News flash! The world is F***ed up. Does that come as a surprise to anyone? I doubt it. It is very easy to see. You don't have to look hard to see a problem. You don't have to think hard to find something/someone to complain about. What IS hard though is to BECOME the solution. THAT requires effort. It isn't passive aggressive lurking in the shadows waiting for someone else to come along and clean it up. What if each one of us BECAME the solution? How quickly would we see the world change? By the way...this is to me.
I wonder if God is somewhere praying just as hard to US to see that we ALREADY have the power to change and we just need to DO it.

TONIGHT! At the El Rey theater. A few of us will be rolling out to see our friends in Copeland play songs from their new record. I love this record so much and I am amped for this show. If you live in the LA area come out and say hi.

In the last four days I have had the kind of surreal life I would have hoped for here in LA. After the studio a few days back, Dave, Benji and I stopped by to see our management mates the Fray at the Wiltern. Strangly enough when we got escorted back stage, the first person we saw was a wasted Bob Saget. The face of family TV is a hilarious dirty old man. If anyone saw him on this season's Entourage you know what I mean!
I got to eat dinner at the coolest sushi restaurant (Yamashiros) I have ever eaten at. It is this crazy exact replica of a famous Japanese temple on the top of the hill overlooking all of LA. I had to drive up this tiny, windy road and when I finally got to the top the view was really amazing.
Capitol took us to see the Lakers play the Bulls on sunday night and we sat on the tenth row center looking right at Jack Nicholson.
I tool a hike to the top of the hill at Runyon Canyon Park, watched sunset and met a spiritual
guru... ridiculous.
Today we got taken to a secret Nike showroom and given a crazy awesome shopping spree. We got ushered into this unmarked building and taken into a room with no doors or windows. The head of entertainment marketing met us and opened a door in the wall that led to a secret room. The only things in the room were two super modern chairs and a couch. The walls were made entirely glass that was glowing white and there were no normal doors. He then proceeded to open up various other secret doors in the wall and led us into crazy rooms that were set up with displays of all the newest Nike shoes and clothes. They told us to look around and pick out anything we wanted and they scanned it into a huge computer pad. It was like being inside a crazy futuristic movie. After we finished looking around they took us into another secret doorway into another large room with a basketball court, a DJ set up, a large screen TV and a fully stocked fridge. Fifteen minutes later a guy rolled in a huge cart with all these different bags. Each bag had our respective names on it and was filled with our size and color of each item we had just picked out. Unreal.
Thats about half of it. I am too tired to tell the rest but maybe later. Goodnight friends:)

When I was a kid I used to watch life out the window of a car on long drives when my family would take trips. My favorite thing was to drive at night and stay awake as long as I could watching the stars pass overhead. I would lay on my back and look up through the window as trees would momentarily eclipse my view of the night sky like patches of shadow.
I had a walkman. One of those old yellow portable tape players. It was the single most important "thing" I owned. Rivaled only by my bike. But those two in combination were the recipe for utopia in my eight year-old world. On long drives or bike rides I would imagine the music was a soundtrack to my own personal movie. My perspective... staring me. I would try to pick songs that "matched" the scenery and speed of things that were passing by. I had no idea why it worked or it didn't but even at that age there was no denying the power of appropriate harmony between music and a moment you are living. When the trees pass by in perfect rhythm. Or a flock of birds darts out in front of you in perfect time with a symphonic climax in the song. Some I remember more vividly than others and most are long since forgotten, leaving behind only the dusty memory of appreciation and a unique sense of order like the universe was somehow trying to tell me its secret.
I finally got the chance to explore that secret when I entered college. I was fortunate to have a couple of professors that believed in trying a new approach and together we created a degree program for me called "aesthetic theory." The basic goal was to study the human response to art and beauty from the perspective of as many fields of knowledge as possible. It was amazing. I got to really dig deep into what I was passionate about and it was truly rewarding. The only downside is that it is completely impractical and if music doesn't work out I am in serious trouble... :)
Anyway. Remaining optimistic! One of the coolest things that happened during this education was a research grant that I won to study the similarities between color and sound. I would like to take you down the path of discovery that led me to give my life to this band and this ever evolving journey. I can't help but to still be led by the quite voice of something deeper; something beyond me that whispers beauty and order into the ears of those willing to stop and listen.
To do that as efficiently as possible I am going to ask you to spend a few minutes reading through this excellent synoptic article by Sean A. Day. It will familiarize everyone with some of the terms (in particular "synaesthesia" and "perfect pitch") that we will begin to use in this discussion. I can't wait to get into this with you all and please feel free to ask any questions you have and we will try to figure it out together.

http://www.thereminvox.com/article/articleview/33/1/5/

Let me begin by establishing that the theory M.A.E. is not a claim made by the band mae. In other words, while we are always striving to create a complete idea and layer meaning in a way that allows people to discover it in layers, we don't think that we have it all figured out in the least! Art is like a huge puzzle that you are always trying put together and sometimes the pieces just fit effortlessly and other times you have to wait. By calling our band mae it is more of a declaration of intention. A beginning. A pursuit opposed to an arrival. We need to establish that because any connection you experience (like the booklet for example) is experiment not law. In any process of trial and error there will always be error so we don't want anyone to think that WE think we have it all figured out.

WHAT IS MAE?

I know that is potentially a very cliche way to start this discussion but at the same time I don't know that it has ever been formally addressed. So here it is.
1. Multisensory
2. Aesthetic
3. Experience.

1. Dealing with more than one sense (sight + sound, or touch + taste + smell, etc)
2. Dealing with beauty or the humans response to beauty
3. Something that happens.

The basic idea is a living moment that is capable of engulfing you into a realm of appreciation. Please begin to ask and the point will start to emerge.
BEAR T.IA MART.

In 1965, statistician I.J. Good described a concept similar to today's meaning of the singularity, in “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine”:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.

www.singlist.org