Martial Mashup Artistry

Here's a recent release from DJ Earworm, a mashup artist whom I really admire.

Before you watch it, a confession: as a quasi-amateur musician, I'll admit that most popular music makes my stomach retch, given the relative unoriginality and low level of technical prowess of the writing, performance, and overall message.....however, I still find Earworm's craft to be fascinating.

Some background: DJ Earworm (aka Jordan Roseman) is a San Francisco based artist who has grown to Internet fame through "mashups", a form of remixing which is essentially a cut/paste job on several songs to blend them into a new version.  It's possible because most popular music is constructed with similar mechanics and can be taken apart and reassembled, like audio Legos.  DJs do versions of this all the time, often by mixing 2-3 songs together for dance mixes and/or workout music.

Earworm is no typical DJ though.  He displays a mastery yet to be matched....even by other prominent mashup artists.

Since 2007, DJ Earworm has created a mix with the Top 25 Billboard songs from each year, synthesizing elements of all 25 songs into a single mashup that has its own sense of lyrical melody (and a different overall meaning from the original works), with accompanying clips from the music videos so you can see his work.  While I feel that the Billboard Top 25 doesn't necessarily have much high-quality material to work with, Earworm is a genius at weaving it all into an interesting musical tapestry that I wouldn't mind working out to.  His 2008 mashup is my personal favorite, followed closely by this 2010 mix.  (I also confess that I've rocked out to this in my car at least twice, thanks to the free MP3 download on his website.)

Listeners can enjoy it on multiple levels.  Casual listeners may be able to enjoy hearing the catchy, familiar beats because it's like hearing several songs at once (because it is).  Serious listeners can appreciate Earworm's technique (his formal training includes degrees in music and computer science) in the way that he painstakingly shifts pitches and matches tempo in order to smoothly fit everything together as he layers his music.  Earworm is no joke - he wrote the book on how to do mashups.....here's his table of contents.

He even manages to fit in some commentary about the overall theme and feel of the music that we gravitate towards each year, briefly connecting it with a general societal mood that reflects the times that we live in:

In 2010, pop has gone into serious all-out party mode. In 2009 the music was encouraging us to pick ourselves back up after being knocked down again, and to rock out to some great dance music while your at it. This year’s music tells us to keep going now that we’re up and having fun. In fact, the fun seems to be in such overdrive that it borders on recklessness. Usher urges us to "dance like it’s the last night of your life”, and Katy Perry wants us to “run away and don’t ever look back”. 

I've written about Earworm a couple of times in my UBBT blogs, but my reason for doing so hasn't been to talk about his music, as much as it has been about the way he performs his craft, and the way we perform ours.  You see, there are plenty of DJs who don't have a clue about music, mixing mediocre beats that play in thousands of nightclubs, simply by randomly cutting/pasting music without purpose, without meaning, often allowing their DJ software to do the work for them while they stand behind a mixing board and pretend to look cool spinning their iPod.

And as you begin to expose yourself to the many wonders and projects of the UBBT, you must also make a decision as to how seriously you want to pursue your craft.  You can glance at the work, infuse it into your school in a haphazard way, without knowing much, and wonder why the results are mediocre even though the idea is so well-executed elsewhere.

Or, like Earworm....you train yourself to become a master in the fields that you share with the world, and infuse your product (your teachings, your life) with the kind of masterful artistry that only you can create.

Choose well, and take action in the direction of your dreams, my friends.


P.S.  Hope all of you are healthy, happy, and living well.  The holidays have tied me up, but I have some great material in the works to share with you all!  I'll be in touch again soon.  Until then, have a Happy New Year! 

Putting Your Makeup Away Is Self-Defense

 
Ladies, do yourselves a favor and reduce your usage of cosmetics by 80% or more next year.  Help break the cycle and encourage other women to do the same.  Men, you can help too.

Consider for a moment:

Many women today began using cosmetics at a very young age.  They are taught from a very young age - through other women, TV, magazines, books, friends, family - that it somehow takes many steps to make your skin look 'normal' and/or 'beautiful'.  Part of the modern socialization process even includes 'reality shows' where everyone laughs and/or makes catty remarks at the 'ugly girl' for not doing her makeup right, until a professional comes in and remakes her image with cosmetics.

It's a form of manufactured demand, and it keeps makeup companies in business: convince young girls to coat their skin with excessive amounts of chemicals and by the time they're thirty, their skin will be so damaged that they'll feel like they have no choice but to cover up the blemishes.... and the more damage you've done, the more products will be necessary to make this possible so you can look "beautiful" again.

Ladies (and some of you guys out there):  every time you use makeup, your choices reinforce this industry.  You've become a passive salesperson for them.  Not only that, but it further reinforces a shallow, skin-deep view of beauty through our inconsistency.  We teach our daughters that their true beauty comes from within, but then teach them how to advertise the sight of their face and body first in order to attract attention, as if their character won't be noticed if the sight of them isn't immediately found desirable to the men around them.  (Watch Katie Makkai's "Pretty".)

Here's how you fight it:  start with the simple stuff.  You don't have to fight the industry - just manage from within.  Still, you can watch The Story of Cosmetics....great video.

Teach your daughters to look in the mirror and smile.

Teach them to communicate by looking a person in the eyes....and how to speak with their eyes.

If they want their face to glow, teach them to splash their face with cool water.  You'll never need blush again.

If a special occasion warrants a little extra dressing up, teach them how to get the most effect with the least product.

But then give them confidence - strength of character that is born through acquiring knowledge and sharing kindness thoughtfully with the world.  Compliment them on those qualities 10 times more often than you compliment their physical appearance.

Teach them how to bring forth their true radiance from within.

Thirteen Masters of Pain

I was searching for a quote to insert into my blog entry, which led to multiple other readings, and eventually I found myself learning through my searching far more than I was writing, so for this entry, instead of writing, I'd like to share some of the wisdom of thirteen masters of pain, an abbreviated tour, in the spirit of my own online searching:


"Pain is temporary.  It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place.  If I quit, however, it lasts forever." ~Lance Armstrong

"Boxing is about being hit more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain... more than it is about winning." ~Joyce Carol Oates

"Illness is the doctor to which we pay most heed; to kindness and knowledge, we make promises only; to pain, we obey." ~Marcel Proust 

"I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage." ~Friedrich Nietzsche 

"Waiting is painful.  Forgetting is painful.  But not knowing which to do is the worse kind of suffering." ~Paulo Coelho


"The smallest pain in our little finger gives us more concern than the destruction of millions of our fellow beings." ~William Hazlitt


"We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain or regret.  The difference is discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons." ~Jim Rohn

"There are only three events in a man's life: birth, life, and death; he is not conscious when being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live." ~Jean de la Bruyere 


"Pain is no evil unless it conquers us." ~George Eliot


"Today, I choose life.  Every morning when I wake up, I can choose joy, happiness, negativity, pain... to feel the freedom that comes from being able to continue to make mistakes and choices - today I choose to feel life, not to deny my humanity, but embrace it." ~Kevyn Aucoin

"We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey." ~Kenji Miyazawa 


"Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding." ~Kahlil Gibran


"When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy." ~Salman Rushdie

The quotes are not as important as the message that you draw from them. 

So what did you hear with your eyes? :)

Hard Work... Is Hard.

The thing about a hero is: even when it doesn't look like

there's a light at the end of the tunnel, he's going to keep digging,

going to keep trying to do right and make up for 

what's gone on before, just because that's who he is.

~Joss Whedon

To find any measure of lasting success or change, you will have to change your definition of "hard".

You're also going to have to adjust your attitude about hard work.

This change must happen regardless of where you live, how much you make, how bad the economy is, who's standing in your way, what's preventing you from succeeding, or any other excuse for failure.

For the vast majority of us, our lives, our jobs, our family situations, our circumstances - are not hard.  Our frustration makes it hard, perhaps our lack of knowledge or experience too.

Of course, getting the knowledge and experience to avoid that kind of frustration is going to have to come from - you guessed it - working hard.

I'm In Love With A Black Belt

I met my girlfriend, Jenn, 20 years ago while we were both training under KJN Ed Fong.

Let me rephrase that briefly.

I stumbled across the love of my life through a training accident while in the middle of a sparring class.  Stumbled, as in I walked into a brilliantly-timed side kick that knocked me back across the room and cracked a rib that's still sensitive even to this day.  It gave us a brief conversation, an "Are you okay?" moment, an icebreaker that I wouldn't have been able to manage otherwise because I was far too shy at the time.

From a certain point of view, it began because she left an impression on my heart that's never left me.

Our relationship was born amidst a lifestyle of learning to live and share the Martial Way.  As we grew together and it began to manifest in our lives, it also served to show me many of the things that I love most about her.  That's not because the training painted her into the person that she is, but because her heart has always been those colors.  The process of training simply helped two shy teenagers find the means to express the beauty of our souls and the insight to recognize it for what it is.

Through training, we've found our voice in the ways that we choose to serve the world.  It shows in different ways, and we don't always work on the same projects, but our support always shows through a deep mutual respect for the things that we choose to involve ourselves with.  That includes each other.

Our training in the arts dramatically enhanced the key lessons of the life training that we received from our families, transforming parental advice into a sense of purpose: make your life a constant process of personal evolution, striving to do whatever it takes in pursuit of what matters most.

We've also shown each other how we respond to challenges and problems.  Over two decades, we have both supported each other through numerous transitions: academic, professional, personal, family, political, philosophical, and far more.  Sometimes those things came packaged together with large quantities of confusion, frustrations, setbacks, and more - but we don't quit anything, especially us.

Our lives are not without challenge.  On the contrary, our lives test us severely at times, perhaps because, as author Paulo Coelho suggests, when you pursue your dreams as we do, life must test you in order to measure your readiness to realize those dreams.

Or perhaps, as our teachers in the arts have taught us: because living an authentic life is the test.

It is difficult to capture twenty years of this in a simple blog entry, but I hope that's a fair enough glimpse to connect you to what I'm getting at.  If you need to understand more, watch my life through a martial arts lens, a warrior's eyes - and beneath the surface of my actions and thoughts, in the place where I keep my innermost self, guarded within a deep reservoir of feeling, you will meet her, just as when you watch hers, you will find me.

I'm not saying this because I want you to begin dating out of your dojo - that's not the point.

I'm saying this because if you train to become the kind of person for somebody else that Jenn is to me (and never stop trying to improve that), then a life filled with love, laughter, friendship, and success isn't very hard to have....because when you bring light into another's life, they will light up yours.