It's done.  A THOUSAND POINTS OF DARKNESS is now on its way to Kirkus Indie, paid for.

Out of those who read my preview book, 100% of the responses were positive!  Based on that, I decided the book is probably ready to be read.  Thanks to everyone for your input.

Kirkus doesn't guarantee a good review, and legally they don't even have to review it at all even though I paid.  But I believe this book is good and it will garner some kind of praise.  We'll see.

I should hear from them some time in the next 8-10 weeks.  When I do, I'll tell you, good or bad!

Love,

Adam

The time is coming for me to send out A Thousand Points of Darkness.  One more spit, one more polish.

I need your feedback.  If you had plans to download the book at http://www.acole.net/downloadable_works.html  under the ATPOD tab, don't wait!  Let me know what you think.

Can't get past page one?  Tell me!  Thought it was great?  Oh, do tell!

Love,

Adam

Ten years ago I began a book called A Thousand Points of Darkness, the story of a tortured executive  in the Corporate United States of America who cannot follow through with a ruthless business decision and trades his identity to become a drug worshipper.  It's gone through many lives.  One friend of mine read a version and said "It's a good book that could have been a great book."

That hurt.

So I worked on it.  And worked.  And worked.

I'm at the point now where, at long last,  I'm ready to call it "done."  But before I do, I have a decision to make, and you can help me.

One of my choices is to send the book to Kirkus Discoveries for a review.  Kirkus is a huge reviewer in the industry and generally only reviews industry-produced books.  Kirkus Discoveries was set up to give self-publishers like me access, but for a price:  $415.  Lest you think this is a scam, rest assured that a good review from Kirkus will open a lot of doors for me (agents, mainstream publishers and library markets all pay attention to good reviews from Kirkus) and would be worth the money.

IF the review is positive.  If it's negative (they guarantee a review of some kind) I'm just out of luck.

Can you help me decide if the book is worth the risk?  Just send me an e-mail at adam@acole.net and I'll send you a preview copy.  If you find you can read it, or even better, can't put it down, let me know it's got your vote.  If you hate it, simply vote with your silence, or tell me what you didn't like.

Everyone who agrees to preview the book, whether they manage to read it or not, will receive a free copy of the final product as my way of saying thanks.

Love,

Adam

Remember the Wipes?  World's best cover band?  Years of benefit concerts to support the Grant Park Cooperative Preschool?

Well, the Wipes hung it up last spring.  Most of us no longer have any connection to the school, and we decided it was time to let other folks with kids there step up and become the Wipes.

But guess what?  The people in the band wanted to keep playing together.  So we kept meeting, and we changed our name.  We're now "Patience Grasshopper."  A lot like the band you love.

And we have TWO gigs coming in a couple of weeks.  First, we'll be playing at the Summer Shade Festival in Grant Park.  We open the festival, playing at the Americana Stage at 12:30 in the afternoon on Saturday, August 27th.  This show is free and open to the public!

Second, amazingly enough, we'll be playing Smith's Olde Bar on Wednesday night, August 31 at 7 PM, as part of the Humble Heroes project to assist police officers and firefighters.  We split the bill with The Elvis Show, the Deadfields, and Parker Smith and the Bandwidth.  Tickets available at http://www.ticketalternative.com/Events/15617.aspx

I hope to see you at one of these events.  Please come by and say hello!

Love,

Adam

One of the joys of my job is that, occasionally, I get to take part in Professional Learning activities that expose me to the best in music making.

I had a great experience working with a man named Dave Holland, a percussionist, and an absolute master at getting children (and the children in grownups) to make music together with percussion. It took him about 10 seconds to have a crowd of 70 people laughing, drumming and LISTENING to one another.

If you're an educator, I'd highly suggest looking him up and seeing whether he's available to come to your school.

www.beatinpathrhythmevents.com

www.interactiverhythm.com 404.819.4053

Happy drumming!

I periodically go through these cycles of elation, determination, depression and resignation.  A lot of it has to do with my creative life.

I love my creative life.  I love that I do all these things.  It's fun.  I'm good enough that the things I do now are decent and can be shared.

I'm not making any money at them, and sometimes that bothers me.  I read a LOT of how-to business articles, get a lot of good advice from my family, but the facts remain and these are the facts:  I by my nature am chimeric, spinning in a million directions at once.  I do all these things.  It's fun.  But sometimes I wish I was that guy that could only do one thing so I could market myself as that one thing.

"Hi.  I'm Adam Cole.  I've published a book called 'You Can Do Your Own Duct Work.'  I give workshops on how to do your own duct work.  My next book will be called 'You Can Do Someone Else's Duct Work.'  And then, 'You Can Get An Apprentice to Do the Duct Work and Still Get Paid.'  If you have a problem with duct work, I'm your guy."

That's marketable.  It solves somebody's problem.  That somebody tells somebody else.  Then "Adam Cole, master of Ductwork" gets a lot of new followers who pay for his book.

My songs don't really solve anybody's problem.  They're wacky demos that I like and that other people like, but nobody NEEDS them.  My novels might one day solve somebody's problem, because I'm writing increasingly tight and entertaining books, but they're not ready yet.  When they are, it'll be hard to attract a market because the books are somewhat individual and scattered like me.  They're not easily branded.

Solfege Town is probably the most marketable thing I've created, and it solves somebody's problem.  I'd like to be able to sell that book, but the truth is I find I can't abandon the writing of my novels and songs and the learning of orchestral writing and the improvement of my Feldenkrais skills and...and...I've tried.  It makes me into a very nasty person.  Like it or not, I do things the way I do because that's who I am and that's how I get through the day.

Sigh.  I have to laugh at myself, but it's also frustrating.  I'm my own best friend and my own worst enemy and I meet myself everywhere.

Some days I think I'll be able to solve this problem by making MYSELF the brand.  Rather than selling my products, I'll be selling myself as the creator of them.  Then the "problem" that my work will solve for people will be, "I really want to know more about Adam Cole and what he thinks, because it's fun to see what he comes up with."  That's how it is for somebody like Michael Colgrass, Pulitzer Prize winning composer.  He's a multifaceted nut like me.  Only, he can afford to be.  He's already established himself.  For 99.9999999% of the world, I don't exist.

Today my answer is:  I work my job, I raise my kids, I try to write as much as I can while the juices are flowing and hang the consequences, and the rest is just gravy, fun.  That's a good way to live.  It keeps me happy and producing.

But it doesn't help me pay the bills, and DANG IT, some days I feel like it ought to!

Thanks for listening.

Did you know I had another website dedicated just to the Feldenkrais Method?   http://www.feldenkraisinfo.com

On that site I publish a monthly newsletter about the Method.  This month I talk about piano playing and the photo on the homepage of mymusicfriend.net in which I made a major discovery.

Go to www.feldenkraisinfo.com and click on the "newsletter" tab.

Love, Adam

A couple of hours before the performance I found myself more relaxed than I'd been in a long time.  I was strangely at peace with myself.  I found myself talking to one of the other participants so freely, so unconcerned with what she was thinking, and it felt like a long lost sensation...it seems I was about 10 years old the last time I was that unselfconscious.  Even at my most extroverted, on stage, I was always obsessed with how I was appearing to someone else.  This was different.

As my performance time came up, I did begin to get nervous.  I wasn't even sure what I was going to play, although I had a couple of ideas.  I finally chose two tunes whose titles represented what I'd been through:  "Everything Happens to Me" because it did, this week.  And "There Will Never Be Another You," because I've finally unified my mind and my body, I'm one person, and I hope hope hope that there will always be the one me from now on, and never "another one."  Not quite what the song actually means, but there you go!

The performance went well.  In fact, probably better than any jazz performance I've ever given.  Not that I was stellar or lightning fast or anything like that.  But I was free enough, I did manage to look towards the audience towards the end, and I did create more color at the piano than I ever have before.  Most importantly, people enjoyed it, and I was happy.

Day 7 in the morning, our final close-out session, I had one more lesson to learn.  We did an ATM in which you sit with your legs curved in front, holding your feet in a certain way.  The idea is to learn to roll to your back and then come back up without letting go of your feet and without using momentum.

During the lesson I remembered what I'd been noticing all week:  Sensation is not pain.  Engage the head and the movement gets easier.  Let the pelvis and abdomen follow and sink into gravity.  I didn't really do the big culmination of the lesson.  I wasn't rolling around all over the floor, but was instead taking my time, filling the holes.  I let my head roll on the floor and that made a huge difference.

We had a final group session after the ATM, and I let everyone know what an incredible week I'd had.  I feel like I've learned at last how to play the piano, and now I can start over.  I can use my ears and my hands in symbiosis to create a musical intent that will improve my organization, and an organization with which I can realize my musical intent.

I've also got this really interesting connection in my mind between the extensor muscles in my neck, the ones that hold my head in gravity and which come into play when I "engage" my head, and the tilt of my pelvis.  These two things are connected through my long lost lumbar spine which, when erect, supports my weight nicely, makes it possible for me to relax my shoulders and my legs, and allows me to feel "normal."

I know that as I return to my life the stresses will take me back to that place I've lived in for so long.  But I think I know how to get back to that special place now.  It's not some mysterious park that I visited once long ago while blindfolded, and never could find again.  Now it's a part of me that I have paths to, one that I intend to visit regularly until I can make that park my whole city.

I hope you've enjoyed reading this blog.  Thanks for following and commenting through e-mails and public posts.  If you have more questions about the piano, Alan Fraser or my process with the Feldekrais Method, just let me know!  Until then, I remain...

Adam Cole

Your Musicfriend

The morning ATM (Awareness Through Movement - verbal instructions lesson) was really nice.  Besides myself there was another Feldenkrais practitioner participating as well, one who was at Moshe Feldenkrais' original Amherst Training 30 years ago.  She was able to give a few pointers here and there, some helpful details, which made the lesson very good.

In it we lie upon our stomachs, bend our legs at the knees, and move them left and right in a couple of ways, legs sliding over each other, and legs connected as if with a rope around ankles.  This rotates the spine at various places along its length.  As I did this part of the lesson I got an idea that I hadn't had before that I could really let the front of my pelvis relax into the floor.  That made turning a very different experience.  At the end of this part I found myself amazed at how tall I felt.  I seemed to stretch onwards towards my legs forever.  I felt my arms lying on the floor and they could have been several feet long.

Eventually the lesson brings you up into the dead bird seating position from yesterday, and you discover an elegant movement from lying on the back to sitting and then back down on the other side.  It's like a dance move.  I noticed that I could do it somewhat, and noticed also the extent to which it was still not elegant.

I practiced only a very little this morning, just pushing down the keys slowly, moving my arm forward, connecting two keys.  No pieces, no fast stuff.  Just "can I tell the difference?"  Sometimes I got a nice sound.  What I began to discover (again) was that the difference between my old way and my new way was a preparation with the hand before the key is depressed.  Not a movement in the body and a dropping of the finger on the key, but a movement with the hand that takes the fingertip right into the key.  That creates a very different sound, one I like.

I watched Alan work with one of our participants, an excellent amateur pianist, as she improved a Scarlatti piece.  He had her envision the piece as a street-musician composition with drums and jangly instruments, and when she played the low bass with his left hand he wanted her to make that a drum.  Tum TUMMMM...I watched as his finger popped off the key towards his hip afterward.  "That's how I know," I thought to myself.  "That's how I can see that he's using his hand, not just dropping the finger."

My lesson was next.

I sat down at the piano and he watched me.  I went through some notes the way he showed me last night, and he was very pleased to see that I was doing everything he had shown me.  No details missing.

I told him my biggest issue was that I had a very poor idea, when I was sitting, where my pelvis was, what angle, how my lumbar spine connected up to the pelvis, where my shoulders were, how my ribs could move.  I asked him to work with that as my FI.  He said that he thought that was the keystone, that resolving this would tie it all together.  I was glad to hear him say what I've been suspecting all week.

After examining my sitting at the keyboard, Alan commented that my "neutral" position, my self-image of neutral at the piano, sitting up straight, was not really a neutral.  We experimented with him pressing on my spine, shoulders and chest, pushing his hands away from the lumbar spine.  We noticed that the force upward wasn't coming all the way through my spine.

I lay on the floor, and Alan gave me a massively long FI, some of which he explained to the few observers.  It wasn't boring, just very complete.  He spent a tremendous amount of time mapping out my spine for me with the touch of his hands, showing me through movement and touch where my pelvis went, where my shoulders and arms connected.

It was interesting being inside of me for the FI.  I was very conscious of each movement, of each touch, even while I was surrendering to his hold and to gravity, trying not to "help."  I was listening, really looking inside my mind for the map of my skeleton that has always been missing.  I never fell asleep, but there were these bizarre times where I found myself dreaming without losing the sensation of his hands on me.  In a sense my mind was one place, vividly creating a conversation between us in a different part of the room, while my body remained on the floor.  This happened several times.  I have to insist I was NOT ASLEEP.  I came out of it and went back into it several times, and there was no drowsiness or fuzziness.  I continued to feel all the things happening on my back and shoulders even as I traveled somewhere else.

At some point these journeys stopped while the FI continued.  I got a strange notion in my head:  "I'm not a personality.  I'm just a body."  As I had this thought, the map of my skeleton appeared in my mind.  I got this idea in my head that I could be and move at the piano just as a body, a will, and not as "myself" with its constructs and imaginings.  This concept faded quickly, and the skeletal image went with it.  So I spent the rest of the lesson thinking about myself as "just a body."

At the end of the lesson I lay on the floor and I was all there.  I had a complete skeleton under my skin, two arms, two legs a head, a spine.  I stood up.  Nothing dramatic, no otherwordly sense, no strangeness, just me.  It was almost an anticlimax, but after all I did feel fine!

I sat at the piano and I played slowly and quietly.  The sounds were nice.  It felt good to sit and play, very peaceful and still.

That was it.  I thanked Alan, got my bag and came home.  I'm not practicing any more.  There's nothing left to prepare.  Alan and I decided that it wouldn't make sense for me to play the Mozart or the Chopin at the concert tonight, because I still have yet to integrate this over time, and I'd most likely just be playing in my old way.  So I'll do some jazz tonight, the only jazz in the program.

What am I going to play exactly?  I don't know.

I got up and normal was gone again.  I felt the usual pull in my legs and knees.

The ATM that Alan did was a three-ATM hodgepodge of some of the lessons that I found hardest 14 years ago, the Dead Bird Series.  Yes, they were easier now, but still challenging enough to leave me mad at the end.

I watched the lessons.  I kept seeing the same things, but not really having enough of an understanding of what I was seeing.  I THOUGHT I understood, but I had no idea how to put it on the piano.  I went back to the practice room thinking, "I've got to bring this to some kind of conclusion.  The workshop is ending.  I have to make some use of whatever knowledge I've gotten."

But it didn't seem like I had much knowledge.  Yes, I was playing better.  But it seemed to be a result only of freeing my back and pelvis, and those were still chimeric.  I had no sense of what "playing through the skeleton of the hand" meant.  I was doing what I thought was right, but who knows?

I was beginning to wonder if it was all just a sham.  I talked to the world class pianist.  She's taking it all in and using it daily.  She missed getting her PhD by one paper.  She's had eight-plus years of piano instruction at Indiana and Oberlin, studied with Pressler, teaches at U. Mass.  But she never really had to study technique except for some Taubmann.  She was finding it all quite legit and useful.

I practiced.  I got mad.  I went and got some ice-cream.  I went home.  I took a nap.  My lesson was coming closer.  I practiced.  My back hurt.  I was mad, because I didn't know where my pelvis was, where it was supposed to be.  I went to my lesson expecting the worst.

Me and another of the participants have this running gag.  She'll ask me, "What are you playing today?"  I'll answer truthfully, "I don't know."  Because I've gone to each lesson with no idea what I was going to play, and the lessons have had almost no music in them, just these attentions to detail.

I played Alan some jazz.  He steered my left arm around, followed it, followed my right arm, followed my back.  I came into focus, out of focus, I engaged my head.  After five minutes of this we stopped.  He asked me what I felt.  I told him I was in a fog and didn't really know what I was feeling.

He sighed.  Then he started teaching me like I was six.  Which was okay, because that's about where I last thought about piano technique.  He laid it all out for me.  "Push up your hand with nothing but your thumb.  Push ups.  Puuuuussshhhh!"  It went on from there.  The thumb has to differentiate from the fingers, he said.  And each of the fingers does their thing while the wrist is loose.

"No!"  he said.  "You're falling into the key with your thumb.  Push with the thumb!"  He took my hand.  He guided it.  He pressed.  He prodded.

And little by little I began to get it.  Next thing I know, he's starting to say, "Yes" and "Good," and I'm feeling what he's talking about.  I'm not just engaging the head, I'm actually FEELING SOMETHING IN MY HAND that's different when he says "Good."  I'm actually feeling what the heck he's talking about.

He takes me through some of the classical pieces, really slowly, two notes at a time, played together so that I can hear the dissonance.  Each time, play the notes and move the hand forward into the keys.  That movement keeps the wrist from engaging, keeps me from doing it the old way.  Mozart movement one.  Mozart movement two.  Chopin.

Ah.  Yes.  And now I'm understanding how you can play different volumes and colors on the piano, I'm feeling it, I'm hearing it, I'm doing it.  Sounds are coming out of the piano that sound like Bill Evans, like Duke Ellington, not their notes, but their sound, their tone.  Oh, I think.  I get it.  I get this.

Walking for the first time.  Walking on the piano.  My hand actually working, the fingers actually pressing into the keys of their own accord.  Like a real pianist.