Happy new year everyone!

Hope you had a great holiday season and you are settling comfortably into 2008.

My brother gave me a book for Christmas called “Cradle to Cradle” by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, and it’s got my mind going like crazy. It’s a book that fits into the “environmental” category of today’s literary genres. But it goes far beyond your standard “we need to reuse, reduce, recycle, stop consuming, stop reproducing, stop everything and go back to living in caves” argument posited by a lot of pundits these days. The book makes a lot of points, from why things need to change (obviously) to how most of the “green” solutions that we have today like recycling are inefficient and don’t accomplish what they ultimately are supposed to accomplish (most of these solutions are, more than anything, ways to be “less bad” and don’t really solve the problems, they just delay their disasters). But the bigger picture of the book, and I think the most exciting part of it, is that we need to (and can) use our imaginations to come up with new, smarter, more efficient designs for things. Growth isn’t bad, it’s great, we just need to grow in a way that instead of destroying the world as we grow, we actually replenish it and make it better. Nature accomplishes this with nearly all of it’s designs, from trees to insects. Why can’t we? We have this amazing access to technology now that can essentially create anything we imagine, and relatively quickly. All we need to do is imagine it. For starters, the book itself isn’t even made out of paper, it’s made out of some recycled plastic that can be recycled again an infinite number of times, because it contains no toxics or additives that will weaken it. But it still looks, feels, reads like a book. Brilliant.

If only the music business could be so imaginative. I really don’t like thinking about the business side of music, but as an independent band who handle all of our own affairs, we don’t have much choice. But the old system that was designed, however many years ago, is crumbling. Digital technology has shaken it up and it is falling apart. And it’s actually good, it was a shitty system, poorly designed, and now it’s failing. No real surprise there. But what next? I’m not sure, but all around I see people clinging to the old system, trying to force it to work, even suing their own customers in an attempt to intimidate them into staying within the old system. WTF? And all it seems to accomplish is more people being fired. There’s nothing inspiring about all of that. No hope in it. So what do we all do? How do we build a book out of plastic that keeps all the great things we love about books with none of the drawbacks?

Imagine it. To me, this feels like the most imaginative time I could ever imagine… um, yeah. More than ever before, creating the things we imagine is possible… and fast. Some guy thinks of a new way to turn his sewage into gas to power his car, and boom, a month later, he’s driving around in his shit eating car like a madman. It’s insane. I can’t seem to keep up. But it’s inspiring. To think that basically anything I come up with in my twisted little mind can become a physical reality in the near future, is amazing. The only problem is that I am having trouble actually imagining anything worth manifesting. That’s the key. There’s no excuses anymore. The only real reason “why not” lies in our minds. We (or I, at least) can’t seem to push my mind beyond what it already knows. And that’s where the solutions are, where are future is: beyond the constraints of the present. It’s not easy. If you’ve lived in one room your whole life, it’s not easy to imagine what is down the street and around the corner. You didn’t even know there was a street!

But trying is what’s exciting. Pushing ourselves, dreaming big, reaching beyond what is right in front of us. Do you remember when you were a kid and the shit you would imagine? I had crazy things that I made up. If I ran into a problem, I would just invent some solution, and all was well. Now imagine combining that fearless creativity with fully developed motor skills and the ability to eat a meal without half of it ending up on your shirt! Things are changing everyday. Who knows where it will go? Actually, we all do. It will go where we tell it. The world will become what we imagine it to become. That seems clearer than ever. So imagine well.

m@