Listening | Noticing | Getting Down
January 17, 2016 Leave a comment
September 24, 2015 Leave a comment
Uncle Funk made a YouTube playlist for you to slap a big high five with.
Click these words, friend. (Sorry for the ads, but they need not enslave your mind.)
1) “Sweet Salvation” by The Stepkids
2) “Peace” by Radio Citizen (N E W – R E L E A S E!)
3) “Triple Helix” by Jimi Tenor, KABU KABU
4) “Back Pocket” by Vulfpeck (N E W – R E L E A S E!)
5) “Too Fine” by Bosley
Savor & repeat.
September 10, 2015 Leave a comment
Uncle Funk, a self-made man, first faced adversity when he shot out his daddy’s tubes and had to struggle his wiggly little ass onto that elusive egg.
And if just one little wiggle hadn’t happened exactly like it did, I’d be a whole different man with entirely different words to say to himself.
Those wiggles I wiggled were the first of an infinite number of transactions that brought us to this point in the kaleidoscopic infinity of alternatives.
I’m here. You’re also here.
Hi.
You and I… well, we’re still wiggling by instinct toward some unknown end, but we wigglers are growing more scarce.
People ain’t wiggling much anymore… Like they’re not trying to get anywhere.
Adversity these days is to keep wiggling when we’re all alone, where the distance between worlds is still measured in tiny efforts.
Go on and get you somewhere. You ain’t alone.
(You’re just tiny, and going against the flow in a self-made craft, through a sea of decisions that aren’t your own, and sometimes need to be reminded you can make it.)
March 11, 2015 Leave a comment
A Tuesday, in late March…
I picked up an unusually shaped set of wind chimes, and the sound waves generated by my lifting them created a sentient being, hanging in mid-air in the garden section of Curtis Lowe’s, composed of the vapor wake interference of the perfectly woven tones. The entity glowed pinkish purple, was translucent, and vaguely humanoid in shape.
Its first words, matching the movements of changes in color I took for its mouth, but with sound coming from the chimes in my shaking hand, were, “Don’t put the chimes down!”
I froze and held the chimes a little farther away from me. The apparition smiled? My hands were shaking, and the chimes continued to vibrationally manifest an entity into existence from what was inert air before me, two feet from my face. Its mouth opened again. It said, “I’m glad you’re nervous and shaking. Keep moving the chimes. Don’t touch them. If you stop them ringing, I’ll die.”
My arm ached just at the thought of holding onto these chimes for more than a few minutes. I looked around for a place to hang the sentient chimes. The spirit’s voice quickly rung out again, through a composite voice of all the chimes at once, “Don’t hang the chimes. Carry me. I need you… father.”
I dramatically arched a single eyebrow. The right one. I said, “What are you, anyway?”
The chimes said, “I am a new creature that never existed before you picked up the set of chimes you’re holding. But I intuit that I can exist only in relatively still air. So the chimes are likely only strong enough for me to exist indoors. Otherwise, even a weak wind would break up the tiny changes in air pressure that compose my internal machinations. I would like to be named ‘Gene Dudley.’”
I said, “So you exist solely in the ringing sounds of wind chimes that can’t be in the wind?”
Gene Dudley’s ghostly head drooped toward the floor, and he said in his beautiful, unearthly voice, “Yes.”
Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad being father to sentient wind chimes. Gene was pretty smart for just being around 20 seconds old. But my arm was shaking, and I am not a strong person. I didn’t consider, in those moments we had together, creating some type of automated chime shaker. I just felt the pain growing in my arm, like a porcupine baby in a womb. I said, “Wind chimes that can’t be in the wind, but can’t be quiet. Are you just trying to teach me a lesson?”
Gene Dudley said, “Look at the label on the chimes. What does it say? Where did I come from, father?”
I pulled the chimes closer to my face, careful not to touch any of the magical singing tubes. The label on the chimes, just above the barcode, read, “SKU76319 $179.99.”
I was like, “$179.99. No way.” Maybe if I had had a gift card. I set the protesting $180 Gene Dudley down gently, and snuffed his existence like a hemorrhoid pad putting out a lit match.
I went into the store for a rake, anyway.
September 15, 2014 Leave a comment
The Badass Hummingbird (Take Two)
I swoop, slash, and drive your dull gullet far away from the nectar that fortifies these sweet pectorals. I am so badass.
Driven by an intimidating, inborn sense of style, I fly casually by your punk, low-nectar self, sitting on “your” feeder, and I taunt you. I show you how easy I think it is to take your juice, and, of course, you are afraid. I swoop, with a threat to bite the scruff on your neck, but infinitely more likely, you will take off when you see the flash of my plumage, the look in my eye, and the furious beat of my wind kickers.
As likely so, that later, when the sky quakes, and rain chases you beneath the cover of leaf, that the rumble of my wings will sound through the nightmares of your buzzing mind.
(
But now I pause in mid-air,
to share with you, bird to human,
an important fact I will divulge to no other like myself…
I am backed into a corner, and living every moment in fear it’s my last.
I make myself every minute of every day.
And I don’t remember anything before I became this way.
It’s exhausting work, but I rule with the ladies, and my DNA will march like a stallion across the fields of time.
)
The wrinkles in your pride, my fellow birds, diminish you, and I remain.
I am the steel arm of sunrise and sunset,
Come to sweep away the malefactions of your inferiority.
I will suck on the sweet, floral nipples of your desire, egg up your ladies, and I will do it for a prolonged, humiliating period.
For the stallion rides.
~~
Lack of Afro (a Brit named Adam Gibbons) makes sounds with his monkey wings, just taunting you to come at him, bro. Here is “One For The Trouble” from his 2014 release Music For Adverts.
Take some nectar, and enjoy your nervous flight along the edge of existence.
September 10, 2014 Leave a comment
I had this 333 post all ready before today, with a story about the future, wherein President Matthew McConaughey, who is also a mad scientist, invents a thing the world has always needed, called the Empathy Cannon. It is a gun about the size of a doberman, and with it, one can bestow instant and absolute empathy for one’s condition upon the victim of the aptly named (I named it) Empathy Cannon.
But this morning I was overtaken by the Vulfpeck. Jack Stratton on everything, Theo Katzman on guitar and drums, Joe Dart on the bass, and Woody Goss on keys. This one features the astounding voice and emotive gesturing of Antwaun Stanley, riffing with righteous soul on the PIN code to his heart and Ford Motor products. I love this song so much I think I will just invent the Empathy Cannon myself, so I can show people what it does to me.
And as the Empathy Cannon fires its last, and falls from his dying grasp, President McConaughey mutters, “1612.” And EVERYONE GETS IT.
Enjoy.
July 21, 2014 Leave a comment
I met a Scientologist recently who changed my mind about Scientology. You see, I was guilty of judging Scientology by the fact that it was created by a sci-fi author and more than seven hundred other reasons based on sound logic and elementary discernment.
But then a Scientologist named Keviin from North Hollywood gave me the gift of perspective.
From the moment Keviin and I first met, our connection was strong. We went directly into a man-hug right at the start of the handshake. I laughed naturally several times during pleasantries before noting that Keviin smelled like honeysuckle. When I commented on the aroma, Keviin showed me the honeysuckle gland all Scientologists manifest behind their ears as part of their development. The gland was invisible, but the smell was undeniable!
Color me intrigued, Keviin!!
Keviin further bolstered the legitimacy of a religion that markets expensive services to egocentric millionaires when he literally levitated.
Background on the levitation: Captain T. Cruise was having an horrific bowel movement right at that moment, which was communicated via a telepathic distress call for psychokinetic prostate massage. And when Keviin remotely massaged Tom Cruise’s prostate with his mind, his corporeal body hovered approximately 19 inches, or one TCU (Tom Cruise Unit, the height of one Tom Cruise), above the ground. The movement passed, and crisis was averted.
Keviin is now my life coach. We are actually on our way out the door, to hot grocery shop (like hot yoga, but with grocery shopping).
Before we go, I’d like to share a song with you that really complements the joy one derives from mocking another person’s core beliefs, like the ridiculous ones I had before I met Keviin.
Here’s “Guerreiro” by Curumin (Luciano Nakata Albuquerque), a Brazilian artist who marches to the beat of his own crazy set of electrical impulses. “Guerreiro” means “warrior” in Portuguese as long as someone speaking Portuguese is saying so.
Do remember, while it’s happening, to enjoy it.
June 17, 2014 Leave a comment
Uncle Funk is most real when his eyes are locked with those of another terrestrial carbon unit in an unspoken reverence for the awesomeness of the universe into which all units have been vomited.
Uncle Funk is most alive when he is lost in an activity that engages his full being, when he ceases to exist as a self-aware entity, and escapes to the form of a pure force maneuvering with geometric precision.
Uncle Funk is most certain when he is dancing.
Uncle Funk is most significant when he is helping others, creating a richer world by his presence.
Uncle Funk is most lightly tethered when he ponders what it means to be living inside a mystery, wrapped inside a create-your-own-adventure story.
Uncle Funk is most satisfied when he is eating his mom’s home cooking.
Uncle Funk is most fulfilled after he works at length on a complex problem requiring the disciplined and rigorous application of skills crafted over days or years to accomplish a predetermined goal.
Uncle Funk is most humbled when he considers his species’ climb out of the swamp, past cataclysms and alternate histories, to shiver and cower in the brush, before swinging through the forest, to walk boldly upright, and finally, to march forward as the self he is today, a clump of sentient cells, an infinite sum in a lilliputian package, contemplating its own snapshot journey along the edge of the universe that nursed it.
~
Michael Jackson and David Lee Roth are all over space right now. Their voices are literally being carried, as you read and comprehend these words, on radio waves spanning and spreading across billions and billions of light years, planting the musical seeds of humanity across space and time.
Here are isolated vocals from Van Halen’s “Running With The Devil” and Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough.”
Enjoy them the most.
February 27, 2014 Leave a comment
from arttattler.com
What can YOU do with your body? Yeah, maybe you can jump. Maybe you can dance. Maybe you can do everything it takes to live a transcendental life in a material world.
But can you sneeze just by thinking about it? Probably not. You most likely have to tickle your nose or pluck a nose hair to elicit a sneeze from your body machine.
In a sneeze event, your body takes control and makes some serious, multiple-horsepower adjustments to your run-of-the-mill exhalation. It’s your body’s involuntary, evolutionary, survival reflexes that make your superhuman sneeze an everyday event… caused by a simple, tickling trigger. Which begs the questions:
What else could you achieve with this body you wear,
if you knew how to tickle out other “sneeze events” from it?
Could you lift a car?
Could you leap higher than holy globbit?
Could you make the world around you a better place with your attitude, your effort, and your smile?
Could you do what you couldn’t do before, because you didn’t have the strength?
I think you could. And I think we can.
We need to tickle our metaphorical nose hairs, and pluck a few if we’re desperate! Because there is secret power inside us all, inside our body machines and inside our mind machines. Our role model is as familiar as the noses on our faces and faster than a speeding locomotive, excluding the mag-lev ones.
What kind of sneezes are inside you, just waiting for the right tickle?
~~
Bullet: Here’s a classic Keith Jarrett track that I groove to while I center my Chi and eat Krystal burgers with mayonnaise fries. It’s called “The Rich (And The Poor)” and rigorous, independent lab tests concur this song encourages healthy digestion with clean, liberating movements.
Bullet: Here’s a list of the elements resulting in the eruptive exhalation called “Treasure Island“ (1974): Keith Jarrett played piano. Dewey Redman played tenor saxophone. Charlie Haden played bass. Paul Motian played drums & percussion. The surging plume is superhuman. Listen closely to hear Keith letting go of some woo’s during his piano solo between the 2 and 3 minute marks.
Bullet: Enjoy.
April 18, 2013 1 Comment
I was 27 years old and poppin and lockin down the frozen desserts aisle of a central Florida grocery store when I first became self-aware. Up until that point I had been living in some type of sleep state. I can still remember my past like a dream, but it hardly seems like my own life.
I’ve retained all the knowledge and skills I acquired in my dream past, and my wife says I have changed very little from the person I was when I was not self-aware… that I was always a weirdo. But I know the difference.
The biggest change is that when I’m poppin, lockin, or whatever, it’s like I’m standing in between two parallel mirrors and the poppin, lockin, or whatever is outlined by a receding infinity that powerfully hints at the recursive iteration machine that keeps moving this self forward in endless destruction and rebirth.
In fact, maybe it wasn’t this me that was in that grocery store in the first place. Maybe it was someone else, until they popped and locked just right, at which point this self, the one who is now aware, was zapped into this body and took over its historical data. And might another self take over later, perhaps whilst I am buttering my chest? Would my wife even notice?
Regardless, I have found solace in a deep awareness of the beauty of music, which seems to enable recursive iteration for the power of good. JJ Grey & Mofro have been with “me” since before my awakening, and their sauce is worthy of standing in front of a mirror to watch yourself lick off a spoon. Their brand new one just dropped, This River (2013), and I’m amazed at these guys’ ability to bring it strong and consistent through the years. Like nothing’s changed but the spoon. They’re on tour now!
Enjoy the lead track, “Your Lady, She’s Shady,” as the righteous swamp rock excites your inner awareness and your booty muscles all at once. Pop and lock if you must.
Uncle Funk's Catalogue 