Here is the first Blast from the Past - a series to shed some light what has happened in the last 14 years and to accompany rest of this journal that focuses mostly on the present and timeless content. In the beginning years on my conscious journey to become the best artist I can be, I did not have time or need to stop and marvel at the past. Once I finished something I were already onto something new. These works of passion and insane creativity consist of literary, theories, stories, essays, anecdotes, chat-logs, emails and random ramblings that will certainly puzzle, mesmerize and hopefully leave you wanting more.
Being inspired is like tapping into an untouched bottomless goldmine and no matter how deep I dug, it was never enough and I constantly tried to outdo and out-weird myself and push the limits of productivity beyond insane and never holding back. In the most hectic moments when I work non-stop sometimes several days straight it feels like passing through a roaring waterfall and scooping frantically as much as you can with your bare hands in those brief moments.
Two good correlations come into mind about outdoing yourself and not holding back. I remember watching DVD extras of 24 and there was a segment of how they wrote the show. And one of the writers captured really well not only the essence of one of the ballsiest TV-shows on planet, but the kind of attitude I have always had toward my work especially as a person and a musician. He said, and this is not a direct quote, “We try to come up with the most incredible, unbelievable thing nobody would expect to see in their wildest dreams in the show and then we try to top that.”
From movie Gattaca, which is about a genetically inferior man who assumes the identity of a superior one in order to pursue his lifelong dream of space travel [1]. The brothers in the movie were talking about how they in their childhood used to go to the ocean and then swim together away from the beach to see who dared to go the farthest. Weaker of the siblings, Vincent, always won and as an adult finally reveals to his puzzled brother: “You want to know how I did it? This is how I did it, Antonio: I never saved anything for the swim back.” That captures some of the headlong attitude I have had when tackling any creative or productive obstacles. You just go ahead and do what you feel needs to be done and find a way to go through along the way as Everything will work out… it always does.
During the first seven years I got acquainted with my imagination and creative potential are in retrospect seemingly the most crazy, most egocentric and all over the place evident not only in the music but especially in the literary works, which range from rave culture to J. Lo’s butt cheeks to quest of universal theory. Not only I have created and composed a lot but I have been meticulously documenting the process and progress in an increasing pace with a thought that when I finally break through it will be the most interesting for people to get a raw unfiltered glimpse to the thinking process of a very young immature yet mature artist.
On more trivial matters, right now I am sitting on top of a mountain built during last 14 years with original material of music, text and digital art that has been partly released in the past to a small exclusive audience around the globe. Thus this journal will barely scratch the cream of the crop. Even I do not exactly how much useful material there is, lounging here with odd 40,000 to 300,000 project files and 500 GB of original misc and mayhem wondering now what?.
So, you will likely get to see and possibly hear some of the worst yet interesting, in a passing by a road accident and cannot help but to look kind of fashion, avant-garde stuff I have made. Or just plain bad, yet good, because for every pristine and absolutely ground breaking idea there is about thousand that fail to impress and within those are always few gems worth exploring with a new set of eyes and ears.
All that mass has lead me to the following weeks and months, in which I turn into a part-time archaeologist and a historian and go through everything I have ever produced, in preparation of one gargantuan, massive release that just might turn out to be the largest music and art compilation in the history by single artist. Though, breaking or setting such record is not really interesting or relevant to me, just a by-product of composing and producing almost non-stop in high gear last decade or so. Like Snoop Dogg Lion said in a video interview for Starsky & Hutch in this vein, “That I am not pursuing Film career to win an Oscar, but I am definitely there if axed [sic]“.
That’s that. To get things started, below is first short excerpt from one frantically written text about creativity, will power and so on.
Originally written in July 2003.
TITLE: [undisclosed]
…from ancient culture and civilization called “COPY & PASTE”. Some have read some of these documents and some have not.
Internet is just a tool to share ideas and promote yourself, it does not change the fact that less than one percentage of all people will be successful in their career in showbiz. Most of the artists out there are without aim and do not take risks and generally just fall into self-delusional cycle when chasing their break and overnight success through “oh-another-cool-but-useless” OMD [online music distributor], I think the key factor in these much diverse times is to find those 10 000 to 30 000 hard core fans. After that the hardest part is as always to transform that fan base and social equity into a proper media coverage and true momentum and then into a revenue stream.
You could make an argument that Internet has boosted the competition thru the roof. The sheer volume of wannabes just amazes me sometimes. It seems at glance that there is much more artists to compete with, which logically would mean it is much harder to get attention. Reality is likely that in some ways it is harder to break through and in some ways much easier and they balance out. Same bedroom musicians were doing their thing prior MP3 and online music boom, but no easy way to get heard or shamelessly plug their doodles.
Now those same people suddenly think they turned overnight stars after rising in some arbitrary list on some random website. Reality is that you compete with that one percentage of true talent and ambition like always, thus the competition is not harder, it is just as hard as always. Bottom line being that there is just tons more crap to be swiped from the sight. “You can’t polish dirt. I don’t wanna know about dirt. I got dirt all over my Internet shoes I’m still trying to get off.”
For seeing things without bullshit that clogs the 7-second thinking layer you need to cut the crap and get to basics to start building good from scratch. Purity is found by rare and when they do, they will caress and nurture those seeds of thought and save it for future use whenever it is needed in midst of LIFE. Persistence is the only thing that counts. Human creature is obsessed by pursue of. As you face that and really grab the essence of that thought you really begin to enjoy the journey and accept the infinite pursue of happiness as a state of being, not something that happens in the future, but something that is NOW.
There is no such thing as absolute happiness and there is no such thing as absolute unhappiness. There are only levels of being satisfied and being not. As we oscillate from being satisfied to being hungry of – things. The more you become aware of that cycle, the more you start freeing yourself from desperation and learn to accept life as it is.
To succeed you have to be talented, you need an ingenious mind to some degree and you need to educate yourself with the things you need in your path, but alone those qualities take you nowhere.
“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On! has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”
― Calvin Coolidge
Persistence and determination ultimately decides whether you will rise high above the sky or flush down the toilet in your path (or bath). In other words, obsession is needed, but being blinded because of it is to be avoided. Human EGO is #1 motivator, originator and at the best it is fuel to enrich the culture. Big EGO’s reflect. Big EGO’s irritate and create friction. Friction creates warmth and without warmth there is no life.
I try to live my daily life with a thought ‘DOING – DID’, and I already went and did it to focus on what is NOW.
