heard	Mike Keneally			Nonkertompf
			Miles Davis			Bitches Brew
			David Torn			What Means Solid, Traveller?
			Yes			The Yes Album
			Yes			Fragile
			all of this was listened to in anticipation of the mailman bringing me...
			Mike Keneally			Dancing

Here is why how can the wind with its arms all around me… (10-25) M y writing pushes at the latch, but can't seem to get enough weight behind itself to get the heavy door open lately. Ideas rush and flash, and it is exciting and new only until the words hit paper. The journal thrives under such nutter butter kumfusion - but hit counts ain't what they used to be, and there again is the lighted stage with the guitar stands that I wish I knew better. Mike Keneally's latest album, Dancing, came in the mail a day ago. After listening to my favorite artist all day long on what to me might be his strongest and most emotional album to date, I went home and between feedings and diaper changes played my acoustic guitar with an abandon I had not felt in quite a long time. I haven't had much of time to try to learn the songs on the album note-for-note yet, but instead I took the happy mood that the album had spread on me like peanut butter and I let it flow out of my hands onto the rusted strings of the Yamaha. Inspiration or emulation, it didn't matter. It was wonderful. Notes, chords, and progressions all pouring out of that beat-up guitar with such confidence and happy recklessness that I knew again (despite my own efforts to bury the fact recently) that I am a guitar player. And I think that's what it's really about. What makes Mike Keneally such a huge inspiration for me. He makes me want to play my instrument, he makes me want to write songs, and with his latest 9-piece effort, he makes me want to play with a band. He inspires something inside me to go out and make it happen. There's only a few people that truly make me feel that way. The way I feel when I see Henry Rollins, Corey Glover, or million-year old Iggy Pop stand up there. God I just want to lean against my amplifier, lower the guitar strap so that it hangs against my thighs, and just let that bad boy scream… Of course sometimes I get too wrapped up in trying to make something important and complex, something that will impress everyone with my brilliance and opulence, and in the hopeless effort of trying to reinvent Guernica for my own glorification I get frustrated, tense, and burned out. As I get to be and older boy, I occasionally get caught between the poles of doing something brilliant and just going out and doing something for the sake of just going out and doing something… Sometimes that dichotomy leaves me with nothing to show at all, and sometimes the cost of what I get is too high to justify having that fancy bauble around in the first place…   Someone Else vs. Crash Course Crash Course vs. Groove Puppies Crash Course vs. Crash Course   I garner different things from the artists I surround myself from. Vernon Reid, Steve Vai, John Scofield, Miles Davis, and Frank Zappa all make me want to sit down with a guitar and figure stuff out - prove to myself that I can do things. It's not really a bad thing, but it's much more of an individual journey. It's an empowering feeling, but one that engages something different from my creativity - the kind of feeling I get after reading William Gibson, Rudyard Kipling, or J.R.R. Tolkien, James Valvis, or listening to Radiohead - suddenly I am thinking, pushing, trying to match what I've just experienced with what I can do. It usually spurs me into bouts of shameful glomming, trying to be someone or something that impresses me, aping my inspirations instead of drawing from them. In those first couple of years at FSU, I carried this lofty notion that I would end up as a music major, and even though that never came to pass, I used to hang around the music school quite a bit. On more than one occasion I would get into one of my "hey-look-at-me-the-cool-undiscovered-musical-genius" moods and I would force myself on some poor unsuspecting piano, trying to invoke the ghosts of Debussy, St. Thelonious, pre-Christie Brinkley Billy Joel, and Dr. Teeth from the Muppet Show (he might have been a puppet, but let me tell you something, dude could shred). The results were unabashedly rank. Biz Markee bad. Tori Amos bad. Phillip Glass would have turned his nose at it. The kind of experience where you start thinking to yourself "don't we have somewhere else we could be, pal?" but listening to the second Disc of "The Clash on Broadway," or remembering Kings X on stage, Funk Bible on stage, P-Funk on Stage… it gets my juices charged up. That same feeling I get ANYTIME I hear Louis Armstrong gravel up his voice and conjure Satchmo, that urge that gets into me when I hear 24-7 Spyz, live Living Colour, or King Crimson from 1974 - I suddenly don't want to be within a million miles of a cubicle, credit card bill, or a car payment. I want to be loud, back to back with Gristina. I want to be charging into shorebreak, hurdling over the first few soft breakers before I fling myself on the board and paddle out to the set waves out back. Gotta do something. Have to. …and then the pollen starts to fall from above. You start to feel it once you put hurdles in front of your own path. I have to find time for guitar playing, I have to clear space out of my muddled schedules to get to the ocean. I haven't got the spare cash to put together a decent rig. I have to meet, court, and connect with other musicians to get to that point where I can call them up some Saturday morning and say, "Hey, whatcha doin?" Then suddenly I am covered in that yellow dust, sneezing uncontrollably and running inside for the protection of my fantasy football league and playstation sports heroics… hurdles, hurdles, hurdles… All put there by me.   Saturday I plan on dragging my butt out to Riverside to play football with a couple of my coworkers who are there every weekend. I plan on jamming with Ellerbee one of these days, and have considered maybe even venturing (gasp) outside of the bubble of musicians I have pulled around myself like a comforter for the last 10 years and see if anyone else out there wants to try to do a decent version of "Re-ignition" right after we finish hacking our way through the head melody to "Equinox." Gotta do something. Have to.     So let it Ring true to you Be doing the things you're here to do Be done with the past Don't let it hold fast your ragged ass So let it ring true Let cool head and pure heart rendezvous An all-access pass to freedom at last for ragged ass -Keneally really, you all need to go out and buy this album NOW.