Just acquired a beautiful Gibson epiphone Sheraton today. Really good condition. Plays great. Sounds awesome. Looks amazing. 

Last screening: Revolution OS. documentary on the history of the free software / open source software story, such as Linux and Gnu. Some back log for reference: A few years ago I used to use the radio as my alarm to wake me up. now I use language CDs. I have for about two years now. Unlike most people who hear their alarm and then maybe hit snooze once or twice and then get up a few minutes later, I kind of half wake and stay half asleep for a good hour or so after it goes off. So I find that waking up to / sleeping through the language CD is a great way to subconsciously ingrain the new language in and you can still kind of get some sleep in there too, but I do actually notice myself repeating and reciting right along with the CD as if I were awake, even though I am also aware of still dreaming at the same time. its an interesting phenom. My mind somehow incorporates the CD playing into whatever dreams I am having in the last hour of sleep. 

So it’s a good tool for learning, a good way to get an extra hour of learning in the day. Before I realized this, it didn't happen overnight, this realization. It was slow. And it was through deciding to wake up to music instead of alarms in the morning. Not that I am much into waking up to anything. For me its just better to wake whenever you want to, whether that's eight am like a lot of people or ten am like I like to or even three or four pm like the other guys in my band like to. noticed that when I woke up to music that even though I was sleeping through the music playing, I was still absorbing a good portion of the music, processing it in my dreams. multi-tasking if you will. Found it an excellent way to rehearse or compose or study music without having to do it consciously. Then one day got switched to a news station by mistake, so then I started waking up to / sleeping through various news shows as an alarm. And what I found was that it was a great way to brainstorm and source really creative ideas. Because when you're asleep, even half asleep, the mind just works like you're on acid, or like you're a little kid, its just total chaos but controlled ever so slightly. 

So ideas are just coming out of nowhere without any sense of logic or without limitations, without thinking. we’re going back about three years here at least. One day I was laying there asleep but was kind of sort of hearing a news segment on open source software code, the Linux system. And I had this realization in a dream that I could use the idea in this other company that I owned, not the record company but the vitamin company. I just started laughing in my sleep because I knew I had just had an amazing idea, and then I fell back asleep. And I ended up taking this concept and incorporating it into our company and it brought us tons more gross revenue. That's not the main point, I'm getting there, but the idea was to say fuck all to the whole idea of proprietary formulas in the dietary supplement industry, trust the consumer, and just develop partnerships industry wide, even if that meant with other companies you had always assumed were your competitors. The idea worked at the time. it was one of the many ideas that got me to where I am today. which is here: I just finished watching this film discussing the debate raging between free software versus open source code software versus completely for profit closed source or proprietary coded software, and now something relatively new that Microsoft has come up with to try to catch up to open source that they call shared source. 

Its gotten me thinking. a bit. Very absorbed in the film. Loved it. because its happening now to us in the music industry. Our revenue streams are dying. All around us. this year alone, 2003, 1100 retail music stores have closed for good. think about it. eleven hundred stores. Stores with owners with families and employees with families---all of them losing their jobs and income. Its really sick and twisted. But it’s the reality. The people are deciding to steal music rather than pay for it. now in the free software community they don't consider it stealing, because they don't believe that software should be proprietary and closed and you should pay for it. but as someone in the open source code field said, that's like communism---where people are forced to share or they are killed or jailed. So the idea that we should make music and spend thousands of dollars on it so people can take it for free because technology lets them is just not cool. It goes against everything we know as a people to be smart----humanity itself would not survive if everyone thought that way. we would literally cannibalize ourselves and only the strong would survive until even they died off because there was no one else left in the world.

That is why the absolute best way for a species to survive is more through a free enterprise or capitalist system which we have now in much of the civilized world. I love thinking about this and no I'm not a hundred percent sold on this idea but pretty damn close to it. I think it is idealistically, theoretically, the most logical, the safest bet for our survival. O.k. so where are we? Yeah so no I don't want to give away music for free and I don't want to take music for free from others. I just got all for you again by Janet Jackson—this is one of my favorite records—I just think jimmy jam and terry Lewis are geniuses. This is my second or third copy of this. my first one got stolen and no I didn't have a problem buying it again. it’s a product. [remember that a lot of these “lets steal the music” butt-pirates out there use this theory that if they buy it once like on vinyl then they should not have to buy it again like on a CD. which I don't agree with. If your TV breaks then you are going to buy a new one. or maybe you won't, but then you won't have TV. that's your choice. no one ever twisted these guys arms and said now go buy all your vinyl albums on cds. They made that decision themselves. Hey maybe you want two copies of Janet’s new album. one for your house and one for your vacation house. What do a lot of people do? they make a copy. [steal one] 

Why not be a respectful responsible citizen and instead of burning yourself a copy why not go buy a second one for your vacation home? That's what you would do if you wanted a TV in your vacation home AND your house, right? you bet you would. You see, the only reason why people burn cds and download music for free and make all these justifications for it is because its possible to do so. And not so easy to get caught. Yet. If you could make exact replicas of your TV but it was illegal and thought that you wouldn’t get caught, plenty of people would have one in every room in their house and wouldn’t have a problem doing it even though they knew they were stealing. A lot of people just don't care. They haven't reached that stage in their own soul’s evolution. They are still at that other level. Steal, try not to get caught, they're doing it to everyone anyway—I'm just getting them back, why not do it, its only me doing it what does it matter, and on and on and on.... hey these are the people who are holding down the entire evolutionary process of mankind. The little thinkers. They're slowing us all down. 

My cousin told me once, “hey man don't worry I can get you that for free (I forgot what we were talking about) I found a way to scam the such and such so I get it for like next to nothing and they don't even know it....” and I look at him and God bless him he's my cousin but I can’t help but think, ‘great my own fucking cousin, guys like this are the reason why we still cannot fly or teleport or have telekinesis as the human species because guys like this are still carrying out thinking processes and practices that are so old and outdated and archaic so they are holding us all back. you just want to shake the person and say “wake up buddy. You don’t have to steal or scam or lie or cheat your fellow man. You can do this on your own and still get exactly what you want and do it on your neighbors terms without ripping him off. Trust me you can do it. and you'll be that much bigger of a person if you do it that way....” 

but still this is not the point. So yes we have a problem now. with all that said I find myself more and more stealing music from kazaa. Bas tells me I cannot believe it, you were the last one standing. And now you’re doing it too? horrible. But the prob with getting your music from kazaa is that one, you're stealing, so you're a loser, me included, and two, a lot of the files that are on there are totally corrupt so its just too time consuming to try to find the good ones. So in my opinion legit businesses like itunes are really going to break big time. where you pay like a dollar a song and all the files are in good condition and you get the song you want when you want it. but let me tell you this. popping the Janet CD with all the artwork into the stereo today and cranking it up felt great. So I don't see cds going away soon. CDs are awesome. For now. but soon this is going to change. Very soon. in a very big way. and I don't think most people realize it. but its because of the ipod. 

You download the songs you want---hours worth of any songs. From your PC then into your ipod. Now you take your music anywhere you want to. you can even plug it into your car stereo (I don't know if this exists yet-but it will, anyday, you can bet on that) and then bam. Cds are out the window. Won't need them anymore. You have your ipod. It’s a revolution. The same way that CDs were, or VCRs, or DVDs, or fax machines. It’s a horrible revolution, because it has the potential to dinosaur the idea of creating “albums” or cohesive works of art made of music or a collection of coherently grouped together songs. Because it really kind of pushes things more into a song oriented culture, where as a lot of us are still more into the album as a whole. But its going to happen anyway. we’ll just have to see how it plays out. Even with us now we have our song Minnie Driver climbing the  charts and everyone involved just keeps saying well if we can just get Minnie driver out there to enough people then that will drive album sales, but the fact is that yeah even two years ago that may have been true, but not now. not anymore. As soon as we get Minnie driver “out there” to a certain level then BAM! It will be so readily available for free for anyone who just wants to download it then it may not drive any album sales at all. it may just in fact become a hugely successful and popular song. Which of course would be great, except for how the fuck do we the musicians make any money from that? and this is what the whole open source code concept brought me to tonight. Which is why I am writing so insanely and quickly. 

Which leads me to the point three pages later of this whole tiring diatribe. I have taken out a large drawing pad and scrolled in big letters on it “Open Source Code ?” on it so it is the first thing I see when I wake up every morning. (will still wake up to language CD though—Italian—still trying to get a handle on it). But Open Source Code-----What could it mean to us in the music business? I will meditate on it day and night. lets face it. our old way is gone. Whether we like it or not. Eleven hundred retail record stores close in a year? Toto we’re not in Kansas anymore. In fact, Kansas doesn’t even exist as we know it in a few years. We have to find new revenue streams. We have to break it all down and come up with a new system—not just us who are in the music business---but all of us music lovers and music buyers and music stealers alike. Because we all love music and we want to see it continue to thrive and be made and heal us and help us and fill us with joy and passion and give us energy and change our state and all that good stuff that music does. And besides that, there is huge money to be made here. like there always is on the cusp of any revolution. And I think the key is, my intuition tells me, that the words ‘open source code’ are a clue to what this is all about.... more later.