios Weekend!

Enjoy local art!!!

PERSONE DESIGN & MYSTIK SOUND
ACTIVSPACE #403
3150 18th Street
@ Treat St. between Folsom & Harrison in SF - Map

Modern Epicurean Dualism

Last week as I was driving to my tax accountant to hand over some paperwork, I was listening to the Northern California-based KPFA radio show Against the Grain featuring British philosopher and author Mark Vernon as he discussed his latest book "Plato’s Podcasts: The Ancients’ Guide to Modern Living."

During the discussion—all of which I found entirely fascinating—Vernon described some of the tenets of Epicurean philosophy based on the classical thinker himself. To summarize the depth and greatness of his thoughts, Vernon said Epicurus would have prescribed to a vastly different theory than the hedonistic, sense-loving impression one might believe nowadays, instead adhering to a “less is more” mentality in his living and thought process.

I understood that Epicurus would savor essential ingredients in life, food, or other experiences, contenting himself with wholeness and purity of substance. He would not necessarily appreciate things excessively or obsessively, but with a more refined, sophisticated and self-controlled approach to enjoyment and pleasure.

Existing in a modern world that at times seems like a whirlwind around me, I am incredibly attracted to a pared down “less is more” lifestyle and approach to modern living, especially where I am now in San Francisco, CA. As a designer and musician, writer, and communicator, I devote a lot of time towards the editing process, constantly reducing, tightening, clearing, opening and simplifying and organizing information intelligently so as to present a more ordered, cohesive and positively resonant result. I find this reduction and distillation process incredibly creative and powerful. My understanding is, that even the very tenets of modern architecture and design advocate a reduction to and focus on essential elements.

As I reduce life’s complexities further and further, simplifying my perspective and processes, I can glimpse how I am just a little part of a much bigger, more complex whole. Like a cell or molecule, performing a relatively simple task, I find my tasks, even as complex as they can seem to be, are a part of some larger movement towards greater global evolution of consciousness and do propel me towards a greater ideal.

My question, now, is this. Is that ideal fundamentally “more is more” as my mind or the mass-media saturated “modern” world (at least here in SF/USA) or “less is more?” More “Super Size me” or more the subtle, vast vacancy of the Wheel of Life , the Middle Way or the Tao?

The next question I might pose beyond all of that is how can I train and develop myself to perceive and proceed as such from here on in…? Ever present, ever aware of my role in the bigger picture, and always able to access the simple, direct aspects to my actions and thought??? Should I think more? Study more...train more??? Or think less and be more? How can I be less is more?