If you've been to this blog before, you know all about the Brainport, but to briefly recap, it's a device that trains the brain to use the taste center for balance. For a detailed description on how the Brainport works, please go here.

I’ve had balance and vertigo issues ever since a 2006 fall drove a bit of bone into my cerebellum, and the Brainport is the ONLY thing I've tried that seems to help. But might it have other benefits, too? Specifically, might the Brainport aid my riff development? I think so, and here's why:

To use the Brainport, I have to stand stock still with my eyes closed for 20 minutes a session -- twice a day. Now, 20 minutes might not seem like a very long time, but trust me, it’s an eternity. What to do during this period? Meditate. Yeah, sounds easy, but it's not, especially if you're like me and blessed with a mind that is about as able to focus as a lab rat's during experiments to determine the drug interactions between LSD and speed.

Anyway, after several failed attempts at meditating while first trying a Brainport-like device in Madison, Wisconsin, I finally pleaded for help. "What should I do?" I asked Yuri dejectedly. (Yuri is the chief scientist behind further Brainport development at the University of Wisconsin.) Yuri told me to think of something I really enjoy. He also suggested that I visualize my dizziness as a giant wheel. Hmmm... after giving the matter some thought, I managed to combine these two notions into a vision of myself on-stage playing Rolling Stones songs. There I was, Strat is hand, crowd gazing up rapturously and, to my right, my friend Toby belting out slightly altered lyrics (he likes to insert thoughts on Depends™, proctology, Oakland and Republicans). And the giant wheel? It became a stage prop blowing a rock and roll breeze across the festivities. In other words, Yuri's idea worked like a charm.

But getting back to riffage...

I’m pretty sure all this intense mental focus on music will help me with my own efforts to craft a hook or two. Part of it, of course, is that I find the songwriting process itself to be somewhat meditative. In fact, I read once that one of the reasons Keith Richards, the Human Riff, was so creative from about 1967 to the early 70s was that his heroin use allowed him to go into a trance like state, during which he could happily play the same progression again and again for hours or even days, all the while making little changes until the perfect riff bloomed. One of the best examples of a song that benefited from the meditative effects of heroin is Gimme Shelter, or at least that’s what I remember reading. Anyway, I’m not exactly interested in trying heroin, but I think my new found meditative method could yield good results if I modify my visualization topic slightly. I need to go from visualizing myself stepping on stage and performing Rolling Stones songs, to simply “playing” my guitar and searching for interesting riffs. I’ve written songs this way before -- using visualization -- but never consistently. Curious to see how it works out. And since I’m going to be doing my Brainport treatment twice a day from now until I’m well, that means I'll be doing sixty songwriting sessions a month. I’d better get at least one riff a week or I suck!

Stay tuned.

Then the post reminded me of the time I tried to walk away from writing, or at least songwriting. It was probably in 1989 or '90, and I was in a band with my friend Toby, and I just decided I didn't have the talent, so I quit the band and headed off into advertising. Was this the right decision? I'll never fully now, but what I do know is this: if you like to write, which means you like to write from the heart, you are about as able to walk away from writing as a mammal is from air; it's just not going to work out for very long. 

I held out for nearly 15 years, sort of. Along the way, I dabbled in writing every now and then, attempting a song here and short story there, but I never committed to finishing anything, which was my out. Of course, I was also never entirely free of the writing curse, for it is a curse, and my accident was just the thing to weaken me, so that the writing demon could reassert his curse in my psyche. But I'm okay with it. In fact, I'm glad for it. Because for all the agony writing creates, doing without it is even more agonizing. For those 15 years I set writing aside, I thought about it constantly, but never acted. And as I wrote my ad headlines, I felt hollow and cheap; it was like sex without love, but it didn't even feel very good.

So demon though it may be, the desire to write is a part of who I am and I need to embrace it (and maybe kick it in the shin a few times).

And my dinner? Amazing. Every bit as good as any self respecting SF establishment and consisting of a warm spinach salad with bacon and goat cheese, followed by ling cod, and crowned with something involving ice cream, thus good. It was all washed down with a few glasses of pinot gris from some local grapes. And the price? Well, that's the tragic part. Thanks to the ever spending ways of the Dubya, the US dollar has fallen by roughly half against the Canadian dollar in the past ten years, so the price was, well, kinda high for one soul. Afterwards, I headed back up to my room -- the restaurant I sampled is in the hotel -- and snoozed with dreams of a non-dizzy brain.

As I write this, the time is roughly 8:20 AM, and soon I will be showered and coffeed and ready to be taxid to Wicab's offices to pick up my Brainport, the device that should help me get better faster. I can't wait!

PS - Last night a posted a somewhat lousy post and it has been removed.

First and foremost, SonicBids offers promoters and artists a chance to connect, enabling promoters to find artists for gigs and for artists to find gigs. SonicBids' whizzbang idea is what they call an EPK, or Electronic Press Kit, which is essentially a web page you fill out with info about yourself, samples of your music and a few pics. Naturally, because an EPK is onlne, promoters can access it and you can point folks to it very easily. For example, here's mine.

Now, I'm not exactly a performer, so this aspect of SonicBids doesn't really appeal to me. However, SonicBids also lists literally hundreds of opportunities for artists to get their stuff into contests, onto sampler CDs, even onto commercials and the like. Sounds cool, right? Not so fast.

When I signed on to SonicBids, I assumed that since they charged their members for every opportunity -- plus demanded a monthly fee -- they vetted all the promoters and opportunities they link their readers to. Nope. They're like a hooker on on the streets of Russia. Anything goes. So if you sign up for SonicBids, it's up to you to read about each opportunity that interests you and to determine for yourself if it's both legit and right for how you want to present yourself. I learned this the hard way by spotting an opportunity that seemed perfect, submitting, getting selected and then discovering that the outfit behind the opportunity barely had a web site. In fact, I'm still not sure there's an actual company out there that has my stuff! I alerted SonicBids, but they pretty much ignored me. And took my money. Like a good hooker.

Anyway, all of this is not to say that SonicBids is crap. It's not, it's a cool service. You just have to shoulder the responsibility of figuring out whether an opportunity you want to take advantage of is the real deal.

In a nutshell, when an idea flashes into existence in your brain, it is not an act of God or a random event. Rather, it seems to be the result of the cortex initiating some waves in the right brain, which propagate along in a pretty random fashion before suddenly coalescing into something coherent -- and possibly brilliant -- and ripple back up through to the pre-frontal cortex, from which a signal gets sent to your vocal chords and you go, "Holy s--t!". Or something like that. Anyway, the cool takeaway for me from the article was the clear, scientific evidence for not trying to force creativity. The best approach is to think hard, really go at it, and then, when you feel like you're simply at wit's end, go for a walk or just find some way to let your mind wander. I can't say how many times this has happened to me while writing songs. I work and work and work, try this word or that, pluck a chord, hum a melody, all for naught, and then, maybe as I'm brushing my teeth or, yes, out for a walk, the solution will hit me. Nine times out of ten, when I try the idea on the guitar or hum it over a chord, it works. And if it doesn't, it leads to something that will. My kinda theory! A rationale for daydreaming!

Sadly, the benefits of CN-NINM do not last forever after such a short period of treatment, and my brain is already reverting to its dizzy ways. Worse, I can only buy the Brainport, not a CN-NINM device, so while my home treatment program will certainly help, the benefits I experience won't be as dramatic as what I experienced in Wisconsin. So my plan going forward is to buy the Brainport and use it daily, plus go out to Wisconsin 3-4 times a year for CN-NINM treatments. Sounds like a pain, I know, but I am DESPERATE to get better, so if this is what it takes, so be it.

Once again, thank you to the team in Wisconsin, lead by Yuri Danilov and Mitch (sorry Mitch, didn't get a photo of you!) and assisted by Kelsey and Joe.

I confess, I’ve always thought that being holed up alone in a hotel room in a strange town would be the ultimate songwriting/recording scenario. Au contraire. Perhaps if the weather were a blizzard, rain or nuclear winter, such a scenario would be great. But here in Madison, Wisconsin, the weather is balmy, breezy and bodaciously nice -- from sunup to long past sundown. So even though I packed my laptop, external drive, Steinberger guitar, book on songwriting and Digidesign MBox 2 Micro*, I wrote not a note and recorded nada. Lyric writing was another matter. As you can see from the photo at left, I found a nice coffee shop (okay, a Starbucks) and once I figured out how to use my Blackberry Curve as a broadband modem connected via BlueTooth, I was in business. I blogged, surfed, worked on verses and choruses and emailed from this upper terrace -- as I am now -- while back at my empty hotel room my recording gear sat and gathered moss.

* If you, like me, fancy the idea of getting some serious song work done on the road, you might be tempted to get a Digidesign MBox 2 Micro. SAVE YOUR MONEY. The Micro has no record capabilities at all -- which I knew when I bought it, but didn’t fully appreciate the full suckage of this fact -- and is basically nothing more than a dongle that allows Pro Tools to work. Yet it costs $249! Sure it comes with Pro Tools, but who cares? If you’re buying this detuned piece of junk, YOU ALREADY HAVE PRO TOOLS. Damn, I’m pissed. Anyway, for less than fifty bucks more, I could have got the MBox 2 Mini, which would have been a FAR better choice, as it has audio inputs yet is only slightly larger. If Digi were cool, they would sell you this device for about $100 sans Pro Tools, but they’re not, so you pay through the nose for software you most likely already have. Bad, Digi, bad.

Soon, I'll start posting about music again, but as you can imagine, my focus as shifted to GETTING BETTER.