Sparks from the Fire

I’m deeply inside a great novel at the moment – the kind that when you read it, sometimes you lose track of which reality is real, yours or the novel’s.  I spent long hours this past weekend deep into the drama of this book that I remember reading back in the 7^th grade and loving.  I’m loving the re-read even more now.

Anyone looking for a little Inspiration during these times of recession and budgetary restrictions would do themselves a favor by picking up this charming and most well-written story and diving into it.

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn is a novel by Betty Smith first published in 1943. It relates the coming-of-age story of its main character, Francie Nolan, and her Austrian/Irish-American family in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York City. The novel is set in the first and second decades of the 20th century. The book was an immense success, a nationwide best-seller that was distributed to servicemen overseas. It was also adapted into a popular motion picture, the first feature film directed by Elia Kazan.

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Pardon my absence, but I’ve been up to my eyebrows in music.

Just this last weekend I had the great privilege to produce and direct a concert of Inspirational music for TMC Youth, an organization dedicated to opening up the horizons of spirituality for the youth of today.

In a 3-day weekend gathering of over 200 young people from mainly the East coast, but also from as far away as Africa and Europe, my task was to put together and spearhead an hour and a half of Inspirational music entertainment for their Saturday night blow-out.

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My son, Dustin and his lady friend, Lauren, took me to see Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland for Easter last night and I had a bit of a resurrection.  I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen.  I literally did not want to blink for fear of missing something.

Hats off to Mr. Burton and his fabulous international crew for making this picture.  It could be the perfect story told in 3D.  I fell right down the rabbit hole with that little girl and spent 2 delighted hours in Tim’s surrealistic dream.

The experience made me so grateful for my eyes, so grateful for this magical God-endowed gift called sight.  What a trip – to be able to see!  What a concept!  When you really think about it, it’s our most precious gift besides simply being.

To be born blind must be one of life’s saddest tragedies, but to go blind must be even worse because then you know what you’re missing.

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Well, it’s truly just around the corner.  I know we’ve been promising this for a long time now, but finally I can say for certain the immortal words, “Coming Soon!”

We’ve been talking about this widget/gadget/app for over a year now and I’m more than happy to report that we’re in the last stages of production.  It’s so “done” that I’m finishing up the programming for each genre this coming week and you should see the first beta tests this April.

We’re excited here at WFM because you’ve been asking for this for some time now.  People I speak to every day have said repeatedly, “I go to Watchfire Music every day just to listen to the samples.”  This has actually been somewhat frustrating to me because as a composer/producer I want our customers and fans to hear the whole song – not just a 1:00 sample.

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I first met John Lennon when I was in college.  Actually, we didn’t exactly meet face to face – just heart to heart.

I was on my way to lunch one day when I heard I Wanna Hold Your Hand on the radio.  My life was changed that day forever.

What followed was the greatest musical upheaval of my life – greater than the advent of rock n’ roll, greater than the Kennedy assassination, greater than the Berlin Wall coming down, even greater than Haagen Daz.  The Beatles – a goofy name for four goofy guys who changed the world through music.  Once I heard that song the very first time, I was hooked forever.

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Yeah, like the title says, what is it these days with culture’s new direction (probably spawned by the Internet) that short, short, short is better, better, mo’ better.  As a human race, our attention span is getting less and less.  Our ability to pay attention now seems down to mere seconds.

There’s so much jockeying for our attention out there that we bounce from one thing to another skipping along the top of life, clicking madly on – to what?  More stuff, more facts, more trivial pursuit.  All in the name of the information age.

I think it’s a dangerous trend for humanity and one that I’m witnessing grabbing a hold of our culture and chancing generations of mediocrity and, yes, (egads!) shallow thinking.

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I read these truths yesterday morning.  This morning I woke up very early from an end-of-the-world dream where I was stuck in LA after a massive world earthquake and a resulting war with deranged people.  I couldn’t get home.  I couldn’t find anyone I knew.

I woke up in a sweat.  Disturbed deeply.  Frightened by the seeming reality that had just engulfed my life.  Wondering immediately what that was all about.  Carrying forward the feelings of the dream into my waking consciousness.  As I crawled out of bed, the Missus moaned and thrashed about lost in the throes of her own nightmare… (more…)

Well, the Oscars are over, the Grammys are over and it’s already started.  We put ‘em up there.  Now it’s time to knock ‘em off.  Just watch.  It happens every year.

What is it with our country this penchant to lift these people up onto the world pedestal, usually because of their good work, and then as soon as they’re up there, we do everything we can to pull ‘em back down?

It’s an American tradition – and not a very pleasant one.  Is it jealousy on our parts?  Is it that once up there most people don’t know how to handle it and so they sabotage themselves?  Is it the press and their ever-growing need for drama whether it’s truthful or not?  Or is it just that once up there, you get your 15 minutes and then it’s time to get off?

Probably all of the above.

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