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You are an artist, you are always saying Look at that! Listen to this! Notice the smell of the lilacs! You want all people — because you love all people — to experience the world with the same hunger that gnaws at you. And you want them to know, to really know as you do that all this beauty is constantly disappearing and reappearing, and that the coming and going of vivid sensation is exactly what makes it beautiful.

But counterpoised against this acknowledgment of beauty in death and death in beauty there is the muscularity of your own work. Each of us has a particular discipline, a craft that stands gnarled and brave in the face of time, a carving of the wind, a sinuous dance, a nuanced shout.

New solo shakuhachi CD out now — see http://nyokai.com/newcd.shtml

Through winter the world was flat. I often skated right off it into the night sky. Now the world is round again, and because it is round I can wrap my head around it, I can embrace it.

I am a little off balance, on the verge of dance. All day I play flute because when I stop I fall in love with the first thing I see.

why do I not have goats?

coaxing Blake’s invisible worm into the light

subway riders
small accidental violations of private space
a delicate beating of wings

in the clinic waiting room
a man holds a CD from radiology
“his images”
holds it nervously and somewhat reverently
like a new friendship with a celebrity –
maybe death sidled up to him at a bar
and has his number?

and back to the subway…

Met an old man on the road,
he looked wise, I said Tell me what you know.
He said My day is done, I’m almost gone,
come closer, I’ll teach you to carry on.

He said
One, be lively;
two, be true;
three, find beauty whatever you do;
four, each day be still an hour;
five, rise up with quiet power;
six, give away your broken heart;
seven, make your love your art.

Art, as an experience, is the transformation of matter into energy. Art as object — visual object, sonic object, whatever — is material at the far edge of materiality.

…and unfinished things are my monument for a while.
What I made was always provisional, that’s my justification for this light-weight architecture.
Now I become my world.
Fire and wind lap my ribs, a flood polishes the inside of my skull.
I lack foundation and pretense, and when I go
I will be gone completely.

The twentieth century began with the widening of public discourse. The twenty-first begins with the narrowing.

I’ve always loved the ping and hiss of radiators, which announce themselves so much more lustily with sound than with heat. Sound is their plumage, as it’s mine.

Each day I start to become a musician again.

In improvising you find no great Truth. But there is the possibility, if you dare, of saying something simply and sinuously, without irony or lies.

With the imperfect tool of this body we cut through time, even as time cuts us up.

Many people are like birds who never soar but fly laboriously a few feet above the ground, knowing neither heaven nor earth.

It’s not the soul should clap its hands and sing — the body in all its chaos would be enough.

Moments of drama are the jewels on this bracelet. A momentary vision of shattered bone — a test. Can I see the beauty even in that?

Three beginnings:
He did an ecstatic Rumpelstiltskin-like dance around the fire.
London, 1869 — for some reason the most frightening place and time.
The sun was the color of lemon pie when Ma called the girls in to dinner.

Night has always meant for me an escape from the civilized, a temporary return to that which is not a movie set, not a construction of the human economy and mind, not nature tentatively held captive but totally beyond capture. Night is the crackling of electricity, the pounding of waves, the emptiness of sky. If you have a cellphone with you it is no longer night.

Night is a negative nourishment. Rather than providing material sustenance it provides the radical absence of the human, and without occasional doses of this absence we become stunted cramped animals.

The mind is a mansion of dark rooms, but there is a courtyard. We’ll find it again.

When I took walks it was always to the most remote solitary places I could get to — I was comforted by how immense architecture and nature seem when unencumbered by population.

But now, a few minutes into my aimless wandering, I find myself turning away from Casco Bay and toward the ordinary downtown streets, where the sight of people intrigues and warms me. I don’t think I ever learned about everyday interactions, how to hang out with guys watching football, how to gab about the kids and their schools, how to act cool around beautiful women. A little past halfway to death, maybe I can watch one more time and finally learn something. And just maybe one of these people will penetrate my solitude, suddenly talking with me about something simple and profound.

Starting to give Thai massage again — it’s almost as fun as playing music. In fact, it’s really very similar: you watch your breath, you find rhythms, you enter into an intuitive state as you work your way along somebody’s receptive body. And the bodies are receptive, it is as if they are thirsting for this kind of attentive touch and you are water.

what I want to say to everyone is:
thank you for being in this beautiful dream

For a long time I had an attitude about John Cage’s late music, his so-called number pieces. Though rigorous in some of their compositional methods, I felt they were nevertheless marred by prettiness. Despite is avowed distaste for artistic taste, here was a very tasteful body of work. It was music in which the balance of sound and silence had become a stylistic signature rather than a philosophic declaration; music to be played by professional musicians for the most part on conventional instruments in conventional concert settings; music which included only the politest of “non-musical” or noise elements. It left me craving the yawps of his middle period, the loud sensuality of Cartridge Music, the courage and stamina of Empty Words, the sheer exuberance of Roaratorio or Apartment House. Clearly, the sonic world of the number pieces was much closer to that of his early and lovely string quartet.

I have changed my mind. Though I still often prefer the noise of middle-Cage to the politesse of old-Cage, I understand that for every age there is an appropriate expressive stance. The great Noh playwright and theorist Zeami wrote of “the flower of returning.” The idea is that after a great artist has explored the limits of skill and daring, he or she returns to the simplest of gestures, to the same basic forms of expression practiced at the beginning of a long career. This returning, according to Zeami, is the final creative phase for the very greatest of artists. And the number pieces, for all their contrived gentleness, seem mystically imbued with what has come before, or seem to float on an inaudible sea of noise.

When you’re in good health, dreams are like people who live in the same building but another apartment. You are civil to them, greet them by first name in the hallway or elevator, but you never get too close, never invite them into what you think of as your life.

In sickness, you befriend them. Dreams are suddenly your most intimate companions, or your only companions. Their strangeness no longer seems stange. The dreamworld is seen for what it is, the underside of the fabric you’re made of.

Or you think of ilness as a deviation in gravity. The body, with its web of mind, becomes as a result of pain lighter or heavier than usual, seeing the comings and goings of life from a few feet in the air, or sunk down and swimming through subterranean sounds and images. In either case who you thought you were is just beyond reach, and much smaller than you are now.

The pearl is everything the oyster isn’t. It is the oyster’s accidental foray into capitalism. It is too often cultured, like buttermilk and opera-goers.

The oyster, unlike the pearl, is slovenly and naked. It is scrotal. When you taste an oyster’s juices a veil parts and you are plunged into the immensity of the night sea, your first and last home.

The pearl augments its value by accretion, thanks to the oyster’s constant weeping. For this reason, among others, I am a communist anarchist.

In the dark generative pit of my libido live two archetypal Barbie dolls, barefoot hippie girl and doe-eyed twink boy. Neither would look good accessorized with pearls. Pearls are for Presidents’ wives. A President’s wife is never seen laughing as she takes her socks off and throws them at the camera. Similarly, you’ll never see doe-eyed policemen giggling with pride as they jay-walk with tupperware bowls of fruit salad, but that’s another story.

Some compare the full moon to a pearl, but tonight it dangles like a bare light bulb high in the Baja sky, illuminating oysters all around us.

I’ve begun to accept, in fits and starts, the impermanence of everything, and I have become calmer and happier. It’s the sugar pill hat comes in the second half of life, served up with a staggering variety of pains and losses. I’d like to think it is the inclination toward wisdom if not its acquisition.

I wish I had meditated on impermanence more sincerely when I was twenty. Just as youth is wasted on the young, the prospect of death is wasted on the old.

We wake up,
look at each other and laugh.
Who put these amusing
costumes on us, these
white wigs,
this padding,
these crinkled masks.
There must be some way to
get them off.

My old man was an old man. Sixty-four when I was born, facing death when I was a teenager, he served as a monument to his past, a sagging reminder of his moment in history. As he looked back on his life so did I, his trusty sidekick. His dresser drawers, my foraging grounds, were full of artifacts from the gone world. He, and I through loving him, inhabited a snow globe where the snow was yellow newspaper clippings, top hats, World War I medals, quaint locutions. I was entranced and ashamed.

Now I am old enough to look back on my own life. I can put it next to his on the examination table, see the remarkable similarities: the dogged dedication to art in all its manifestations, the apparent calm marbled with desire or dissatisfaction, the stubbornness and lack of patience, etc. But there is an essential difference. In daily life, even more than music, he was a composer while I have always been an improviser. He turned what he knew into something of substance, while after all these years I continue to privilege process over attainment. I have flirted with the idea of being a “life composer,” but it has never lasted. And so his lesson to me is something else, it is not the usual fatherly sort of thing. And my lesson to my own children, too, must be something else…

My friend Pauline got me to try Facebook, and as a result I’ve heard from several old high school friends. Though they are almost unrecognizable from their photos, in the composite sketch you can put together from their words they seem essentially the same people they were thirty-six years ago. I find this somehow gratifying, as it makes me think it’s true for me as well. Despite participating in the discouraging history of late 20th century capitalism, despite becoming an ecstatic father and grandfather, despite chasing after numerous rewards that turned to smoke or shit, I still stumble happily along the path I happened upon at the twilight of the sixties. My aesthetic and my politics remain unchanged, or have come back around, as has my lifestyle. Only now the dope is stronger, the stakes are higher, and unfortunately at my age I see a tunnel at the end of the light.

We fall asleep into something like our ocean origin, we wake up into what is by contrast the thinnest air. The sensation of tiredness is similar to dropping into the sea. We move our limbs only slowly in the water, the world takes on a darker and darker cast as we sink. We close our eyes, and when we open them inside-out we experience a world as strange, and as strangely familiar, as the ocean floor.

But waking, that is the real shock. Everything is dry, delicate, brittle and bristling. There is always a moment, at least after a night without nightmares, that I think “Do I really want to be here?” Maybe that’s what any artist thinks. We are the caretakers of ocean memories.

Thirty-five years ago nobody except a masturbating Ed Koch or Rudy Giulliani could envision the absolute Disnification of midtown Manhattan. Times Square was all glitter and sleeze — rhinestones in a pig trough — and its edges were among the tawdriest edges in New York. Consumerism then wasn’t Starbucks and Lion King souvenirs, it was getting propositioned by a midget hooker, or the guy with a sandwich board endlessly shouting “Take a sneaky peaky, leave da wife outside!” I liked it much better back then, the syphilitic city still wheezing on its deathbed, before the corporate undertakers traipsed in, snuffed it, and put Mouse ears on the corpse.

The old New York, or more specifically the old Theater District, is epitomized for me by the long-defunct Jimmy Ray’s bar on Eighth Avenue, a little piece of heaven, purgatory or hell depending on how liquored up you were. Jimmy himself was a saint — a stocky Irish ex-truckdriver with baby blue eyes who would let just about any loser run a tab. I know, because I was eighteen at the time with no prospects of material success and ended up owing Jimmy hundreds of dollars before I moved on with my life. And you felt safe, because once you were part of the family Jimmy or his well-muscled bartender Huey would defend you in any scuffle.

Jimmy’s was a watering hole for theater people, but a watering hole at the crumbling outskirts of that world — of any world.

Some of its denizens had seen much better days, such as Cecil B. DeMille starlet Olive Deering who was collapsed on the bar most nights, or Front Page director and old-school queen Harold Kennedy who pranced around boasting of his enduring friendship with Kitty Carlyle. Or the non-theater regulars, Mosely and the Judge. Mosely was a business man of some sort who wore polyester suits and a gigantic pinkie ring. After he heard in passing that I was a fledgeling writer he used to buy me drinks (on his eternal tab) and shout “You’re the best damn playwright around, kid, you’ll make a million.” His best friend the Judge — I can’t remember how he got that moniker — inhabited a chair in the corner, doubled over in a ragged overcoat, coughing himself to death and occasionally sitting up long enough to tell a few war stories.

Some of its denizens were yet to see better days, the up and coming stars who weren’t always comfortable with the more sedate and ferny world of Joe Allen’s restaurant around the corner. I got drunk a few times with Al Pacino, for instance, and I remember him showing me his fancy new watch over and over, the first digital watch I’d ever seen. Other up-and-comers were more interesting. Carol Kane became a friend — she was only two years older than me, and we shared the solidarity of angsty youth.

But most of Jimmy Ray’s denizens didn’t quite fit into either of these categories: they inhabited a twilight world between up-and-coming and already-gone, a sort of purgatorial showbiz realm that seemed to have its own language and code of behavior. They were settled in a fog-machine fog. They got smaller parts than they used to get, or slightly bigger. They played villains in cop shows, or prostitutes. They knew everyone on both coasts, and they were career alcoholics. An example: Robert L. As a child I had watched him on TV, when he’d been the heroic handsome star of a popular adventure show. I’d even had a boyhood crush on him, wanting him to be my father, and I suspect that my later interest in flying was not unrelated to dreams of Bob in his leather flight jacket. Now, oddly, he seemed to have a crush on me. He used to come into Jimmy Ray’s high on some combination of booze, cocaine, and who knows what else. He often had his “LA friend” in tow, a boy a little older than myself wearing a fur vest and hideous makeup. Bob was still very handsome, with a chiseled masculine face and a deep booming voice, a sort of Jason Robards for dummies. He draw pictures of me on napkins that I gave away to some of my girlfriends, who were not impressed. Our conversations were surrealistic at best, dadaist on average. Bob was pretty typical of Jimmy Ray’s customers, and I had many similarly strange relationships.

I doubt that anything like this exists these days, a meeting place free of class rancor, gay-friendly, and only slightly racist and sexist. There was a we’re-all-in-this-hell-hole-together feeling that I can’t imagine in the new New York. If home is where you can hang your hat even if it’s a very funny hat, we’re all homeless now.

Should I write an autobiographical novel? It would have to start something like this:

” Time itself is a time-bomb, he thought: at first ticking unbearably slowly as you wait for the sun to rise on Christmas morning, for your half-drunk father to move his checker piece, for the afternoon school bell to ring, for the swirling chemicals of puberty to settle in calm pools in your body. Then one day you realize the bomb has exploded, noiselessly, maybe while you were napping, unleashing its terrible radiation that kills your grandparents, turns your schoolyard buddy into a fat-assed banker, withers your lovers, one by one fells family and friends until you are left alone at the cold heart of the blast, facing the absolutely unknowable.

“Or sometimes he thought: It was just a quick succession of colors, from the achingly delicate chartreuse of spring to the bitter green of summer to the ironically self-congratulatory reds of fall to the broken brown of winter, just a speedy anonymous and ultimately meaningless transformation that buries personal history. And if we’re going to do the season metaphor, he thought, then why not the time of day thing too: my youth so vivid I shivered with delight, waking to the sun and wind both in the pines, etc.

“He thought these thoughts, but we need not be concerned with them as truth or myth, as apt metaphor or stoner head-trip, but only as momentary mind events, in themselves tiny elements of his story, for we are dealing with particulars here, yes, though we cannot build a wall that stands up to the sea we can fashion a net of tiny shimmering knots, permeable and strong in its permeability, a lived life.

“It was a makeshift life, improvised with little thought to staying in one key, held together, as they say, with bubble gum and rubber bands. Since he came from some privilege it was very good bubble gum and very good rubber bands. The bubble gum (money) went toward piecing together a life spent in the arts, though often in the shallow end of that pool; the rubber bands (a family tradition of discipline) held together wildly disparate elements of a personality that threatened to spin out into the farthest galaxies of insanity.

“But the particulars, the particulars. There can be no net without the knots. Let’s start, for no particular reason, with Doctor G.”

Just started a new project, Dharmasong Publications, dedicated to the relationship between Buddhism and music. Check it out at http://dharmasong.com and download a PDF copy of my pamphlet Listening.

Suffering is universal but individual. We each have different attachments and aversions. One man’s amused complaint is another’s suicide note.

And yet despite a huge range of emotional reaction to circumstance, there are clearly some circumstances that increase the probability of individual suffering. First and foremost is poverty, with its henchmen starvation, ill health, and crime. (Starvation, ill health, and crime would not disappear with the elimination of poverty, but would become chance woes rather than routine systemic violence.)

How strange that the largest factor affecting the probability of suffering could be completely eliminated by human agency, having been invented by human greed. This is what makes me political, what makes me an anarchist communist. It is not enough to counsel individual non-attachment. I am still left crying for a billion children.

You’re out walking in the woods or through a meadow. You start to notice details — distant sparks of color, faint odors, the sound of twigs cracking, the precise texture of the ground against your soles. Hundreds of sensual details bombard you, and your attention becomes more and more refined as it races from one to the next until suddenly everything fits together in a unified whole that includes even you. Subject and object are not clearly demarcated: It would be hard to separate hearing from sound, for instance. You no longer reach out from your body to grab discrete experiences, you are simply a part of it all, as if in an art museum a painting magically sucked you into its design.

The bombardment of the senses with nature’s detail has not caused “sensory overload” and fatigue but has instead awakened you to a state of alertness beyond that you usually experience. In this state you are endowed with powers, too, that you don’t usually possess. You can run full speed across the rocky forest floor or rough meadows without tripping. You can hop across creeks fearlessly. You can find your way.

There is nothing mystical about this state of grace: It is simply our neurological birthright as a predatory species. It’s the state that let’s us see or smell still-live food in the distance, find a particular plant in a thicket, sense the danger at our back. And our attention to these minutiae triggers the brain chemistry that weaves it all together into whole cloth. This is the pleasure of rediscovering our animal nature, our humanity.

the storm

(knocks down walls, unhides lives
as they are now, as they’ve always been,
the poor a nation huddled between stores)

reveals our mundane catastrophe

Often I have mentioned the beauty of the broken. And yet after years confronting my own brokenness — a broken childhood, a broken education, a broken marriage, several broken careers, maybe even a broken mind — it’s nothing aesthetic I see in this wide swath of ineptitude. Oddly, it’s something practical: a resolute repeated privileging of possibility over form. In my ruins the worms can do their necessary work — and I, too, am one of the worms.

For many styles of music, a significant component of the art is the small subtle ornamentation, sounds often referred to as “grace notes.” These sounds are most effective when they go almost unnoticed, executed with such precision and delicacy — such grace — that they flit in and out of consciousness like a slight change of lighting or a momentary (was it really there?) odor of lilacs.

In some styles, for instance the Japanese shakuhachi tradition I am most familiar with, these grace notes are the essence of the music. Besides the quick note preceding a longer one, there are dozens of “grace effects”: tiny downward or upward pitch glides, barely audible finger taps, slight variations in breath as transparent as a breeze, sudden short pauses in an otherwise unbroken melody. The larger gestures — the basic notes and rhythms — provide a framework on which to hang this subtler world of sound and silence.

And I think that if there is any grace in life it is also in the grace notes: not in the grand gestures or the larger life events that infect us all with similar joys and miseries, but in moments of untranslatable revelation that we only notice when we’ve acquired the habit of stillness.

Because so many do not play, because so many are bound to a suicidal work ethic, because so many have lost the ability to loll inside their imaginations…

because of this, I must play more fully. And I must find ways to bring play back to those who most need it, to help in some small way to keep uncommercial unmediated art from disappearing.

For many years I was a connoisseur of loneliness. There was the loneliness of the broken midnight streets, that was dry white wine. There was the loneliness of bicycling through the empty country, or through sunny towns full of unseeing townspeople, that was bitter coffee. It was all delicious in its strong flavors, in its infinite precise variety.

Then I had a family. When you have a family you have a world, and you carry it with you, and you are not lonely. (Atlas had a backache, but he was never alone.) For years I did not know loneliness. I knew everything else: joy, grief, contentedness, despair… but the subtlety of bitter tastes was no longer available to me.

Then the children grew up, and loneliness returned. But it is plain and simple now, a single flavor. You cannot be a connoisseur of the coming all-consuming nothingness.

Remembering Peter van Riper’s beautiful hologram of the dancer Simone Forti repeating one simple movement, the small glowing green image of her body suspended in space…

But how much more beautiful if it had been a flipbook, passed around from person to person…

Not long ago “American independent film” meant Stan Brakhage, Yvonne Rainer, Jonas Mekas, Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren. Now it means Sundance and big expensive mediocrities supported by the same old media giants on dress-down day.

Not long ago modern literature meant modernist literature, intelligent language constructs that challenged our sensibilities and explored the mysterious deep sea of our humanity. Now it’s object lessons and cautionary tales, bedtime stories for big babies. For the large publishers, Paul Auster marks the far fringe of experimentalism.¹

Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany saw a similar privileging of trite advice-art over innovation. In both those cases it was the state that dictated the swing toward mediocrity. In our case it is the corporate world, which has largely replaced the state as the primary agent of intellectual repression. The little fables of Nazi and Stalinist cinema were designed to keep monsters in power; the mediocre narratives of today further the corporate monster’s dream, a world of easy-going liberal consumers who scarcely see the reflection of their casual misery in the shop windows.

1. To be more precise about all of this, modernism did not mark the end of narrative or even the subversion of narrative, but rather the expansion of narrative to include our non-linear inner lives. [↩]

Photography, film: images hidden on celluloid until chemically tricked into revealing themselves. I could not know exactly what would be brought to light — the time between shooting and processing was a pregnancy, an artistic silence full of potential energy.

It was not so different with writing. I wrote by hand in a barely readable scrawl. I experienced the stories and poems as rough and unformed — embryonic — until I had them typed. It was only then that I felt I could really see what I had wrought.

Or music: I could hear in my head what I wrote on manuscript paper, but the music itself lived in a shadowy world of potential until performed by instrumentalists. It was always a surprise.

All these dark seed-in-the-ground pauses have been eliminated by digital technology. What have I lost?

There was an excitement that seemed at times erotic, like the anticipation of a lover’s visit.

There was an imposed pacing to the work that always reminded me I was collaborating with chance.

In short there was night, real night, without 24-hour convenience and car sirens.

I must find new ways to get night back.

The “rock and roll moment” coincided almost exactly with my youth, and so I really have to write one of these songs:

I was born in nineteen fifty-four
when rock and roll came knocking on the white man’s door.
Through the driving New York snow
I heard some noises on the radio.
With a sound that promised to set me free
the rock and roll angel’s been looking after me.

I learned to shimmy and to shake with joy
(that’s not easy for a smart little Jewish boy).
I learned to twist and I learned to shout,
started wearing boots, let my hair grow out.
One day it was robots and collecting stamps,
the next day it was reefer and lava lamps.

You know Jimi Hendrix can still make me cry
cause guitar feedback was my teen lullaby.
I coulda been a scientist or mathematician,
I coulda been a lawyer or a rich physician.
Instead I play music and try to stay free
cause the rock and roll angel’s been looking after me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.
(I don’t usually like to talk about angels, either. They’re fucking creepy.)

Check out this literary ebook that I just put together, the mind is a terrible thing to cut and paste. It’s a selection of my older writings, mainly from the 90’s, written for my own amusement and the amusement of friends. Enjoy!

one leaves a daughter
one leaves a son
one leaves a prayer in the muzzle of his gun
one leaves his innocence
one leaves his sin
one leaves his childhood dreams
one just leaves his skin

one leaves his dogtags
one leaves an arm
one leaves the parents who kept him from harm
one leaves the sisters who taught him to be kind
one leaves his body where another lost his mind

one leaves in pieces
one leaves intact
one leaves in uniform
one leaves in a sack
one leaves in a blaze of glory
though one bullet would suffice
one leaves on fire
one leaves on ice

one leaves a daughter
one leaves a son
one leaves a prayer in the muzzle of his gun
one leaves his innocence
one leaves his sin
one leaves his childhood dreams
one just leaves his skin

Already the news media are announcing the run-up to the presidential election. Thank goodness, at last they’ll have a really good excuse to avoid reporting on the slaughter in Darfur, the AIDS epidemic in Africa, populist insurgencies in Mexico and South America, and other distasteful topics. But there’s one personal announcement I better get out of the way before all meaningful dialog is subsumed by the noise of political showtime.

I don’t vote.

In America, where Democracy rides sidecar to God down the highway of illusion, this is tantamount to calling yourself an atheist. (Oh yeah, I’m an atheist too. A non-voting atheist. You wouldn’t want your daughter to marry me. Probably not your son, either.)

I don’t vote because I don’t accept the authority of the state, it’s as simple as that. Voting assumes that the ruling class has a right to rule, it implicitly grants them dominion over us.

Here are some of the reactions I encounter when I tell people I don’t vote:

“But as a citizen it’s your duty to vote. You receive the benefits of our system, so you owe it your participation.” Or more succinctly: “Voting is a duty, not a right.” (Make it short and punchy and it can sound like the Truth. Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco.)

Nope, I don’t owe anything. I never signed up for any of this, the genocide or the lattes. Yes, like any beggar artist I accept what’s given me, but I will not lift a finger to perpetuate a system I don’t accept.

“Though it may not do any good in the long run, voting for particular individuals may improve things in the short run.”

This is true. I’m not forcing you not to vote. For me, it is more valuable to abstain from participation and to get my point of view out there. I’m working on cultural change, on the popular non-accep