Lessons 617

you try...
it slips through
like that a coffee ground
dancing it's way off a shallow spoon
for years, you scrape the edges
you dip and dunk
lapping at the current
to manipulate the particle
when instead... in underrated measure
you attempt to attune your spirit to the liquid
and realize life is all about the balance

love: an inner light that comes from within which casts it's glow upon the perspective for which we, as individuals, view all things.

If the soul, an individual, is the Earth
then love is the sun...
and each celestial body in the universe is carried on the ebb and flow of it's pull.

Mirror Mirror

I shudder to remember a time when talking meant subtle introversion. Is that something we lost? I'm serious, is that something we have to contend with now. People so scared and paranoid that you're always weary that they're leering a little too close to the surface.

I haven't thought about it to be honest. Perhaps, that's part of your issue. It's a slant, and your perception can turn everything on it's side.

So you're saying that everyone collectively is still the same level of shallow as they were twenty-some years ago?

It's not about being shallow, everyone can be shallow. This is about seeing your own shallowness in other people, and how you deal with that.

It's that and it's little things like noticing how in order to converse openly with someone I need some sort of actual context unlike in my youth where "sharing the same vibration of existence" was enough to warrant starting a conversation with someone. There's a fear in people's eyes now that didn't use to be there.

It's the same amount of fear that's always been there, the difference is that you're more fearful now.

I'm denoting a pattern with you...

You know how these conversations about "society" usually goes: You start off by making a blanket statement about the world, and I make the same statement about you. It's a basic redirect, works with almost anything really.

1

Why They Stole Einstein's Brain

What is it we did when we crossed the divide into this reality?
Did we haggle over life expectancy
bartered with the conditions of status and wealth
nothing too specific
just enough to give you a good idea of what a life might be
there's one peering in, eyeballing one on the table...
he thumbed through the listing

"in this one you get to be a white middle-class kid
who grows up in an upper-crust suburb of a major metropolitan city"

the eyes react with recognition...

"being a white kid in twenty century America"

they always add in a few intangibles...
a mother who's neurotic
a father who was forty five year union man
then the orders come through...
they flip the switch and you're set spinning
mix it up for seven months, instead of the usual nine

"plop him down somewhere in Middle America,"

and then in a place resembling an off track betting facilities
money exchanges hands over perceived outcomes

And then perhaps it's all one glorious kitchen...
some ooze meets a little goo
you add in a little random convergence
a random spike in the gamma radiation
a little vodka in the evolutionary punch
then cook it slowly

over
millions
of
years

and let's see how this bakes up in the celestial oven
a smattering of constructs
a tender and delicate balance of chemical compositions...

or perhaps existing in the mind of a programmer
until we were zipped up into this little virtual reality existence
into a file playing on someone's consciousness
as defined by it's subroutine...
the predictability patterns
linking up the chain to form a process
which enables the independent thought
to become a self-actualization algorithm
and the factors of existence
they are so infinitesimal small
that time appears bigger on the inside
and what takes millions of years happens in seconds
we burst, sprout, and explode
one day, they'll upload you
They'll shove your DNA into a C++ code
and be able to virtually interact with you
it's this crazy machine they have
powered by Einstein's brain...

and then The Oasis was Enlightenment

To focus on to far a future is ultimately self defeating

I remember an ex-nun once giving me advice
she told me that I should spend more time considering
the next ten minutes versus the next ten days
it was sort of a, live-in-the-now/call-to-Jesus... if you will
my fragile adolescent mind
imagining something so bold
etched across it's vernacular
to see the sum of time as a mere span of seconds
if five minutes were a thousand years

It reminds me of someone shouting,
"don't look down."

You know how it goes
what's the first thing you do when someone tells you,
"Don't look down"
That's right... you look down.
Unless you're one of those folk
who has either

• A. everything figured out
• B. pisses perfection into a cereal bowl each morning
• C. isn't actually afraid of heights

and regardless which of those three you are
you still convalesce in the process...
but for those of us, however, who lay outside of such revered 'distinctions'
To carry our truths across the belly of a desert floor
with each mirage, a burden
a fixation,
that disrupts the causality of existence
we'd burst if not for these trappings
our enclosures don't speak kindly of the weather
but even those things pass... such is life
at a pace... just slow enough to not notice
creeping along with the speed of a 17-year cicada

67% Triacetate / 43% Nylon

I played Silvie's Lounge tonight, good crowd... quiet and attentive. The kind of crowd that meets you head on. It helped that a third of them were musicians.

To be honest, I had gone the good majority of my entire life without wearing triacetate and nylon together and I pick the most humid night of the year when I'm going to be standing under stage lights to (suddenly and surprisingly) break from that tradition. So epic fail in the wardrobe department on my part, but this is what happens when I'm allowed to dress myself. I did also discover that I can't finish up a twenty mile bike ride just two hours before a gig starts. The very idea to me is now reminiscent of a Ponce de Leon expedition.

So (as I was saying) my skin is just radiating heat... oozing. I contend that very few of you can understand or appreciate the way triacetate and nylon feel against sunburned skin... under stage lights. What could I have possibly done? That shirt had sat in my closet gathering dust for four years before making it's way onto the stage tonight. It wasn't to be resisted, after all it was the first time I can recall fitting into the shirt (as intended)... and if not for the heat, a fedora. Damn, this humidity.

One day off and then I'm back at The Abbey Pub. Good sound system (very loud).

I always find it a little surreal, the idea of playing to a room. It's a very strange and wondrous sort of give and take that one has with their audience... even if it's just two people (which it has been on occasion) and sometimes those shows are your best ones. Those are the no pressure gigs. The kind where you can say a few things that you otherwise wouldn't. Interestingly my crowds seem to be about 99% non-republican now... not surprisingly.


...and about the shirt, the shirt looked good.

It's A 21st Century Plague

Guns are really the plague of the 21st century to me. Fear is it's symptom. Paranoia is it's fever. It's like people see this in the news and they react one of two ways... one, if you're like me, you find it disgusting and you feel this whole culture we have in America is sick on the sauce of it's own violence... and the guns do nothing but make it easier for someone to facilitate that culture and you want all guns to be outlawed and banned, or two people freak and think the only answer is for everybody to be armed so that we can ooze and perpetuate fear. It's like a cancer... you can't just simply cut it out because it's spread everywhere...

Lost-and-found In Thought

Anxiety
you cold flame
I can feel your hands stifling me
the hard clasp struggling to maintain it's hold
to cast upon me the woes of worry
the pains of thoughts I can't hope to even control
I feel the bonds of madness
"I refuse you"
"I shall defeat you"
I deny your hands upon this throat
though you have found me
and as you dwell in my weakness
lingered upon the lesser states
your captions emblazoned upon my sweat
you, who wake me up 2 hours at a time
out of a dead sleep
dizzy and tingled
you don't deserve to rob me of my sanity
the pull and twinge of heart strings
I refuse your offer
the municipality of your palpitations
No...
Stop!
With your heavy-headedness
with your words spewing from my lips
your thought-control
I feel the cloak of your horror-tipped fingers
squeaking down the chalkboard of my last nerve
I refuse to accept thy invitation
to become trapped by fear's voice
to de-evolve myself in your plight
and succumb to this fight or flight
because I will soar
I will rise
and are rising...
I will overcome
I will succeed
I will empower my thoughts
I will infuse them with a positivity so bold
so harsh
so angelic by design
so as to completely overshadow
the tallest building in the Chicago skyline
I can beat this...

The Dis-Chord of Dreamland #1

...soap
quotations
self respect
new shoes
steampunk
celery stocks
opium
butterscotch
peppermint
fig leaf
Robatussion
pot leaf
silicon
decaffeinated
dopamine
dream...

Meanwhile at the debriding agent's office...

""Last chance - romance
forty years well spent
thinking about wherever else I thought we'd be
like burdens to a plan
with a stone in my hand
I'm going to skip it 'cross the water, baby""

""I wake up to see your smiling face
in a sun so bright
that it makes me see
that there's nothing left to say
when I see you glow that way
it must be something in the water, maybe""

""Hideaway streamers
on a lakeside hearse
Ding Dong Douglass
knocked him out in the first
it's a really silly tune,
a quirky little melody
'bout something in the water, baby""

""ripped all the weights
with the clothespin fingers
imagine your face, when you see
that no matter the look
it's something we took
every time we're in the water lately""

""who cares - no chance
judge ya at a first glance
and they'll tell you who else that they think you'd be
like burdens to a plan
with a stone in my hand
I'm going to skip it 'cross the water, baby""

...like an activist on a bus

That wander...
it's glide through a meadow
three inches from the ground,
like demons in heat
those road-weary leather-men
smelling of scorched Earth
and a thinly-vailed lust
which implies a repression of the singular
in a cadence of co-dependency
we've rested those zippers on ruby red slippers
while sipping the proverbial scotch
coffee break
off having some minute of your time
...and he'd say,

"fuck those boys"
"I fuckin' own Illinois"
"I remember when this shit was all forest and farmland..."
"...back when surviving meant a good tilled Earth"

and he starts carrying on
about how the lands been taken away

"by Freddy Mac and Fanny May"
"...and you best speak their names with God's reverence"
"like Pharaohs, you best-believe it"
"what chance do we have..."
"...now that corporations are people"

and he's stammering on
this perfect little ode to derision
Mr. Crazed Ratcheted Eyebrow... a skeptic
coming back from a talk he said
was with a God who "ain't" there:

"lovely conversation with oneself"
"a nice sort of meetin' where we discussed why it's necessary for science..."
"...to not become some superstitious religion"
"afterall, human beings always have to build their pyramids...
"we best make sure it be for the right reasons"

Mystic Holy Moley

You are bathing
in the aspirations of free floating wonder-bliss
regardless of whether you prescribe to The Jesus Manifesto or The Jesus Conspiracy
I have seen
beyond the blue door of their thinly vialed libertarianism
shrouded in it's staunch colors;
crying at the help to restock the tea
like Crisco for coffee; they lube those veins
slick those venomous little side notes; my appendices
you know the kind,

coyly sympathizing, narrowly acute
Splashing down - Sloshed - in the same damn river
for the third weekend straight

or typically the kind muted throughout history.
And to all it's ugly-inferred paraphernalia...
the political institution -to read: asylum
the religious institution -see above
set on the wings of a manifesto so curmudgeonly
that even Hitler's innuendo took the hint...

Villainy - Acoustic Reboot

To listen, follow the link: http://soundcloud.com/antony-mores/villainy

Over the course of the last few years I've written a lot of music that focused on relationships, politics, and inner-turmoil. The last ten years have been fraught with both elation and sorrow, and music is a conduit of health for me. It's a way of being able to say what I otherwise wouldn't be able to through words. The catharsis of writing music and learning how to express the things which words can never fully relate is definitely it's own reward. It's a way of allowing one's self to walk out into the world completely naked, humbly revealed, without having to worry about the double standards of ideologies or the burdens of an intimate context. The music itself supplies it's own in this manner. Every now and then, however, something comes through the grand third eye of musical composition that goes beyond what normally manifests in an average session. It was during one of these (extra-ordinary) sessions where I crafted the song Villainy. A self-imposed walk through some of the things I didn't like about myself and my personality. This song contained things I had both noticed and things that had been brought to my attention over the past decade, and while I'm committed to the betterment of self I also have to be cognizant of the fact that I live in a world that has taught me how to live in a deep state of denial.

The process I use to write is very personal to me, I don't use a big studio with all the refinements (not that there's anything wrong with that). I find that a smaller intimate setting is more akin to my creative process. The same goes for my style of playing, as my guitar is generally tuned to lend itself to the lyrical composition, that is to say, the lyrics are generally the first thought with everything else coming after that. This is where you'll see my style represented by the term "anti-folk" given the attention paid to the vocals and lyrics. The reason I preface this song with a little more insight is that I believe it captures the essence of the sound I wish to strive for every time my finger meet the chords.

So I hope you enjoy this latest effort and feel free to check out my facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/antonymores

A Mayor In Bohemia

You don't always partake of Bohemia by choice... sometimes... just sometimes...

in that same way that sometimes 'crazy' just finds you

life takes a backhand to that area 

at the base of your skull, 

 delivering one of those awkward kicks that makes decision-making more difficult, 

it's a brutal business...

and you face yourself, your PO$$E$ION$, 

what you consider to be your essence, 

and no one deserves to be            the messiah...

Nope, you gotta be martyrs for your own damn causes 

or you're sellouts... every single one of you 

this space for rent

they use poverty like a tool... like a weapon 

aimed at the middle class                            "your money or is your life"

and every day "the system"    grows.    more.    broken.

like a country full of crack-addicted-toddlers 

                               and sometimes... just sometimes

         you have to allow yourself to go broke in order to stop it...       

you have to think: No longer-

                                                   will i feed this machine

                                                                          -will I walk blindly into the belly 
                                of some corporate-cronies-cubist
                                                                           abstract view of "how it all works"
                               like how Gods often necessitate religion, or the reverse even 
   ...and if you thought Zeus was powerful 
               apparently you've not seen the types of mountains a Ben Franklin can move 

   "when he's gotta get it done now"

It's far easier in this system to mobilize for war...

than it is to say, respond to a natural disaster... 

   it's easier to overdose on legal drugs  

       than the bad-evil, illegal ones...
           they started it with sugar in the kool-aid 
and the most disturbing part, 
           is for those of us here, under the star spangled canopy, 
                                                             who are not even making it 
                              at the 14k crime they call a poverty line
                 is that we're more stricken by grief
    at this notion that economic relief... trickles 
                                                            down...
       and they attempt to victimize you with scorn 
to shackle your life with a servitude so hollow
             that the only type of medication
             is some morally imposed preemptive invasion 
of Gods against Gays
   cause masked under the stench of that ideology   
          is a senator with a lifetime pension 
leeching off the system, costing us more money than welfare babies 
                     and health insurance benefits... which never expire
   but they point to the poor as if their abuse were less dire 
                            in this ass-backwards system that asks me to submit 
   I will never relinquish my role
                    as a mayor in Bohemia 
                                           I will fight... and I will die 
                                     to make it so love is not some dollar sign

A Snug Sip Of Joy - That Didn't Quite Fit

 
I remember first being drawn to a girl at the age of 10. I was sitting in my grade school classroom with my third grade musings, feigning attention at the teacher speaking before the bell sounded. It was the first day of school, and I was in my prim and proper, wearing clothes so stiff and shiny new that bending would have been considered a chore when she walked into the room... the flowing blond of her hair was caught in the wind of the shutting door, and I knew something was different. I felt a need to indulge, to ask, to ingratiate myself with her every need.

She was oblivious for the first few weeks, of course. Even when the teacher's assigned seating chart pulled off, what could only be coined, a divine intervention and sat us directly next to each other. Her name was Kim, she liked to chew on her pencils, and when she raised her hand to answer questions she did so with vigor and authority (even at that age, I was drawn to strong women). I did every conceivable thing to garner that girl's attention over the next two weeks, I sang in class, told jokes, acted out (all to the teacher's dismay, I might add)... and in the end it was a playground game of tag, amongst several of us, that inspired our getting to know each other. She was tagged by one of the older boys and skinned her knee on the asphalt. She sat there, examining her bloodied appendage, when I reached my hand out to lift her back up she beamed the widest smile back at me. She took my hand and, very lightly... so as not to rely too much on it, pulled herself up.

For the next 3 days, we were inseparable. We ate together at lunch, I sat with her and all her friends, we worked on our school projects together during class... it was perfect... or it was perfect until the first time we truly held hands. Now it took about three days for me to work up the courage to take her by the hand. That's how things were done back in those days. Holding hands in early grade school was like kissing, it was as intimate as one could be while still remaining under the cloak of adolescent innocence. When I held her hand in mine I noticed something, though. She liked to tuck her last two fingers together so that my ring and pinky fingers were left out on a lurch by themselves with no support. So I readjusted, re-interlaced our fingers, and looked up to see that her eyes had tightly clinched at this maneuvering as she quickly reasserted her original hold.

That was the moment I remember thinking "this wouldn't work" because the way she held hands was different. It was also the moment where my first relationship ended as she had also taken great insult to the fact that I didn't want to hold hands like she did, and that was that. I wasn't all that upset over the ending of the relations. I was more befuddled with how the girl wanted to hold hands. It was a greater metaphor for how people, sometimes, just don't fit. Of course, this was grade school and while our split was mutual, she sounded off on it first, and in those formative years that meant she got the credit for doing it. C'est la vie...

Soundtracking Life

Music happens usually whether we want it to or not... it's like a gift from a higher plain of existence that graces us with it's beauty while keeping much of the muse behind the creative curtain... if we had privy to that sort of information, everyone would be tapping that tree, creating record players with pine needles and putting shame the great composers and songwriters of history. Music is a fluid thing, some of it's best writers have known little about it's theory, however they speak it's rhythms fluently. It's like quantifying spirituality in an emotion or like summing up a vast adventurous dream in one word. It speaks a universal language that is incorporated into every facet of life... like the soundtrack, your soundtrack to existence.

Musical Interludes: In Dream

This is the first preview off the new album (still as of yet untitled), slated currently to hit your local itunes and cdbaby store on May 7th. I wanted to give you all a taste of what's to come with a brand new song that rolled off the press last week entitled, "In Dream"



Antony Mores - "In Dream"

In the coming weeks I'll continue to post new songs and free previews up until the May release, and we'll probably fill it all in with some lovely banter along the way.

You can join me on twitter at
@audasticity
@airscale

or on Facebook at:
facebook.com/antonymores

Musical Interludes: Back Into The World

Here's one off my latest album, 'Seeking The Familiar' along with a bit of artwork to go along with it. Ideally each song will have it's own piece that accompanies the music, but for now just hit the play and enjoy a taste.


Back Into The World


Artwork and lyrics for the Back Into The World are available here.
The song as well as the rest of the album are available on cdbaby.com or antonymores.com

Off The Leash!

It's a rock & roll world for most people. They live fast, play loud, and (in the case of the recent era of the internet) will attempt to draw as much drama and attention to themselves as humanly possible regardless of just how good or negative the story lines are (see: Chris Brown, Rhianna, and modern pop music). The checkout line tabloid prattle now comes to us piped through fiber optic lines at speeds previously unthinkable just twenty years ago. It's hiding in our daily action planners right now, lurking inside our CNN news feeds, and playing tricks on us in hot button subject lines as we check our collective emails each day. At one point it happened, though and we hit the supermarket saturation point for tabloid content... and now you don't have to pay for a copy of who has 'the best and worst bikini bodies' or find out 'what celebrity is on the rocks this week.' Now those types of thought-provoking articles can come to us courtesy of free access email or a simple net browser... whether we want them to or not.

Overall this makes the creative marketplace fall prey to something it has been in danger of succumbing to since the advent of talkies; complete irrelevancy. Simply put, we've got more people on this planet than at any point in it's history... or as a roommate I once had use to put it... "you know the babes of those babes who are having babes of their own... (nods approvingly)... well those babes are having babes now." There's more people, and each one of those people has a corporate decimal point attached to them in terms of potential revenue. It's the ultimate irony that when you consider, as people, we have unlimited potential in terms of how we fill our lives with meaning and sustenance. This is an industry that's aim has been creating your needs and then fulfilling your wants based on those needs. It's all about what they're selling:

*you can't be beautiful if you don't have this...
*You need this product to be happy...
*This product will enable someone to accept for who you really are....
*Having this product will change your life...
*Using this product will help attract that perfect match...

It seems everything that they're selling you makes no mention about one glaring fact... that you, yourself cannot possibly overcome all these problems and issues alone. This creates a marketplace based on being better and more perfect in areas of aesthetics than it does fostering a place of inspired inner nourishment. We're ushering in a society of co-dependent offspring who more adept at creating an online persona than actually representing themselves with the sort of integrity. The culture inherently makes people less self reliant and more prone to going back again and again to their 'products.' An alarming amount is currently being directed at children. Like a pusher on a schoolyard playground, preying on the defenseless before they know any better. Speaking as a parent who's child's eyes go wide whenever the golden arches come in to view, when you start putting limits on your child's happiness based on a product or a brand, you're feeding the cycle.

It's not all bad, of course. There's plenty of positives to be found by a budding global-user-controlled marketplace. The ability to share globally self created content is at levels never before witnessed in the span of human history. This leads to a saturation of the market, meaning people have more options, more choices, and a more diverse marketplace with which to feast on a never-ending palette of potential. An artist dabbling in any sort of creative avenue can share it instantly with the world... if the world so chooses to tune in. Music went from being a dominated corporate fixture in the 90's to being all but non-existent in this new era. The corporations have had to branch out, with many labels now owning billboards, venues, and smaller record labels which they can give more of an 'indie' presence to... another brush of the market's brush in attempting to craft a product.

The internet has brought us all sorts of new categorically challenged celebrities, but it's also brought us a host of other options for being able to detach ourselves from the all the extracurricular hype. The marketplace use to be dominated by corporate selections, and if you were wanting current or modern music your choices were a lot of similar sounding bands unless you were brave enough to step into the world music genre... which is ironically where I found such names as Ani DiFranco and Keller Williams roughly in 1993. The landscape of music now is unprecedented, with limitless options and places to track down something new and unheard of to tap your foot to... and it's growing by the day.

So while the industry does as the industry has always done, we the people have to realize that the industry shapes itself around us. It may do so by trying to bend and shape us in it's own image, but the simple bottom line never changes... without people there is no industry. You can't round people off as decimal points, when in fact there is no one supporting your product. The internet has brought a quick turnaround time in terms of public opinion, and almost more importantly, the public's perception of that opinion. The way things currently sit, we're still learning to walk through our infancy. Now we've got mass protests in almost every major city being organized online in grassroots style campaigns, and likewise pro-corporate lobbyists in Washington are able to utilize the same tools.

In the end, though it comes down to people and not buying power and interest rates that make up the grand design of artistic expression. The ideas will be there long after the money stops flowing, besides you can't really have a sustainable corporate monopoly on the act of human expression. You can't charge for the air you breathe so long as they can tax you for the land under your feet. The lesson from life I've learned the most is that regardless of how things end up, it's the journey that truly matters the most. Looking at the journey inspired by the corporations, the end point is the bottom line... which is what matters to them. Do the ends justify the means, it's up to the individual to make that choice, not any corporate entity. In the past we often had to cater to them. Now, though it's a different world. We have more choices, more people, and more options... and thus more content without having to subject ourselves to the homogenized or sterilized environment of having to pick from the same bands with the same sounds. We've cut the leash on their creative control, and as evidenced by the current marketplace, we've taken off running.

The Intro - Pretense With Gushings

Do you really need to have a mission statement or an intro letter? A Holly Golightly sashay in front of the big window of Tiffany's? Do we need to have a point given to us? Do I have to put chalk to blackboard and designate a side for the reviews and a side for the analytical rantings. No, ideally it would be nice to have translucent emotional messages where magically everyone could share the same thought and each relate to it in their own way instantly. The next best thing to that would be music, however. It is the banner under which we congregate. It is the special sauce which we splash across, what would otherwise be, the plain toppings of existence. When we color the pages of our lives, we do so with the misty-water-colored-melodies that inspire us.

Music isn't just some trivial matter, it's defining. It's comfort can hold you in a warm place when you're cold. It can make the most daunting of tasks seem a little more tolerable. You have a personal relationship with the people playing through your ipod. You get to know them on a personal level as they supply the accompaniment of life. Every album is like a birth and a death, every song a child shared for better or for worse (because you're not expected to like everything). You hit that open road at the start of a long journey and what do you reach for, the music. It's a language operating entirely on instinct. It's completely self-contained within it's own words with each syllable caressing the tone of a melody. It's entirely freeing and universal to the soul as breathing is to the body.

Our musical tastes define us, they make up a crucial piece of our personalities. They're our anthems, our movements, our phases. Those musical appreciations are the all encompassing, all knowing, height of our personal identity. To exist in one moment with the right piece of musical undertone encapsulating everything with it's own brand of tenor and tenacity. There's no description for it. No amount of gushing or romanticizing about it will do it any sort of justice. It's felt from the heart and exhibited out every cell in the human design. For those folks who are like me in terms of music and it's ability to deliver the life's blood, the everlasting sustenance... this is for you.