Category Archives: African Music

African Music

Happy Music- Harry Belafonte

for the first time in my Life
I’m SERIOUSLY digging
Jump in the Line by Harry Belafonte.
I mean, it somehow reminds me SO MUCH of some
very Dance-Happy West African Music… the kind that MAKES you move when you hear it…
WHAT IS this, I do Wonder….
(and why don’t more white people feel moved as I…)

I have been hearing this song over and over for 20 minutes, and I bet tomorrow I will here it for 4 or 5 hours.

it is true, that underneath community, connection, family, and love,
there is self, and self joy, and self love.
without enjoying to the hilt, things such as a song and dance like this one,
there isn’t much TO share with others.
joy joy joy!!!

I love rehearsing and playing Meine Music

I love rehearsing and playing music I like/love. but never in the “let’s get it over with” way; ALWAYS in the “we love this there isn’t anything we’d WANT to do!”-way!
(I really don’t understand musicians who don’t feel that way, but, lucky me.)

The Hurt Locker, 1

the ideas in this post need clearer explanation. I’ll get to that some time.

A post about the film THE HURT LOCKER.
SPOILER ALERT! DON’T READ THIS till you SEE IT!!
seriously!




ready? ok.

the first time I saw the end, when he goes back… I felt what I imagine was intended, kinda shock and horror at how a man could become addicted to the adrenaline rush that they feel in a war.

but every time since,

I have felt, shall we say, something else.

as he is walking in slow motion, and then it jump cuts to him in the suit… with that super loud THRASH music…

I feel who is anyone to judge anyone for what is best for them in life…

there are things about life that I love very much (not war, no.)
sometimes, as in the case of The Dude from The Big Lebowski….
sometimes there’s a man… and… he’s the man, for his time and place.

ADHD is not “addiction, for one.
I am not addicted to war, no.
but there are things that I find “highly stimulating.”
fortunately, for me, they are mostly music, not some ‘foreign substance, i.e, a drug” that I put in my system.

nobody can tell me, nor indeed anyone,
that they shouldn’t be this way, that they shouldn’t get “what they need”, in “their” amount and in a way of “their” choosing. (albeit, if it’s really drugs we are talking about, and I’m not sure it is…. it might or might not change the equation.

I mean, is adrenaline a drug?

is developing tolerance for things, adrenaline included, bad?

who’s to say?
(this is why a film wins best picture, in ambiguities like these.)

certainly not “normal people.” anymore than someone different is to say that “normal people” are doing it wrong. though, we may often think so, I certainly do.

All I am saying is that when I see Sgt. James walking in Iraq, in slow motion at the end of the film…. in the suit….

having nothing to do with America, or War or anything… Edmund, I didn’t take any pro or anti-us stuff from the film, was on a different level for me, as you can see)

I felt empowered. very very VERY MUCH.

to this day, I get a BIG rush in that last scene (see above… it’s High Stimulation.)

not because of war. I was against our invasion or Iraq.

because sometimes people need to do what’s right for THEM, regardless of how it might appear to others.

this is why a film wins best picture. because of ambiguities like these.

In High Stimulation we trust.

p.s. this is all about MUSIC, and MY FEELING that people have often not been in sync with, not understood, my tastes, and the comparatively extreme nature of my musical tastes, to others’.

I love Wagner, West African Drumming of various kinds, Minimalism by Steve Reich and Philip Glass, James Brown, Jazz, and many other things too.

sometimes I like to hear the same thing over and over for hours.
sometimes I hear the same thing over and over in MY HEAD, automatically, for hours.
sometimes I love playing music for hours…. sometimes I like doing it until I’m dead tired and can’t drive home (but have to anyway… coffee…)

High Stimulation Music is life. for me.

so again, this post was not about war… it was about me, and music, which somehow, I saw in the last scene of the Hurt Locker.

(Incidentally, there are Tritones in the chords of this music…. pimp)

repetitive stress injuries and left hand cramps

on and off pain radiating down my left hand’s fingers, as well as higher up, (along them tendon thingys that connect to the fingers), and on the BUMP on the left side of the left wrists…. must be connected to somethin higher up the chain, in my left arm…
perhaps I be playin two sixteenths followed by an 8th rest TOO aggressively… or just have bad posture when I sit IN BED indian style at a laptop for HOURS….
feels a tad like a CRAMP,, and for years, my solution has usually been to BASH the back (not the front,) of said hand against a hard surface… for some reason, the pain of the impact of that “distracts” me from the pain of this (neither are all that noticeable…)
but, these things happen.