More than ever, we are being taught to believe that being current, up-to-date, and “in the know” is of supreme importance. In this age, information is being solicited from every angle, and its acquisition has become a necessity, replacing food and shelter (which have become, in a sense, automatic and indulged without gratitude). By having this content on tap via the internet and other media outlets, we convince ourselves that this stream of knowledge is paramount to enhancing our lives. It is the gas that fuels conversations among friends, and it is on its way to replacing our brains rather than supplementing them. History has become irrelevant at this stage. Keeping up with the latest news while constantly updating our profiles, blogs, and consumer interests has become a full-time job in and of itself. What then is the point in going to school? Everything we learn will be out-dated by the time we graduate. There is no hoop more important for us to jump through than the current one. Learning from the past ideas and actions of other people and cultures is virtually useless and has no place among the other information competing for our attention. And so long as we keep ourselves busy with these never-ending endeavors, we can be sure that we’ll never have to question why any of this really matters.

Illustration by Mary Rose.

Our entire social system is constructed around the false notion that a high-paying job with benefits leads to a secure and beneficial life. In a country where most of the population survives on paychecks and commoditized goods, it is no longer necessary to live off the land or to have personal connections with suppliers of the goods that we purchase. Our jobs are integrated into a system built upon paper money (or imaginary funds) and false security, and thus most of our relationships are economic in nature. We come into contact with people at work and at stores. These relationships need only operate on the level of costs-benefits and the exchange of work for pay or pay for products. Aside from these relationships, we may have other encounters, but these quite often revolve around entertainment and the media. We make connections by discussing popular films, music, news, sports, or other information created and filtered by major corporations, which stand at the top of the economic food chain amused as they watch us chase our tails.

“Just getting by” is no longer acceptable. Comforts and entertainment must now constantly be at our fingertips, and these temporal pleasures must be continuously updated and marketed in new, eye-catching packages. All of these “things” that we purchase now progressively define us. Everything we own becomes an indicator, in part, of our personality, which we have invested into our wardrobes, our DVD & CD collections, our furniture, our modes of transportation, as well as our circle of friends. In this kind of environment, it becomes increasingly difficult to engage in authentic discussions about what really matters in life. Everything, including our values, has already been preprogrammed into us by a society focused on fashion, entertainment, comfort, and the idea that we need to possess a constant flow of cash to keep all these items up-to-date and accessible.

Being original now means merely finding your own “unique” place within this preconceived social structure. Don’t get me wrong; there are nearly endless possibilities when it comes to choosing your personality framework. It’s just that, like most pop songs, nearly all of these personality frameworks follow the same conventional pattern as their contemporaries. Each one values material goods. The range and type of these goods differ based on what niche you find best suits you––the individual interpreter of success.

It is this illusion of freedom that so significantly deludes our perceptions on reality. Values become vague abstractions that we can hit with a slingshot from 10 miles away with our eyes closed. You say you care about the environment? Buy green. You say you’re concerned about the poor people in Africa? Write them a check. Money is seen as the answer to any conceivable problem. Therefore if everyone had a decent job and enough money to live on, then the world would be a place of total peace and harmony, right? That’s what people fight wars over, isn’t it? The resources that fuel economies?

There is no longer any romantic rescuing of damsels in distress. In this age, we are all damsels in distress. We all have mouths to feed, pockets to fill, toys to buy, minds to entertain, and pleasures to indulge. And, as marketers have discovered, our appetites are insatiable. So, there will never be an end to this cycle. We live educated by a system which has, by-and-large, funneled us into accepting a cycle of spending and saving up for “the good life” that retirement claims to offer us. Our heaven on earth. And all the while, we live…or it at least appears that we are living. And, as these ever-shortening lives unwind, we expect that somewhere along the way, we will be satisfied. Really? Is this what our lives will amount to? When did money replace relationships as the source of value in human life?

These days, people marry left and right and divorce at nearly the same rate. There is no longer a fabric of compassion and love that unites people in a common struggle to live meaningful lives. At best, we find camaraderie in the quest for common interests limited to video games, amusement parks, sports teams, fashion accessories, and the rapidly dying dream of a happy family. Within this doomed cycle, the most we get from religion is a spin on pop trends and self-help advice laced with words about God and vague concepts like love, joy, and peace. Preachers talk about a new life that transforms our thinking and places emphasis on eternal things rather than temporal things––on the things of God, not the things of earth. But I don’t see this transformation taking place among the churches I’ve visited. All I see are bumper-stickers and other “Christian” merchandise worn by Bible-toting “believers” who do not even faintly resemble the Jesus they claim as their Savior.

Screenshot from Average Life of a Modern Lemming

After a very long development period, myself and the rest of the An Umbrella team are excited to bring you our latest exhibit. Head over to www.AnUmbrella.com and click The Glistening Mundane to take a look. Recordings for An Umbrella are still on our mixing to-do list, behind the Make-Believe Machines and Grimfeather albums, which are both close to being completed. For now, we’ll continue to build animated exhibits at the Web site to work in conjunction with the songs that have been written for the An Umbrella album.

Screenshot from the front cover of the coloring book.

Before publishing the strenuously-crafted vocal songs we have in progress, we thought it would be nice to release three of the instrumental songs we produced last year. You can now listen to them sans animation at the An Umbrella PureVolume site.

Screenshot from Average Life of a Modern Lemming.

As summer comes to an end, I’ve been looking back on the massive amount of work that’s been accomplished. This summer has certainly been a musical workfest for me, and I’m very excited about finishing the mixing up on the three projects I’ve been working on. First of all, in June Erik and Rob Ogden went into the recording studio to record about 50 minutes of music for the first full-length Grimfeather album. There’s still a lot to do on that project – recording my bass and keyboard parts, and recording Erik’s vocals – but to have that step forward was nice. Next, Rob and I composed 40 minutes worth of orchestral music for a new project called Make-Believe Machines. We’ve got ten minutes left to create before the album’s complete. We hope to share some of that material with you soon! Then, last week, Rob and I went back into the studio and he recorded drums for about 30 minutes worth of An Umbrella material – totally re-recorded versions of “Vegas Anesthetic Peddler,” “Three-Pronged Fork”, and “Glacier Park”. On top of that, a great artist named Mary Rose completed the first phase of her work on a new piece of interactive artwork for the An Umbrella Web site. In other summer news, I also did a lot of writing and animation work for the first six episodes of a new online comedy series. Yes, we’ve been busy, but our hope that we’ll be able to share this stuff with you all during the latter part of this year. Until then, have a wonderful fall season! I suspect you’ll be hearing from us again shortly!

The familiar image of Joe Richards’ headphone mixer.

We finally have something new on the An Umbrella front, which is a new animation called If It’s Pretty, Don’t Fix It. You can check that out by going to www.AnUmbrella.com and clicking “Mark My Words”.

Screenshot from If It’s Pretty, Don’t Fix It.

With the new year comes new music. Take a listen to our remix of composer Clint Mansell’s piece “Stay With Me” from The Fountain soundtrack by downloading the Rogdale Hogmuffin MP3.

After about a year and a half of keeping a barely functional MySpace page for the sake of informing friends on upcoming projects, I finally decided that MySpace was a terrible environment for this sort of thing. Regardless of my non-participation in many of the wretched goings-on, I decided to do away with my page, and I left an essay as explanation here. Three others deleted their pages as well, one of which was my girlfriend and fellow Grimfeather musician, Savanna Blazina. Her take on MySpace can be found here, and is well worth reading.

An excerpt from mine:

If anyone out there is actually reading this incredibly rare blog from me, hello to you, friends. For quite some time I’ve struggled with using MySpace, it being mainly used as a place to build giant, self-glorifying monuments to people’s bodies and mindless conversations. From the beginning, I decided I would only use it to promote my work and not my personal life, but at this point, I’ve decided the whole thing needs to go, for reasons that the mass-abuse of this system has driven it into a weighty corruption, though I doubt the intentions of its creators were such. After witnessing, but not partaking in, the giant load of pointless comments left on people’s pages, the self-serious photos and blog-banterings, and the public cries for attention through supposed emotional strain, I’m finally through with even my small share of this Web site. I don’t really want to have people seeing links to my art projects on the very same page as a bunch of potentially lust-inducing ads, nor do I want people to be inclined to judge me based on my “friend count” or popularity ranking. I’m not claiming to be the moral captain of right and wrong, but I have some very strong convictions that I feel I need to apply, and I thought I’d share them with you, in case anyone cares, because, in that case, it may be helpful. I also think in this environment, where these issues generally seem to go ignored without question, it might be wise to at least examine the potential negative effects that can emerge from this mess.

Aside from all the factors I just mentioned, I also wrote an essay awhile ago, critcizing MySpace from the point of being a Web site designer for ten years. It is called ‘The Tragic Cost of Convenience,’ and it’s posted at the link below, since MySpace strips any blog writings of quotation marks. It’s somewhat formally written, but I’ve figured there’s a chance you might not think I’m a giant bastard and understand me (even if you don’t entirely agree with me). I feel that I’ve made some mistakes in the past, but that I’ve learned from them, and more importantly, acted upon them. I’m certainly not where I want to be yet, but I’m trying, and the essay is simply a reflection on what I’ve learned so far. That said, I argued my point without backing down very much, so it could come off as a bit harsh – it’s honestly not meant to be, but I felt that it shouldn’t be softened for the sake of not offending people. Anyway, this MySpace page is most likely going to be down in a week, for those reasons. Not that it’s any tragedy, but I thought I might notify anyone who exclusively contacts me through this MySpace page, so they can write down my e-mail address. So, if anyone wants to get ahold of me, I’d suggest sending me an e-mail at my An Umbrella address.

The essay: The Tragic Cost of Convenience

My brother Wesley and I are hard at work this week, hoping to accomplish major progress on a few different projects, including a second video based on a Robyn Miller composition, although this time, drawing from the original Myst soundtrack, rather than Riven, as in Persistent Disparate Interchange. Aside from that, we are finishing up work on the Tracing the Seams Web site, which is a repository of Wesley’s writings and photography. Alongside those two projects, we are both heavily involved in the An Umbrella project, and have been doing a great deal of work in preparation for upcoming content, as an expansion of the current animation/composition, Average Life of a Modern Lemming. Meanwhile, Erik Brown is nearly finished with work on another new song, making for two new musical works since the tour, which the rest of the band will hopefully be writing to shortly. We expect that at least one of these projects will reach completion next week.

Screenshot from Average Life of a Modern Lemming.

Time to polish your self-produced chains. The animation I had mentioned in my June 29th news post has now been linked as a two-minute preview of the upcoming musical/visual project called An Umbrella that I’m involved in. You can view it now at www.AnUmbrella.com. 

Screenshot from Average Life of a Modern Lemming.