Went to pick up a bunch of books on Italy and Italian for a trip to Florence in September. I want to spend a couple of weeks there at a school learning about Italy and studying the language before the band tours. For a while I couldn’t figure out which one I wanted to do next, French or Italian, but then while I was in Costa Rica I saw the Italian channel Rai on TV. And that pretty much made up my mind. I watched it every night before bed. Hired a company to research my genealogy, tracing back my roots. Go to ellisislandrecords.org and you can see the ship’s manifest with all of your relatives’ names and home towns on their first trip over here. I  am going to go to the towns where my family came from in Italy. The language is beautiful, the women are beautiful. The culture, the art, and the music are the beginning and ending of modern civilization.

Spent all day on South Beach today. A juice and smoothie bar inside of the Polo Sport store, a Mexican mariachi band outside of Senor Frogs, big guitars, big hats, horns and all. Beautiful girls and boys everywhere. People on roller blades and scooters. The beach, the sun, the fashion, the cars, Ahhhh, Miami. I love it. If Miami could discover rock and roll, if we could inject some rock and roll into Miami, it would be paradise. No matter where you go on South beach, club, bar, clothing store, every one is playing the same music, the same fucking song almost, it's either hip hop, house or techno. It's as if they get hypnotized there and they think that it's the only music being made right now. as if just by the mere act of playing it they will be cool, as if being cool means being like every one else. I have never really seen a city with people so unwilling to go against the norm. It's almost like there is a dress code there, like a private school. This is the ugly kid sister to the goddess that is South beach. Every girl thinks she has to wear faded low cut hip hugger jeans and last year’s J Lo sun glasses and they’ll be cool. Every guy thinks he has to wear sandals and sleeveless t-shirts and he’ll be cool. And everybody has to listen to that music. Today in a shop a guy asked if I was going to wear these pants I was buying with a  sleeveless t-shirt. I just looked at him, gave him the old ‘whachyou talking bout Willis?’  People think Miami is culturally diverse. But still, it's a very exciting place to call home. If I do ever put on one of those fucking sleeveless t-shirts, I hope the boys in the band shoot me before I leave the house.

Last Movie:  The Wild One, with Marlon Brando. The origin of the BRMC.

Watching the wild one circa mid-fifties really makes you realize how each generation has gotten successively more extreme than the previous one. the music they considered wild back then, the really crazy stuff, was jazz. It frightened the older generations. Then came rock and roll, stuff like bill haley and chuck berry and Elvis. That was considered so threatening and crazy. It went on from there. acid rock, and then punk, metal, and then grunge. Each generation more extreme, more seemingly wild and threatening than the next. Not just in it's music but in it's language, it's desire and threshold for violence and gratuitous exploitation of sex. I think every generation thinks it's the shit. Thinks they’ve seen it all seen how far it will go. I mean who can imagine anything harder than Metallica, System of a Down, or Rage against the machine. But time tells that it's just another rung on the ladder. 

Things will continue to get more extreme on both sides of it. The music will get harder, but it will also continue to get softer and more beautiful. People will get uglier, meaner, and more deceptive. In the last ten years we saw on live TV, them kill over a hundred people at Waco, then the Oklahoma city bombing, and those kids killing other students in Arkansas and then the trade center attacks. But we keep going. everyday we keep living on in spite of how extreme it's getting. “good morning Mr. Smith. Terrible about those dead people in Omaha huh?” “oh yea Charlie, did you hear about that mother in California? Bit off the head of all four of her children? Crazy huh?” “yep crazy. O.k. well have a good day.” “o.k. you too.” And we keep moving on.

You know, but at the same time, we’re seeing things get more extreme in the opposite direction also. All over the world people are discovering God in things. In everyday life, people are starting to recognize the force of God all around us. Psychics are starting to be taken less as a phenomenon and more as an accepted reality.  Angels are popping up all over the place. Visions of the virgin mother appearing. The Green Party in America is really starting to take hold. People seem to be getting nicer. Less and less willing to take shit. More spiritual. Although you would never know from listening to most radio or by watching MTV, but still it's becoming apparent in a lot of other places. The obvious question is, if we keep going in this direction in consciousness, one side swinging hard to just total evil and chaos and madness and the other side swinging hard over to being good and just and pure and peaceful, what the hell happens? Can we keep a balance? Is there some sort of universal need for evil, for violence, for deception, wars, murder, lust, and greed? I mean is there any real reason for it? do we really need a balance? Could there be such a thing as too much goodness? Too much peace? Too much love? Too much justice? I say nah. I say anyone who gives you that is just full of shit. Cynical people, people who don't see any other way yet. People who still tell you things like, you have to be greedy sometimes, you have to lie sometimes, you have to think about yourself because no one else will, that only the strong survive and all that other last century crap. Don't believe them. They’re the same people that got us into this mess in the first place.