Plant & Fallon

Robert Plant and Jimmy Fallon with an ipad looper app team up with The Legendary Roots Crew for a bit of good fun. Enjoy, B.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Jz8KQWWaaRQ

AWARE

I wrote a book! Over a period of two years, closer to two and a half...but let's call it two.
 The name became "AWARE" An Inquiry Into Consciousness... http://www.brandonearlbristow.com/

Book #1 in a series I'm calling,  "Congratulations You're A Robot"   (the original working title).

I'm also exacerbating preexisting search engine trigonometry by adding "a psychonaut adventure" to the top of this thing.  Why? Because that's exactly what it is.

Sometimes you've got to get wordy and there's no way around it.

  I'm sort of a proud papa about this book, and truthfully I'm a little caught off-guard as to how to present it to the world. SO.... here goes...

           AWARE (above)... The banner ad. Good for websites, magazines and the like (so they tell me)

               & THE COVER! (below)  ....  Front and back...  Sweet eh? ...  

 
 SO... I finished the first draft in April/May...ish... and by June, Julia (my wife) and I finished the editing process. It took a little over a month to design a proper cover and convert the Microsoft Word files into something print-worthy. It was NOT a breeze, but now that I'm through it, I'm already acting like it was easy as falling down.

So I baked a website into existence... http://www.brandonearlbristow.com  fresh and functional.

Then I made a sacred pact with AMAZON (secret handshakes and blood) Amazon AWARE

I had a word with KINDLE    
AWARE @ The Kindle Store

and even rubbed elbows with B&N (ooooh) I know right?
Barnes & Noble

I realized with a sting that you don't get to be on Apples iBOOKS 'till you own an Apple computer.
Maybe later I suppose... then again, maybe not.

So where does this leave me?  Someplace between the first real attempt to advertise my novel in earnest and the strong urge to sit down and focus on the next one before I forget what I wanted to say in the first place.

 Grab a copy today and tell me what you think.

 I really want to know.

Peace, B

 

Dupers Delight - Eckhart Tolle

not Eckhart Tolle

"Duper's Delight" is a term created to describe that uncanny feeling we get when someone is gloating internally about deceiving us. It's classified as a "micro-expression," but sometimes it's not so very micro at all.

Take Eckhart Tolle for instance, a strange little man with mole qualities and a creep factor so large it vacuum seals any room he enters.  Tolle is a self help guru with legions of followers, fans, readers, attendees and whatnot bobbing around in his 3 horsepower wake. In his best seller "The Power of Now" he extolls the virtues of detachment to the extent you get a real sense that he is taking you for a ride...in a van.

Also... boredom...
When you are being strung along by a poet, a priest, or a politician, there always exists that familiar circular feeling, "anemic sentences" I call them... literary Cocoa Puffs.

I found Tolle haunting a small audience in a quiet room on YouTube last week, up on stage wearing what I would describe as a "Serial Killer sweater."

Sweater withstanding, the mole-man took his questions from the frothy crowd with a purposefully slow demeanor that stood the hair up on my arms and made me instantly furious.... I don't know why....

It's instinctual, I suppose. I tend to be fairly connected to my animal roots and my roots conferred, gathered round, exchanged glances and lit a few torches on first contact with digital Tolle.

So maybe he's helping people you might say.

Maybe.

But if we were living tribally, I would make him move downstream by threat of force with instructions to rethink eye contact with my children, and what's more, I wouldn't feel the least bit bad about it.

Like I said, it's instinctual. I think he's a creep, call it a skill... 

Ha ha ha...yes, I'm going on and on about somebody I know nothing about.

 I skimmed the book and fast-forwarded through huge chunks of his talk...

I remain totally uninformed about Mr.Tolle, the man, the myth.

 That's the beauty of it...

B.B.




vintage photo - courtesy NASA archives.

Chasing Addictions (surf flick)

Starring: Kelly Slater, Dane Reynolds, Yadin Nicol, Parker Coffin, Conner Coffin A fast paced, modern, endemic, surf movie, for adrenaline junkies and zombie surfnauts world over. The soundtrack aint' bad either. Buy it, Own it, Catch it now!... before it's too late. B.E.Bristow Available on iTunes and surf shops worth a damn.: Chasing Addictions David Parsa, Steve Guerrero & John DeTemple (6) Sports Aug 9, 2013 View Item The next level in modern surfing seen spreading its infectious influences across the California coast and beyond. Chasing Addictions is the latest release from surf filmmaker David Parsa (LIVE: a music and surfing experience, Absolute Mexico). Witness the worlds best surfers push their abilities to unimaginable heights, on perfect waves of all types from the well-known rippable and often documented locations, to countless perfect "secret" unnamed gems that you may have heard of, but have never seen until now.

The Golden Age of Cancer

 
"The Golden Age of Cancer"

                         The Golden Age of Cancer

I have an interest in the stock market. A fascination, self-developed in high school prompting a younger me to waltz unannounced into a small brokerage office on Main Street, Ventura, California, at the age of 17 to ask the surprised suit-wearing inhabitants about their business.

 I remember them asking me if I was doing a report for school. When I said, “No, I’m just curious,” they (three middle aged white males) dropped their guard and invited me to have a seat behind a desk and offered me a soda or coffee or ice water (they had an arsenal of drinks and snacks). This was 1988, pre-internet boom by a few years, their prime weapons of choice were telephones, lots of telephones, blinking lights and odd sounding micro printers, a strange atmosphere of high energy stress and casual lazy coffee drinking. I was duly impressed by the multiple clocks, showing key time zones labeled neatly in black block lettering underneath, New York, London, etc… strung across the undecorated office walls.

The place felt like a time capsule, something left over from the sixties that couldn’t die. Powerful, effective methods of making money resist change like oily duck feathers. Just three extremely similar men, working in this cave, making calls in suits and polished leather shoes. They each had large, heavy, hard wood desks. I saw signed golf balls displayed under clear plastic cubes, complete with the obligatory kinetic steel balls, tiny bull statues and calenders featuring aerial shots of Pebble Beach. I had to wonder about the suits. I suppose if I had wandered off the street and saw people in Hawaiian shirts and sweat pants, I would have kept on walking. I suppose I can see the logic behind a funny costume. 

One of these fellas was between calls, and was kind enough to fill me in on the day to day operations of a real live stock trading outfit, a real eye opener. I was impressed and left with a head full of entrepreneurial thoughts, grown up thoughts of money and stuff. 

A weird, California version of the business, connected by physical wires across the country to Chicago and Wall Street herself. 

Trading stocks was one of the few vocations I could ever see myself excelling at, I had something close to a real interest. 

A brain at a desk appealed to me, thoughts converted to cash with zero physical movement, air conditioned magic. 

Behind the obvious set design was something close to Palmistry or reading chicken entrails on a stump… and possibly the promise of a BMW. 

 

Yesterday morning (twenty years later), I was having coffee and decided to have a look at the talking heads for shits and giggles.

The CNBC gang of soapy affiliates were shiny and groomed like pure bred Dobermans trotting the fake, green, grass of dog show hell.  The stock ticker ran its usual cycle and informed me of losses and gains (both imagined and real) while I simultaneously checked my email messages and poured a second cup of french roast.  The professional narcissists were talking, but I wasn’t listening, I know better. They are reliably full of it. We all know it. 

Three cups and a ball is all grown up and swindling in shifts.  

 Some of my personal strategy hinges on deducing fake smiles and reading uncomfortable micro expressions in order to turn them to my advantage. The social aspect is interesting to me, a language I can somehow traverse. A giant, mega media corporations awkward on-camera pause is a leaf on the breeze and a botched segue leaking snarky unintended audio into the world is an OPPORTUNITY large and tall, “The Cattleman’s Code.”  But…

I’ve said all that to get to this.

 

The busy mumbling in the background came sharply into focus on the last sentence, before the raging volume-boosted Cadillac commercial assaulted my senses.

This is what I heard.

Mumble mumble mumble… something something something, 

“The Golden Age of Cancer.” Smiles all around, swooping left to right boom camera, out of body experience angle, cut to commercial.  

“The golden age of cancer?”  You gotta be kidding me…I had to focus a little to remember what I was just witness to.

They were talking “Big Pharma,” a fuzzy pet name they give to their favorite auntie.  

In spite of the overall country’s flat-lining economy, the nation’s largest drug companies are having a good time.  Selling overpriced cancer treatments to dying people is the new gold rush, has been for some time now I gather.

Psychopaths. 

I’m still feeling ill from it. Those words I can’t throw up, the message I’m unable to purge, the camaraderie and the smiles I can’t seem to unsee… a monster with soundtrack and a graphics team.  

  

Just another great success story crawling out of my television. 

I guess that’s where we are now… Clubbed over the head when we weren’t expecting it.

The whole country woke up chained to the Black Pearl, singing songs and driving Cadillacs.

Whooping it up in the Golden Age of Cancer.

             

                                      

                                  B.E.B.  June 4, 2014

Mary Magdilinium

 http://brandonearlbristow.bandcamp.com/track/mary-magdilinium

 

 

Testing....1,2, is this mic on? this is my loose attempt to connect the dots.

Two sordid years of computer problems and I am just short of going caveman on the modern world.

I wish I could be a snob and insist on touring and pressing records with zippers, wiggle pictures and pop up cartoons inside but alas me pockets reflect a different approach to audio production. So be it. WE assembled and cut this song in about a half an hour. Based on a riff I had been noodling for twelve months without resolve. (my attempt to emulate African guitar styles without fancy retuning) Eric has a great ear and launched into a great rhythm almost immediately, After some vocal overdubs,  guitar and some bass she was allset to sit on a shelf till I could figure out how to move the audio over to bandcamp... Better late than never. 

Peace, B.B.

 

Its Mary Magdilinium
she pretends to work a pendulum
she mix a little bit of magic and dance to make the folks swing and sway

what they say? well its all right its all right yea
its all right if I say that I love you

Its Mary Magdilinium
she pretends to work that pendulum
when you get them tongues wagging you got to hear what they say

what they say .. what they say?

Well, a penny earned is a penny saved
and that's what they tried to tell you when she's out there on the biggest wave

Mary Magdilindium...
its all right....Its all right if I say that I love you.

credits

released 04 August 2012
Eric Clemow on drums Lyrics and other noises by Bristow

Dude Where's My Drummer? or Bill Ward Where Are You?

Loyalty                                            

I Love (old) Black Sabbath....  BUT.....Let's talk about (new) Black Sabbath! "13" for a moment.

I would love to give two shits about this release!

I have an issue.

"WHERE the HELL is BILL WARD?"

Not including the original Black Sabbath drummer is like removing the concrete foundation from under your house.

The inevitable question pops up...WHY?  Maybe he lost his groove? maybe he's really into Hello Kitty and needlepoint these days and can't be bothered??  NO.    Somethings rotten in kitchen here.

Greedy pricks are everywhere. Please prove me wrong. Until then. FUCK YOU Tony Iommi and FUCK YOU OZZY!  Hey,  Geezer Butler...are you part of this debacle?  Then fuck you too! 

I am truly curious about this new "Black Sabbath 13" but without Bill Ward I am afraid I will be forced to purloin  it....Just to send a message. I like Albums and Cd's and physical product.. I like to support my favorite Artists....

I Will BUY "Black Sabbath" when Black Sabbath is good and present.  

LOYALTY fellas......   Google it.

B.E.B.