During my MIT years, when I wasn’t studying for Calculus tests or dancing in a cage (that’s another story), I was in a band called Modern Man. The band had four members, all from my fraternity ADP. They were Jeet Singh (founder, lead singer, composer), Joe Chung (base player, backing vocals), Mike Fleshman (guitar), and yours truly (keyboard with a bit of lead singing). We wrote and recorded our own music and played around boston. It’s been decades so I am hoping that instead of threatening me with legal action for posting their music the band will refresh my memory with some entertaining stories to add to this post. A few things I do remember are:
Performing at one rather famous place for live music (the name escapes me but I’ll update the blog once I get the story straight) and seeing that tons of bands had signed their names on the dressing room wall including “The Cars” and “The Ramones”.
Playing at the Battle of the Bands at Harvard and almost cracking open someones skull when I kicked the mic stand onstage (oops)
Playing at our frat for a crowd of screaming women with big bows in their hair (our Fab Four Moment for sure)
Getting airplay on Boston’s local alternative radio station WFNX.
I can’t think of any funny PG-13 stories about the band at the moment but I did want to post some of our music for old times’ sake.
Confession Time: Ever since the 7th grade, I have wanted to be a pop star. In the 90s this took the form of Hunter Sunday.
As Hunter, I wrote and recorded some music, did some photo shoots and performed around San Francisco.
My favorite and final gig was at the “Halloween in the Castro” street festival. To prepare, I rented a gorilla suit without the face mask, bought a plastic orange jack o lantern and purchased several bags of candy. The event was staged at the South East corner of Market, Noe and 16th Streets. I showed up about an hour before my 11pm “curtain”, changed into my costume, filled my jack o lantern with candy and gave my music to the sound engineer. I was all set.
What I didn’t expect was the crowd. The performers were hanging out behind the stage and had no sense of the audience.
(Note 1 to Reader: To get a feel for the experience, start playing the music now)
(Note 2 to Reader: No player? Try http://www.kehle.com/2009/08/12/will-you-be-there/ )
When my music started, I remember climbing the stairs to the stage and looking out at a sea of people. Every single street for as far as I could see was packed with human beings. I was exhilarated. I began throwing candy into the crowd and shouting “Trick or Treat!”. Much to my amazement, in spite of the late hour, children started coming out from this sea of adults to grab the candy. And they were so happy! So excited! I don’t think I have ever made so many people so happy with such a simple act. I was a wonderful gift to me and was a great way to end my adventures as Hunter Sunday.
PS. I want to thank the engineers at SGI who made a workstation that read DAT tapes and had a great digital audio editor. This event not have happened without your equipment. And special thanks to Kerry Jaggers for making sure the live performance sounded good and finally to Fred Drake for recording my tracks at the Rancho De La Luna. Love you guys!
It’s been a couple of years since the last blog makeover, so I decided to change my blog around.
I’ve left blogger (good-bye blogger!) and returned to wordpress. I enjoyed the simplicity of blogger but I wanted a little more flexibility (e.g. the ability to add pages) than blogger provides.
Helped write a software clone of the Macintosh for Quorum Software Systems.
I hold a B.S. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which is probably why people let me get away with these sorts of things.
For pleasure and less profit I have been involved in a number of other projects including
writing, recording and performing music
modeling for fashion and art photographers
writing prose
dancing
performing (plays, costume parties, etc.)
hanging out with interesting people and get into all sorts of mischief
Each of these bullets contains at least one story. With any luck I will write about them sooner rather than later.
Yes I am woefully behind on my blog (and my improvement program).
April has been the month of slack. I’m not sure whether this is from over-training, changing my diet/supplement regiment or plain ol’ burnout. A three month run was pretty good but I’ll see about getting back on the saddle in May.
I most definitely did not do what I said I was going to do in March. So what have I learned from my failures? 1. Pick one thing and one thing only – especially for compliance reporting. For some reason I had assumed that you should/could build on tracking the habits you are developing. This doesn’t work for me. Instead it results in habit development burnout. I’m really tired of writing about the habit that I learned in January. What’s interesting is I don’t think anyone explicitly suggested I keep adding to my compliance list. In fact Benjamin Franklin explicitly did not do this – In Ben’s self-improvement program he only focused on one thing at a time. Henceforth, I’m going to do the same. 2. Even though I’m failing, I’m still winning. So I haven’t mastered the art of getting to bed by 11 each night. I’m still becoming a more present person by meditating every day, developing as a singer on a daily basis, and getting in great shape by working out 6 days a week while following a strict diet. I’m made some major behavioral changes in the last three months and now they (mostly) feel like old hat. Also, I am getting better at the 11pm thing. I’ve quit drinking caffeine after noon. I am insisting that I get 8 hours of sleep which means that if I don’t get to bed at 11, I don’t do my singing exercises in the morning before going to work. I’m playing games with my brain until I figure out what works. The rest of the nighttime routine is a piece of cake, so I am almost there.
Tomorrow is the beginning of April. I need to pick my April healthy habit soon!
I have been taking on a lot of new habits lately which I can list in a later post. The habit I need to create for myself is the thing I am not doing – getting to bed on time.
I am waking up every morning at 7 and I really need to try and get 8 hours of sleep – especially with my sleep apnea problems. If I’m not well rested, all other good habits and achievement become unpleasant and difficult and more importantly – I become unpleasant and difficult.
I’d like to get to bed at 11pm every work night (Sunday through Thursday).
There are some things I need to do before going to bed so in this post I am declaring that I will follow a “Nighttime Routine”.
I will do the routine at the same time Sunday through Thursday.
I will do the routine on Friday and Saturday – at some unpredictable time.
I think I waited so long to pick a healthy habit because the two leading candidates: meditating on a daily basis or picking the three things I was going to do during a day, just seemed like too much of a commitment. I didn’t think I could do either of them every single day. My solution to this problem was taken from Jill Bolte Taylor’s “My Stroke Of Insight”. When Jill talks about relearning things after her stroke, she says that things were successfully learned by chopping them into discrete steps where the complexity of each step was manageable by her mind. In the realm of habit creation I take this to mean make the new habit simple enough to be workable.
I had thought that meditating daily meant finding 20 minutes out of my day, every day to meditate. That is so not workable right now. So I thought about 15 minutes, 10 minutes, 5 minutes. All were a no go. What I settled on was committing to counting 10 breaths. In the particular form of meditation I practice, you count your breaths from 1 to 10 and then repeat the count indefinitely. So I am effectively committing to doing 1 unit of meditation. While this main seem like a cop-out, I maintain I will end up doing more meditation by setting this commitment. If I were to commit to 20 minutes a day and knew I couldn’t do it, I would just skip that day’s meditation. But since I am committing a counting 10 breaths, I really have no excuse not to sit down and do it. It’s too easy to not do every single day. And since its the minimum, I might fall into a routine of doing 5, 10, or 15 minutes a day. The point is that I will do something everyday. That will give me a daily foundation from which I can build. My goal is to sit for 20 minutes but will get there one set of breaths at a time.
Speaking of goals – why meditation? What do I hope to gain from it? In the particular form of mediation that I practice, you always start with out the vow “No matter how many sentient beings there are, I vow to save them all from suffering”. This is a very nobel sentiment. I am going to sit with a goal that’s a little more modest. Having seen myself meditate and not medidate over the years, I believe I am a lot more fun to be around when I mediate. I am more relaxed and easy going. If I don’t mediate, I can get really cranky (think godzilla). So the reason I am sitting is to save the people around me from suffering! They shouldn’t have to put up with ’sir-cranks-a-lot’. So this one goes out to all my friends…
