Fair warning:

This post is going to be a little bit weird–maybe a lot weird–depending on your perspective. I promise, that this really is useful to me, which is why I’m sharing it. Of course, it may, or may not be useful to you. Please take whatever you find useful and leave the rest.

Monsters???

Here’s the idea:

The most important thing about monsters

Here’s the key

Approaching my monsters

Thanking Your Monsters

So in my last post, which now feels like ages ago, I mentioned that I was going to be creating a gigantic projection design for Holst’s suite The Planets, to be performed with The Portsmouth Symphony Orchestra.

It had been my intention to blog about the creative process as I was creating the piece. As you may have determined by now, that didn’t happen. Instead, I ended up putting virtually every free moment I had into creating the projections. It was worth it.

The performance was really extraordinary, and received an extended standing ovation with the conductor being called back for additional bows three times.

More importantly, the audience was truly engaged by the combination of music and imagery. I was able to talk to a number of members of the audience after the show, and was really blown away by the response.

At some point, I will have some extended excerpts from the piece to share with you, I am dealing with some technical issues about how to convert them into a format that I can upload.

What I do have, that I can share with you now, is the trailer that I created as a preview for the orchestra’s website.

I’d also like to share with you my program notes, which I think will give you some idea of my thought process and creative process.

Creating imagery for “The Planets” is a daunting task for a projection designer. Holst’s amazing music was written about the astrological planets, that is to say, the significance that the planets have in classical astrology. In Holst’s time, the beauty of the astronomical planets
(the actual objects in space) was just beginning to be discovered through powerful telescopes, and was not widely known.

Today, we are fortunate to have an amazing and almost endless catalogue of images of the universe. Images, from ground-based telescopes  and spacecraft such as Hubble and the Mars Rovers provide an incredible wealth of scientific knowledge and also of visual texture and beauty. It is in this second capacity, as artistic images, that I draw on them for this piece. I also draw heavily on the 3-D space visualizations which it is possible to create using modern computers and the amazing DigitalSky 2 software. This software was created here in New Hampshire by Sky-Skan, and is used in
planetariums all over the world.

Each movement begins with imagery of the planet that it is named for, from there we go wherever the music and the visual rhythm of the
imagery lead. In some movements we explore the planet and its moons, in others we fly to the very edge of the visible universe. I’ve made a choice not to be bound by the science of what these objects are, but simply to allow the music to lead my eye wherever in the universe it is drawn. So I invite you to approach experiencing this
piece as I do, as a feast for the ears and the eyes, and let your heart take flight.

I’ll have another post going up on Thursday where I’ll talk about some of the technology behind the show.

And by the way,  I’d love to bring The Planets to a performance hall near you!  If you know of a local performance of The Planets that might be interested in projections, please let me know!

A couple of weeks ago I spend 4 days in a local elementary school with an inflatable planetarium.  I did shows during the day for all of the classes in the school (20 shows in all) and then did brief, 12 minute public shows in the evenings(18 of those).  In all, 600+ people saw a show in the dome.

After a couple of the public shows, I gave the audiences a peek behind the scenes. Here's my Mac desktop on the dome, warped by the mirror.

I have to say, I had an amazingly good time – the teachers and students were wonderful – and the kids had amazing questions.  But I’ll talk about that another time…  What I want to talk about today is the geeky end of the whole thing – and how it’s possible to set up a portable, inflatable digital planetarium.

The Dome

The dome, made by Go-Dome, is inflated much like a bounce house at a fair, except that it has no floor – it just sits on the floor of the room it is set up in.  You roll it out on the floor and it inflates in a couple of minutes.  The kids (and adults) really enjoy squeezing through the airlock to get inside.

The dome set up and ready for an audience.

The Projection and the Mirror

The projection technology I used is very cool.  It was originally developed by Paul Bourke, an Australian academic who works on 3d, dome projection and related ideas. The problem with digital projection in domes traditionally is that it either requires many projectors, blended together, or a very very expensive custom fisheye lens.  Paul realized that a single projector aimed at a 1/2 hemisphere mirror would cover almost the entire dome.  He then figured out the warping process that’s necessary to pre-distort the images to be projected, so when the are distorted by the curvature of the mirror, they come out right on the dome.   If you’d like to know more about this process in detail, check out Paul’s pages on spherical mirror dome projection.

I used a commercial implementation of Paul’s technology from Discovery Dome.  It encloses the  (fragile) mirror in a case which opens up.  The projector goes under the mirror facing forward, the light bounces off a flat mirror, and then off the spherical mirror on to the dome.  This keeps the projector out of the way….

Here's a look at the back of the dome - the funny looking thing towards the upper right is the spherical mirror setup. I'm to the right behind the computers.

The Computers

All of the images were generated from my MacbookPro, and I used a Macbook for control of certain things on the projection computer – more on that later.

The software I ran is an open source project called Nightshade, which is a fork of Stellarium specifically for use in domes.  By using a combination of live keyboard commands in Nightshade and running scripts written in Nightshades scripting language that I wrote, I had a very powerful and flexible planetarium that I could use interactively to take the shows where ever the kids questions lead.

That interactivity is where the 2nd computer came in – running scripts in Nightshade requires going several levels deep in a menu and taking more time the I wanted.  That is for all the scripts except the demo which runs from a keyboard shortcut.  So I wrote a shell script to give me a menu of my scripts and rename whichever one I wanted to run “demo.sts.” so I could run it with the hotkey.

The only problem is that when Nighshade is running, it takes over the displays completely – no way to have a terminal open to run my script in.  So I brought the Macbook – I used it to SSH into the Nightshade computer and run my shell script.  So I used the Macbook to select scripts, and the MacbookPro right in Nightshade to do everything else.

It’s kind of a hack, but it worked great.

Try it yourself

By the way – If I’ve gotten you interested in trying to do something like this on your own, you can home build your own planetarium.  I particularly like the instructions on the Microsoft WorldWide Telescope site. You can use this with Nightshade, or with the MS WorldWide Telescope – which I highly recommend.  In fact I would have used it in my shows if I had known about it at the time – it’s not a replacement for Nightshade (in my view) but a great compliment to it, and an amazing piece of work.  Lots of fun on your desktop to – you don’t need to run it in a planetarium.

Here I am in front of the dome at the end of a long day of shows.

On to the Planets

Now I’m moving on to another astronomically related projection project – I’m creating giant projections that will accompany the Portsmouth Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Holst’s suite The Planets.  The Performance will be on June 6th at The Music Hall in Portsmouth, NH.  I’m going to be blogging about my design process along the way, so keep an eye out for that, coming up soon.

Planetariums are magical places for many of us – I’d love to hear stories about your first or most memorable planetarium visit in the comments!

A couple of years ago, I was fortunate to be invited to do a massive projection design for The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace when it was performed by The Community Church of Durham.

This is a massive choral work by composer Karl Jenkins, and is the single most powerful piece of music I have ever experienced.

You can listen to the opening movement here:

And just to give you a peak behind the curtains:

Here’s a photo of all of the computers and the main projections that made everything happen.

I sat down at my compute tonight, and something promoted insisted that I look at Twitter.  I knew somehow I had to listen.  Almost immediately, my eyes fell on a retweet by Natalie Christie (The Tiny Soprano) which had a link to the video below.  I don’t want to say anything about it, other then to ask you to take the time to watch it.  It’s 9 minutes long, and so worth it.  Don’t miss the surprise at the end.

I have so much I want to say about this, and at the same time, I don’t want to say anything quite yet.

So I’ll do something different, and ask you to begin the conversation in the comments, then I’ll chime in there as well. There is so much here to talk about!

Need I say more? Just watch:

I’m not sure whether I should give Havi Brooks credit for pointing this out in her Item! post this week or not.

I think she would appreciate it, so I will. I mean, she does have her own duck after all.

Before the release of his new book Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion, I had heard of Garry Vaynerchuk as the host of Wine Library TV, but I really didn’t know anything about him. Understand, I don’t drink wine, not for any moral reason, I just never got into it.

With a title like "Crush It" I couldn't resist

In any case, I started to hear lots of positive thoughts about this new book, so I went audible.com and downloaded the audio book. Audio books are my preferred way of reading almost everything, but in this case I strongly recommend you get the audio book even if that’s not normally your preference. I will get to why I say that in a minute.

This book is about passion. Of course the subtitle tells us that it’s about making money from our passion, but more importantly, it’s about how living from your passion is the way to be happy. Gary himself as the ultimate example of this. I found his passion both enjoyable and contagious, now some will say that he’s over the top, and he is over the top. The thing is, this is the real Gary. I have no doubt about it in my mind, it’s who he is. He talks about this in the book, and how important it is to be genuine to you are and your own style.

The book is really about how to create a brand around yourself, who you really are and your passion, mostly using social media. This is illustrated very well by Gary’s own story, and examples from other people who have been successful. As I read this last sentence, I realize that “creating a brand around yourself” can sound like something a used car salesman would do. This couldn’t be further from the truth. What Gary teaches is all about real honesty with yourself, and with everyone you relate with. It’s about being genuine at the deepest level.

So, why do I recommend the audio book rather than the print version?

When Gary went to record this book, he was so passionate and so into what he’s talking  about that he couldn’t stay on the script. For me, many places where he riffs off of what is in the printed text are some of the best parts of the audio book, it gives you everything that’s in the printed book plus bonus insights.

For me though, the single best part of this book, particularly the audio book, is the power with which Gary’s passion comes through. I found this really inspirational, it was really helpful to me at a time that I was a little bit down about what I was doing online. Now as I say, Gary style is over-the-top and this will bother some people. But, it’s who he is and though it took me a little while to get into it, I ended up really loving it and loving him.

So, if this sounds appealing, check out Garry Vaynerchuk’s Crush It, either in audio or print.

What do you think about Garry, and Crush It?  I’d love to hear in the comments.

Note that the Amazon links in this post are affiliate links, and I get a tiny commission from Amazon if you decide to buy through one of them.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, my sister and I saw Harry Potter the Exhibition at the Boston Museum of Science earlier this week. I am going to start this review with my overall impressions which will be spoiler free. After that, I’ll go into more detail about some aspects of the exhibit which you may prefer to be surprised by if you plan to see it. To my mind, it would not be a problem to know what’s coming from my descriptions, but you may feel differently so I will give you a warning before beginning that part.

Overall, I loved this experience. We had what I would consider an optimal viewing experience since the museum was almost deserted during our weekday visit, I can imagine that during busy times, such as school vacation weeks, it could be much more difficult to see everything. It is important going into this exhibit to understand what it is: it’s an exhibit of many costumes and some props used in making the films, they are displayed in small stage sets which do a great job of giving them context and creating an environment. It’s important to understand though, this exhibit is not about the making of the films. There is no look behind the scenes or education about the filmmaking process. The optional audio guide is primarily the voices of the artists who created the various costumes and props telling stories and talking about aspects of the process, while these clips were mostly very interesting, they were too short for my taste, I wanted more.

The creators of the exhibit done a terrific job of creating environments for the objects to live in that help you to feel the context, and I found this extremely effective. The objects and costumes themselves ranged from interesting to magnificent and extraordinary. We spent close to an hour and a half touring the exhibit at a very leisurely pace, looking at objects in detail and listening to each audio guide recording. Both of us enjoyed the experience very much. My basic recommendation is, if you have a chance to see this exhibit and it’s appealing to you, do it.

Spoilers begin here

in my post yesterday I talked about how important I think the opening of an exhibit is, at least to me. The opening of this Harry Potter exhibit was terrific. After our tickets were taken and we got our audio guides, we were instructed to wait in a queue line. (We were the only ones in the line.) Shortly, a British sounding gentleman in costume led us into a sort of courtyard area. At the front of it was a small stage, on the stage was a stool, and on the stool was an object which could only be the sorting hat. We were each called up to sit on the stool, the sorting hat was placed on our heads, and we were each sorted (both Gryffindors.)

Then the doors were opened to a building façade, and we were led into a dark room with about eight beautifully backlit posters for the films. We quickly discovered that these were not really posters, but rather large high-definition video screens mounted sideways. Shown on the screens is an excellent montage of moments from the films, clips interplay between screens driven by sound effects and the familiar and powerful musical score. I really enjoyed it. As the montage built to its climax, the whole right wall of the space rolled up like a giant window shade leaving us looking into a bright light, as were called forward into this newly revealed space we discovered that the bright light is the headlight of the Hogwarts Express locomotive. Another British gentleman quickly ushered us through that space and into the exhibit itself. Quite an opening.

The next thing we saw was a short hallway filled with portraits some of which were video screens containing animated ghosts — I thought that this was mildly interesting but because the video screens looked so different from the stationary portraits I did not experience any suspension of disbelief, or sensation that I was looking at anything other than a video screen.

From the air began the incredible array of tableaux of costumes and props in appropriate settings which I described above. About two thirds of the way through was a full size, walk-through set of Hagrid’s cottage. This served as a transition into the darker characters and the Forbidden Forest. Here in addition to costumes were full-size models of some of the creatures which were created primarily in computer graphics. All very cool.

Then we came around a corner into a small sort of anti-room with walls covered in notices in individual frames just like in the film, this was the entrance to the Great Hall. The Great Paul was not a full set, but rather a set of tableaux arranged to suggest the space (of course creating a full great Hall would’ve required more space than the entire exhibition probably used.) In this space were displayed the most lavish costumes, primarily from the Yule Ball scene.

At the exit of the Great Hall was another short hallway of the portraits some of which were video screens, the ghosts in the video screens were all applauding. I was somewhat disappointed to discover that this was the end of the exhibit. After the incredible themed opening experiences, I was expecting some sort of grand finale which never came. I’m sure the intention was that the Great Hall would fill that purpose, but it just didn’t work for me. I had actually been wondering in the back of my mind as I walked through the exhibit what the finale would be. I thought I had figured it out, nowhere in the exhibit was there a reference to Dumbledore’s office, and I thought that somehow we would find ourselves they are with something cool happening as a finale. Instead we got a gift shop. Now don’t get me wrong, it was a very nice gift shop, with lots of cool things, but it wasn’t the finale I was looking for.

Overall I would still give the exhibit a rating of eight on a scale of 1 to 10, which from someone who is as picky as I am is actually quite a complement, and better than I expected it to be.

Have you seen the exhibit? Would you like to? I’d love to hear it in the comments.

I love museums. In fact, going to museums is one of my favorite things to do. I have to say though, I’m rather picky about exhibits. Very rarely do I find it interesting to look at objects out of context. I want to see a series of objects, descriptions and media that tell a story. I want to be led on a journey to a place, or a time, where I’ve never been and possibly could never go. Of course, considering the title of this blog, I imagine that this doesn’t come as a big surprise. It’s amazing how effectively an exhibit can tell a story.

(photo by duluoz cats)

Archaeology as theater

One of the most effective and enjoyable examples of museum exhibition as storytelling that I have ever experienced is the main exhibit at POINTE-À-CALLIÈRE  the Montréal Museum of Archaeology and History. The museum is built on the site, the actual spot, where the city of Montréal was founded. An amazing archaeological excavation revealed generations of construction and life in the city as physical layers of foundations and artifacts. The museum was built over the top of this excavation.

You enter the very modern museum building, and after purchasing your tickets enter a theater. As the multimedia presentation begins, you discover that you’re looking down into the excavation. The show is projected onto screens above the excavation, and on the rock surfaces and foundations themselves. It is an extremely effective orientation to the history of Montréal and brings you back to the founding of the city. When you leave the theater, you go down into the excavation itself, and the rest of the exhibition consists of winding your way through the physical foundations of the city of Montréal. As you take this journey, lighting and projections are used very effectively to bring to life what was happening in the various locations you see. It really is an amazing journey.

Storytelling in a tomb

In my mind, one of the most important aspects of that experience is that the story is laid out by a clear opening which draws you in, and also provides the background context you need to understand what you’re seeing. I think that all of my favorite museum exhibits do this. About a month ago I went with friends to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and we saw the special exhibit The Secrets Of Tomb 10A. This is an exhibit drawn from the museum’s immense collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts, but this exhibit is special because all of the objects came from one place — the Tomb 10 A. of the title. Here, the storytelling was a little bit more subtle, but very present and very effective.

When you enter the exhibit, you come into an opening gallery where objects, maps and descriptive text along with a projected montage of photographs set the scene of where in Egypt these objects were discovered and begin to tell the story of the excavation. Each succeeding gallery continues the story, weaving together the ancient Egyptian religious and funerary practices, and what we can learn about that particular people for whom this tomb was built as well as the story of the excavation and in some cases the conservation of the objects. It is a wonderful journey, the context provided by the way the objects are organized and displayed makes it incredibly powerful. While I have toured the Museum’s permanent ancient Egyptian exhibits many times, and enjoy them, they lack the flow and context of The Secrets of Tomb 10A. That’s something that I really miss when I visit them.

By the way, The Secrets of Tomb 10A will be open through May 10, 2010 at the MFA. If you have any interest in ancient Egypt and anyway of getting to Boston, this exhibit is not to be missed. I love ancient Egypt, and have seen many exhibits on it — this is one of the very best.

As I think about exhibits that I’ve enjoyed, I keep coming back to how they open, your first experiences you visit. I think this is so critical to setting the context for what you’re about to see, and I think it’s something that’s often minimized or left out altogether. I’ll leave you with one of the most indelible examples of a wonderful opening in my mind.

The grand vista of space

Many years ago (it must be close to 20) the Boston Museum of Science had a special exhibit called Soviet Space, an amazing array of spacecraft and satellites built in the Soviet Union, and I believe exhibited in the US for the first time. I still remember the opening of this exhibit. You waited in a small foyer after your ticket had been taken, and at the appointed time a curtain was pulled aside and you entered a small theater. There was a panoramic screen at the front of the theater up fairly high, and on that screen a multi-image slideshow (the state-of-the-art technology at the time) introduced the story, and at the climax of the presentation, the front wall of the theater opened (much to my surprise,) revealing a giant fiber-optic star field with a sputnik spacecraft floating in front of it. That moment was pure magic for me. I still remember it so clearly all these years later.

Off to Hogwarts

There’s a reason I’m talking about this today, yesterday my sister and I visited the Harry Potter exhibition at the Boston Museum of Science. This post is really a preamble to my response to visiting that exhibit which I will post tomorrow.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear how important, or not, these aspects of exhibits are to you when you visit. I look forward to your comments!

I was first introduced to Edmar Castaneda when I heard him on an album by Marta Topferova, the friend who recommended her music (which is wonderful) pointed out that the sort of unusual sounding, flamenco guitar was in fact not a guitar but a HARP.  I was blown away.

Then today @hiddenplace tweeted this video of him playing solo:

Then, fascinated, I dug deeper and found another NPR story on Edmar:

And even a full 1 hour concert recorder at Tanglewood as a member of a wonderful quartet.

I have to say that Edmar is on of my absolute favorite new musical discoveries, I’m really excited by his solo work, and can’t wait to hear more of him.

What do you think?

Since I am, in fact, just that geeky, this blog now has a mobile version.  courtesy of WPtouch, a plug-in for WordPress, now if you visit this site from your iPhone, iPod Touch, Android device or Blackberry, you will see a special version of the blog designed to be easy to navigate, and very fast on mobile phones and other small screen devices.

Photo by Edans

When @ScottBourne mentioned mobile WordPress and WPtouch I just had to try it!  (BTW Scott Bourne is also an AMAZING photographer specializing in birds – Check out Scott’s PhotoDiary )

I am very pleased with how well it works, and how easy it is to use on the phone. You can even bookmark, tweet about and comment on posts from your phone.

This works great on my iPhone, which is the only device I have to test it on. If you have one of the other supported smartphones, give it a try and let me know how it works. I’d love to know.

And just in case this isn’t geeky enough, I’m hoping (fingers crossed) to have an iPhone app that will let you read my blog directly in the next month or so. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, let me know what you think of the new mobile version of The Journey of Story.

Today, particularly in this economy, it seems to be very popular among the “art” crowd to moan about the financial problems of orchestras, opera, and particularly more avant-garde forms of art and performance. To these folks, losing these institutions is a great tragedy, and I agree with them, but maybe not for the same reason.

This was brought into focus for me by Nathalie Christie, “The Tiny Soprano,” in her post Can Art Afford To Ignore An Audience.

I think it’s really an important question, particularly for those of us who are artists and performers, to consider what is it that makes a piece of art or performance “good” or “important”? Is it the opinion of a small group of experts: other artists, reviewers, etc.? Is it only the opinion of the creator of the piece that actually matters? Is it a matter of the audiences opinion? Or is it even something to be discussed? Something left to be determined by the divine (if the artist believes in such a thing)?

I have a very strong opinion about this, and it’s one that’s not currently popular in many circles. I believe that the quality and the importance of a given work can only be determined by the audience who is experiencing that work. Yes, I really do think it’s up to the audience. Now, does that mean that we should all program to the lowest common denominator, of course not. We, as the creators get to define who we are creating for. However, if we’re creating a piece that is difficult to grok, we need to be prepared when people who don’t like difficult work don’t like it. That’s okay.

But there’s more to it, if we’re not happy with the size of our current audience (symphony orchestras and opera companies, are you listening?) It’s up to us to reach out in some way. I see two basic ways of doing this, either find stuff to perform which more people will like, or find more people who like the stuff we perform. I want to talk about both of these.

Finding stuff to perform which more people will like, is often a very unpopular thing to do. It’s seen as programming to the lowest common denominator, and somehow that’s bad. I think it can be bad if it’s the only thing that we’re doing. On the other hand, it can be a way of extending a hand and welcome to people who might not otherwise come. It also generates needed funds from people purchasing tickets. So, it can be one important part of building a larger audience.

Finding more people who like the stuff we do can also be hard, often many of them are already coming, and it takes a lot of work to find a few more.

I actually think, the most important thing to do is a third thing. Help people who don’t know that they love our stuff, even the difficult, not so accessible stuff, to discover that they can love it. Let me tell you a story:

When I was in college, I joined a coed professional performing arts fraternity called Kappa Gamma Psi. One of the things about this group which was really amazing is the variety of backgrounds, and performance styles which members came from. This is a great thing for me to be exposed to, and that was illustrated by one particular experience that I want to share with you. Early in my association with the group, it might even have been while I was pledging, although I don’t remember, my big sister Ruth called me one night and asked me to come down to one of the practice rooms in the music school. She was working on a piece for her recital, and wanted to play it for somebody.

I went, and sat in this tiny practice room, maybe 3 feet from her cello as she played a suite for solo cello by George Crumb. Crumb is a modern composer, who writes some very strange stuff, which was not at all my taste at the time. As I listened, I found the piece very, very strange, but I also found it captivating and powerful. A number of things happened that night, one of them was that I fell in love with the cello, and another one was that my mind was opened to a new kind of music.

As I was putting my thoughts together for this post, I searched YouTube for a performance of this piece, and when I found it I was surprised that it didn’t seem as strange as I remembered. I find that fascinating, but I have been stretched in what I listen to by experiences like this.

So what was it that allowed me to expand my definition of “interesting and good” music? Well, part of it is an invitation, if I hadn’t been invited to hear it I would’ve never had the opportunity to like it. But there’s more to it than that, it’s also being able to experience it at full power, at close range. That’s a different experience than listening from the back of a concert hall. And there’s also learning about it, discussing it with people who know, so that I can listen in a way that it feels less foreign.

So I think that there is some important lessons here about how to build an audience:

1. You have to invite them in
2. Create opportunities to have optimal, full power experiences of the material
3. Give audience members an opportunity to learn more about what they are going to hear or have just heard

I think that Benjamin Zander, in his work with the Boston Philharmonic has demonstrated the power of this. He gives brilliant pre-concert lectures about the music that is about to be performed, typically 75% of the concert audience comes to the lecture, and they sell out virtually every concert that they give. I think this is a really good model.

It’s also helpful to mix the familiar and the unfamiliar, this was Arthur Fiedler‘s great innovation as the conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra. He would create a program in three parts, the first part was selections of the recently popular favorites and light classics that the orchestra was known for. Then, having made the audience comfortable, he would present a “heavier or more difficult” major piece, then in the third segment of the program he would play timeless, favorite music. It gave people in his audiences a gentle introduction to stretching their palette. I think this is also a really good model.

So what do you think? What makes good art? How do we build the audience for the art that we think is important?

I want to share with you a YouTube Concert in tribute to one of my very favorite performers, Victor Borge.  Victor’s secret was that he was both a brilliant comedian and a virtuoso pianist – and he never let his comedy get in the way of great piano playing, or his great music get in the way of brilliant comedy.  He was known as The Clown Prince of Denmark and The Great Dane. So let me get out of the way now, and invite you to enjoy a most unique and wonderful artist, preserved through the magic of YouTube.

To end with a grand finale, one of Victor Borge’s most famous pieces, Phonetic Punctuation, performed here by Victor with Dean Martin.

I hope you have enjoyed this concert/tribute as much as I enjoyed putting it together.  Victor was a true master, and is very much missed by many, including me.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, responses and memories in the comments.

Daniel Pink just posted on his blog about something that got me thinking. Emotionally intelligent signage . . . in an airport? | Daniel Pink.

In short, the folks at Milwaukee’s General Mitchel International Airport created an area, just past security for folks to get their shoes back on and themselves back together, and labeled it the “Recombobulation Area.”

I just wonder, how many of us could benefit by creating “recombobulation areas” in our lives.  Be they physical spaces to decompress when coming home, or coming in to our offices or whatever, or temporal spaces.

Recognizing that we are discombobulated, and taking the time to take care of ourselves in whatever way we need to get back in harmony with ourselves.  I suspect that if this is done mindfully, the time gained in increased productivity and gain in comfort would FAR outweigh way the time it take to do the recombobulating.

So if you need a walk, go for a walk.  If you need a cup of tea, stop and make a cup of tea, and take the time to really enjoy it!

Tune in to whatever it is you really need, and find ways to give it to yourself.

I really believe that it will make all the difference.

So what’s your “recombobulation area?”  Please share in the comments!

Nathalie Christie is THE tiny soprano. (She calls herself that.)

Natalie Christie - The Tiny Soprano

When presented with a tragedy on the scale of what’s happened in Haiti, or what happened in New Orleans after Katrina or any major disaster, it’s natural to want help. Many of us give money or volunteer our time to help in whatever way we can. This is a terrific thing to do. But some of us are moved to do more. Natalie was moved by what happened in Haiti and by what she saw other bloggers doing — offering something of themselves, of their own work, and donating the proceeds to relief in Haiti.

So Natalie turned to her gift, her art, her voice, and decided to share with us an amazing performance of a song cycle by Samuel Barber. I’d like to encourage every one of you that reads this to go to her blog and click the “buy now” button. Make the $10 donation and download this wonderful recording.

Now, if the term soprano sends chills up your spine, and conjures pictures of a very large woman wearing a horned helmet, let me ask you to set your prejudice aside, and let me assure you that Natalie is not anything like that. She has a truly lovely, lyric tone, and communicates beautifully in what she sings. So even if classical music or opera is not your thing, take a chance, you’ve probably never heard these songs before, sung by anyone, and I think it’s likely that you’ll never have a chance to hear them sung better.

And besides if you’re to make a donation to relief in Haiti, who do you trust more to deliver your $10: your cell phone company, or a professional musician and mother of three.

So do it now, just go to Natalie’s blog, click the “buy now” button, you make your donation through PayPal easily and securely, and be downloading the music in moments.

Thank you, all of you, for participating in this, and thank you Natalie for letting us make a difference through you!

PS — please excuse the somewhat hard-sell in this blog post, this is me, doing what I can do to help the people of Haiti.

A few days ago someone on Twitter (I wish I could remember who) mentioned cellist, Zoe Keating. I was not at all familiar with her or her music, though I’m a great fan of the cello ever since a college friend asking to be the test audience for a piece she was working on for her recital. Sitting in a little tiny practice room, maybe 3 feet from her instrument, was an incredibly powerful, visceral experience, that left me with a great love of this instrument.

Zoe takes an extremely unusual approach to the cello, or rather to what can be done with the sounds that the cello makes. She creates her music by playing segments, and using electronics to record them and loop them so they play over and over again. By doing this, she creates amazing layers of sound, and creates an entire orchestra from her cello alone.

Listen to this:

Now here’s a short interview with Zoe where she talks about how she makes this amazing stuff:

If you like this music, check out her website at http://www.zoekeating.com.

So of course when I discovered how cool Zoe’s music is a naturally followed her on Twitter. She is @Zoecello.

Then today she tweeted about a new band that she just found out about called The Finches.

You’ve got to see this:

Pretty amazing, isn’t it. And by the way, if you’re thinking that this is faked, I’m quite confident that it isn’t.

This was done as a part of an art installation called “Rhythms of Life,” at the Barbican Art Gallery in London. It’s an installation piece done by the French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot.

I know these are far from the typical music most of us listen to on a daily basis (me included.) I’ll be interested to hear what you think of them.

Every three minutes there is a new diagnosis of invasive breast cancer.

Every 13 minutes someone dies from breast cancer.

More than 180,000 people, women and men, will be diagnosed with breast cancer in the US this year alone.

This has got to stop!

It’s time for all of us to step up, and do what ever we can to end breast cancer.

This whole train of thought was started a couple of days ago, when I got an e-mail from a dear friend by the name of Andrea Berman. We’ve been friends since college, and she’s a very cool person and a geek to boot. Andrea sent me an e-mail because she has committed to participate in this year’s Avon Walk for Breast  Cancer. She’s going to walk close to 40 miles in a weekend. It’s up to us to support her with our donations.

Please go to her Avon Walk for Breast Cancer personal site and donate whatever you can right now.

But there is more than not that we can do, as connected people on the Internet, we can blog and tweaked and Facebook and stumble and digg and whatever else you can think of to make sure that every one we are connected to knows about this challenge, and the commitment that we are making to help solve it.

Just to provide a little extra incentive, if you make a donation of any amount, and let me know in the comments of this post that you’ve done it, I’ll send you a link to a special meditation video that I’ve created. This 12 minute video uses my Binaural Journeys technology combining binaural beats, binaural drumming, natural sound and music to guide you effortlessly into a state of creative relaxation. The visuals in this program are amazing photographs of spectacular tropical flowers. As the imagery takes you into the miniature world of the flower, the binaural audio track guides you into yourself.

Just remember, the only way to get this video is to make a donation through Andrea’s page, and then let me know about it in the comments here. Of course, this is on the honor system, and there is no need to say how much you’ve given, what’s important is that every one of us give.

I was first introduced to the term “Inner Physician” through the work of Dr. John Upledger, creator of CranioSacral Therapy. this is an extremely gentle form of manual therapy, where the therapist uses his or her hands to listen to the patient’s body. From my perspective, as someone who has received a significant amount of this work, and read a number of Dr. Upledger’s books, in many ways what the therapist is “listening” for is this Inner Physician.

The Inner Physician is part of each of us, deep inside, that knows exactly what we need, right now, to grow and develop and heal and love and be ourselves, the most true, complete version of ourselves yet possible. Over time, I’ve come to realize that working through the body is one way, but far from the only way, of accessing and facilitating your inner physician.

It is because of this, I created a new audio program called Journey to the Spirit of Healing. Only, I didn’t really know that at the time. I’d like to share this story with you:

I love to absorb information by listening to it, so it’s not surprising that I have a subscription to audible.com, the downloadable audio book service. Audio books are one of my very favorite ways to read. I read all sorts of audio books, but one in particular started the chain of realizations and events that I am about to describe. That book is Inspired Marketing by Joe Vitale and Craig Perrine. I had been listening to this book, and mulling the idea is that it presents for a couple of days. I was inspired by the stories in the book to start some sort of an online business, I wasn’t sure what kind of business or product I wanted to create.

Enter the needles

I was listening to Inspired Marketing as I was driving to my regular acupuncture treatment.

<tangent> I love acupuncture, going regularly for treatment makes me feel better and somehow makes everything work better for me. I’m able to do this affordably because I go to the Manchester Acupuncturists Studio which is a community acupuncture clinic. Community clinics charge on a sliding scale to typically ranges from $15-$35 a treatment — whatever you feel comfortable paying. Everyone is treated in one large room, with a big circle of recliners. As you lay in a chair, the acupuncturist comes around, checks in with you briefly, and then sets your needles. And that is actually where the story continues. </tangent>

So I’m laying in my recliner, with needles sticking out of various places on my legs and arms. (No, it doesn’t hurt. Most of the time I don’t feel the needles all. Give it a try, you’ll be surprised by how comfortable it is, and how good you feel.) I’d been lying there for maybe five minutes when I was struck with what I can only describe as an inspirational “clue — by — four.”

All of the sudden, I just knew what my product was. I knew I needed to create an audio program called Journey to the Spirit of Healing which would combine binaural beats for brainwave synchronization, binaural drumming and self hypnosis/guided meditation. I knew what needed to happen in the journey, what the structure of it would be. I was inspired. I was so excited that my first thought was to ask the acupuncturist to take my needles out so I could go home and start working on it right away, I decided it was better for me to ask someone to write the idea down for me and then let the treatment finish working. Afterwards, I went home and immediately recorded the program. By noon next day, it was done, but I had no idea of how to sell it online.

So I began to study, and after a lot of work, and a lot of help from Pat O’Bryan and all of my colleagues in his Portable Empire Coaching Program, I am pleased to announce the launch of my Journey to the Spirit of Healing at http://www.journeytothespiritofhealing.com.

I am so excited about sharing this product, and getting it launched, I wanted to do something really special. So for the first 30 people who buy my downloadable audio program I’m going to offer a very special bonus. Each of those first 30 people will have a 20 minute phone call with me to develop a set of personal affirmations, just for them. I will then create a custom audio program, a customized Journey of Affirmation based on their personal set of affirmations. Each of them will receive their own, unique, Binaural Journey. Of course, this takes a lot of time to do, so I really can only offer it to the first 30 people to order.

So take a look at http://www.journeyedtothespiritofhealing.com, and if you feel moved to do so, order the program and get your own custom Journey of Affirmation.

I am really excited to hear about your results with this amazing tool that I was inspired to offer.

One of the most amazing things that technology is making possible is long-distance collaboration. We are able to work together in ways that we never have before. Blogs like this one are a perfect example, people comment, and join in the discussion from all around the world. But much more intimate and direct collaboration is also possible. Over the last few days, I’ve been talking with folks in the southern US about giving a talk at a conference in Kentucky. Thing is, I’d be giving the talk from New Hampshire through Web conferencing. It’s pretty cool.

It struck me this morning just how powerful this is when I ran across a link on twitter to this video:

It was created by a group called Playing For Change. They believe, and I agree, that one way to create peace is to bring individuals from around the world together collaborating in creation. One of the really cool things about this type of project, is that even when it’s “finished” we can still continue to collaborate, by sharing the work across the Internet, and in person. Here’s another video from Playing For Change which is fair introduction of themselves, and has another great song.

I hope you’ve enjoyed these videos and music, I know I did, but the real question is, what are you going to do now? How are you going to use this to make a difference? Share it with the people you love. Pass it around the Internet. Maybe host a party to show the Playing For Change film. I’m looking into showing it at the theater were I am the technical director.

How have you been moved by technology enabled collaboration? Please share in the comments.

I am a little bit afraid that this post is going to start to sound a little like a broken record after my last two posts. Then again, I don’t know how many of you reading this are even old enough to remember records and how they would get scratched, and skip, and play the same segment over, and over, and over again.

But then again, I’ve sort of felt like my mind is a little bit like a broken record, going over and over some of the ideas in Daniel Pink’s book Drive. If you’re new here, start with this post I wrote last week for background.

I really have been struck powerfully by how unuseful extrinsic motivation is in my life, and the kind of work that I do; everything I do has creative components, and extrinsic motivation has been proven to reduce creativity.

I spent quite a bit of time over the last several days with friends from college, one of whom is a Montessori teacher. We talked about motivation, and the ideas in Drive at some length, and she loved the image that I created of the dangling carrot in the “no smoking” sign. I call this the “No Extrinsic Motivation” sign. She said that she wanted it on a T-shirt, so I decided to upload it to a cafépress store for anyone who’d like to get this cool graphic on almost anything. Choices range from T-shirts to throw pillows to underwear, and almost everything in between.

No Extrinsic Motivation Sign (click for the Cafépress store)

Check it out at: http://www.cafepress.com/mythworld