Commitment.

Trane- John Coltrane courtesy of umich.edu

Today I was in Dallas recording tracks for the opening of the Car Talk Show. Afterwards we all went out to a jazz club where a relative of our producer was playing with his combo.

It’s a Tuesday night, pretty late in a financial part of the city, so the audience was spare to none. Yet, the band were playing with such passion, as if the place was packed, standing room only. When I asked the pro musician with us, how does it feel to play to an empty room, he replied;” They don’t play to amuse the crowd, they play for themselves, for each other, for the love of music.”

I see why John Hubley loved watching jazz musicians so much. I sometimes love observing Jazz musicians when they are not playing themselves, but digging the music of other musicians. They close their eyes and lose themselves in the currents of sound. They immerse themselves in the music and float on its’ waves. And not just jazz. I saw Mtsizslav Rostropich doing the same during the sections of a cello concerto when he did not have to play. He sat with his eyes closed, an instrument himself, rocking to the waves of sound.

The difference between people who make good animation and great animators is much the same. There are plenty of people who know enough tricks to get by. But as musician C.P.E. Bach once said ” If you rely only on technique and tricks, you are no more a musician than a trained monkey.”

Real artists lose themselves in the work, They lose track of time. Dick Williams called it The Flow. You look up, and suddenly you notice the sun has gone down. The great artists sing from within their soul. They float upon the patterns of thought. Those who have, know what I am talking about.

I wish you all such a similar experience. I may not be the best natural talent, nor the smartest, but I have strived my utmost to use what talent I have been given to achieve that feeling. Regardless of the project or the deadline. I’m not doing it for the client, I’m doing it for me. It is using to the fullest the instrument God has put inside you.


History for 9/26/2007
Birthdays: George Gershwin, T.S. Elliot, John Chapman (also known as Johnny Appleseed)-1774, Winsor McCay-1869, Theodore Gericault -1791, Olivia Newton-John, Cheryl Tiegs is 60, Marty Robbins, Linda Hamilton, Pope Paul VI, Jack Lalanne is 95!, Melissa Sue Andersen, Phillip Bosco, James Cavaziel, Surena Williams

303a.d. -Feasts of Saints Cosmas & Damian . The Syrian twin doctors were nicknamed 'The Moneyless" and this was before HMO's. they were martyred by being crucified, stoned, shot full of arrows, beheaded, then they had to read their own prescriptions.

1650- A Spanish expedition under Don Pedro de Ursua left Peru for the deep Amazon. Lost in the limitless rainforest almost all his men die or go mad. The expedition at one point is taken over by a lunatic conquistador named Aguirre who declared himself 'Emperor of the Kingdom of El Dorado'! The incident is the subject of Werner Herzog's famous movie "Aguirre the Wrath of God".

1687- The Ancient GREEK PARTHENON IS BLOWN UP during a minor Venetian raid on Turkish held Athens. A random shell ignited a gunpowder magazine the Turks had been storing inside of it. For two thousand years the Greek masterpiece had survived mostly intact. Later on in 1801 English Lord Elgin will back up his frigate to the shore and pry off the frieze marble sculptures for his collection.

1739- THE WAR OF JENKINS EAR- A small war between England and Spain started when a Spanish warship stopped an English merchant ship and cut off the ear of the captain named Jenkins. Jenkins ran around Parliament loudly calling for war and waving his ear in a bottle of spirits. He wore his hair long so some doubted that it was his ear in the bottle.

1820- In Defiance Missouri 85 year old frontier scout Daniel Boone died of acute fever and indigestion from eating too many yams. He did all of his exploring without a compass. Someone once asked him - Didn't you ever get lost? He replied, No, but I was once bewildered for three days...

1835- Donizetti’s opera Lucia De Lammermoor premiered.

1863- In a secret meeting several top Confederate generals agree to petition President Jefferson Davis to have their army commander Baxton Bragg, removed for incompetence. This despite his just winning his greatest victory- Chickamaugua. Private soldiers like memoirist Sam Watkins reported that most of Bragg’s army hated him. But Pres Davis was probably the only man in the Confederacy who liked Bragg and kept him in command. Bragg humiliated the mutineers and the rest of his staff refused to talk to him. His next battle, Missionary Ridge, was a decisive defeat.

1887- Emile Berliner patented the gramaphone, rejecting Thomas Edison's cylinder in favor of a flat disc record on a turntable.

1892- The John Philip Sousa Band makes it's first public appearance.

1914- The Federal Trade Commission, or FTC created.

1918- THE MEUSE ARGONNE OFFENSIVE- To the rally cry of Marshal Foch “Everyone to the Battle!” the Allies began the final mass offensive from Belgium to Switzerland to finish the Germans and end World War One. The Big Breakout was done by the fresh American divisions thrown forward by Pershing into the Argonne forest. Led by colorful officers like Douglas MacArthur, the Boy Colonel, who led his men calmly across No-Man's Land without a helmet or gun and dressed in his West Point varsity sweater and cane. MacArthur also started an American military fashion of removing the gromet (wire reinforcement) from his officer's cap and let it slouch rakishly. Captain Harry Truman led his artillery battery as well. After fierce resistance the exhausted German lines finally caved in. The Offensive had started off in a dense fog. A whole Yank battalion got lost and surrounded by Germans. After being rescued they were hailed as the "Lost Battalion". Another American platoon met a stranger fate. They went off Indian style single file into the mist and disappeared completely. No bodies, no reports from enemy or civilians, none of them showed up in German P.O.W. camps after the war.
To this day they are still listed as "missing".

1926- Bullock's Wilshire department store opened. It's Tea Room quickly became the in place for Hollywood Society to see and be seen in.

1937- "Queen of the Blues" Singer Bessie Smith died after a car accident in Mississippi. She crashed her Packard into a parked car. She was 43. One account said she died because she was refused treatment in a segregated hospital but the truth was she was treated by a white doctor at the scene and sent to the nearest hospital, which was a black one.

1939- Nazi scientists led by Rudolph Heisenberg met to discuss how the fission of uranium could be used to create a super bomb. Meanwhile in America Hungarian scientist Dr. Leo Szilard was warning the US government that they better start an atomic program fast. Some say Heisenberg deliberated sabotaged his own experiments to ensure that Hitler would not get atomic weapons, others say that’s baloney and that he just went in the wrong direction.

1941- Max Fleischer's "Superman" cartoon debuts. They were much more expensive that the usual short cartoons- $90,000 to the usual $40,000, but Paramount wanted them.

1955- Eddie Fisher married Debbie Reynolds.

1957- The musical West Side Story opened. The legend goes composer Leonard Bernstein was in the hospital to be operated on for a deviated septum. While recuperating he ran into lyricist Steven Sondheim, who was also recovering from an operation. To pass the time while convalescing they started working on the idea of an updated Romeo and Juliet set to music. One early title discarded was Gang Way!

1960-THE FIRST NIXON-KENNEDY TELEVISED DEBATE. The first televised presidential debate that really ushered in the era of the "media-candidate". People who heard the debate on radio thought Vice President Nixon had won because he scored more points on issues. But far more who saw it on Television lauded Kennedy because of his cool, calm Presidential bearing as opposed to Nixon's pale sweaty-lipped nervousness. For years Nixon put down his electoral defeat to the fact that he refused stage makeup before going on camera .One New York Times analyst recently referred to Kennedy & Nixon as the Roadrunner & Wile E. Coyote of American politics.

1961- Nineteen year old folk singer Bob Dylan made his debut in a Greenwich Village coffee house Gerde’s Folk City.

1961- Fidel Castro gave a speech to the United Nations that lasted 4 and 1/2 hours.

1962-The Beverly Hillbillies debuts. The story goes that CBS mogul William Paley disliked farm-humor type shows and this was premiered behind his back while he was on vacation. It was the masterpiece of programming chief James Aubrey, nicknamed "the Smiling Barracuda". One wag said Aubrey deserved a statue because he was the first t.v. executive to realize that even if you put garbage on the tube people will watch it anyway. When Aubrey took over CBS they were doing "Playhouse 90" and when he left they were doing "Mayberry RFD".

1964-The premiere of Gilligan’s Island. The good ship Minnow was named for Newton Minnow, the FCC Chairman who first called television “A Vast Wasteland”.

1983- Filmation's "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe".The popular toy was originally supposed to be a product tie -in to the Arnold Schwarzenegger film Conan the Barbarian, but toy maker Mattell balked at the films R rated violence, so changed the toy's name. I Have The Powerrrrrr!!!

1987- A market research group called Q-5 tried to use a bank of computers to design the ultimate safe wholesome politically correct children's show. They came up with "The Little Clowns of Happytown"-. Of the 26 children's series in syndication it remained dead last in ratings, He-Man, Jem and G.I.Joe on top. The people have spoken.

1990- The Motion Picture Association changed the rating for the naughtiest movies from X to NC-17.

2004- Florida gets hit with it’s fourth hurricane in six weeks. Hurricane Jean killed 6 and caused billions in damage. The last time Florida was hit by that many hurricanes was in 1886.