What's new with you, Sun People?

#Musings, #musics, #mystics, #mangroves

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Do the @esguillo shimmy!

Introducing Guillermo Ortiz, photographer extraordinaire (・・。)ゞ

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Sun People logo by shepush

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Visit Original Link

It's demo time!  This one's called Lucky Break.  You break it, you buy it!

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https://soundcloud.com/amos-rose/little-big-bossa

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My Hand (S) http://bit.ly/W9Q20c @Flickr

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In the closest mirrors, we see all the details.

Hi folks, friends, and even foes.  Welcome.  I'm Amos Rose, and I'll be your host for a minute here on the great wide web.  This is my first post here!  We are Sun People, and in no time at all you'll be asking yourself where we've been all your life.  If you haven't already, check out Benny's video below and stay tuned for more...we're just getting started.  Literally...this Tumblr is only a few weeks old.  And we're gonna print up our debut album, release a music video that we made with our amazing and talented friends, and hold awesome events right here in good old NYC.

Being here is quite the shift for me.  I lived in Rochester, NY for 10 years where I was close to many people I care deeply about.  For now I will just mention the fantastic musicians with whom I conversed and created.  Through these  conversations, along with my own meditations, I learned a lot about how I want to live my life, and of the awareness I want to foster.  Since I have been here in NYC, I have been learning quite a bit as well...drastic changes and difficult situations tend to teach you a lot, hehe.  I have been thinking a lot about my time back in the Roc city with my brother Danny Rose who played drums on our upcoming album, and other former bandmates Chris Coon (keys), and Joe Bushen (bass), who are also on the album.  As we update our website, we'll include links to their current projects, which range from awesome to clever.  I miss hanging out with them and playing,  And I miss the whole scene.  Too many people to name right now, but Rochester...I love ya.  One fellow, Joel Dow, who's got a great swashbuckling old-timey alley cat band called The Pickpockets, made this mirror necklace.  I have worn it continuously for almost two years.  It reminds me that everyone we meet is a mirror to help us discover more about ourselves.  Thanks Joel.  

I think that in our relationships with others, we see ourselves, our ideals, beliefs, actions, and goals in a different light.  I mean of course we see the other person with their whole thing.  But often, and I think more often the closer we get, when we feel things about them, we are really feeling things about ourselves, and when we say things to them, we are often just talking about ourselves.  Rather, if we listen to ourselves when we have intense emotions...there's just a lot to learn there.  It's as easy as breathing to slip into such a mode, and much more difficult to remember to observe ourselves at those slipping points.  These modes are the first things we ever learned; they are the patterns and roles our parents taught us without realizing it.  That's where each of us is coming from.  These underlying roles define our comfort zones, and when we get uncomfortable, we act out.  When we act out, we gift ourselves with the opportunity to ask about the situations that trigger us, and we get to ask, "why?".

In our relationships we are mirrors for each other.  The more we share with someone, the clearer and closer the view in the mirror.  If our friends are mirrors, then our best friends are the closest mirrors for each other.  In the closest mirrors, we see all the details, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

On the other hand, we can, and must, be our own mirrors.  Ideally we can notice our triggers before they lead us to act in ways we don't want. And ideally we can dig the treasures out of our unconscious.  For me, I want to act out of love to all peeps.  But I have a lot of trouble with it.  It takes a LOT of conscious observing and looking around.  That's what this mirror I wear means to me.

So to all I meet, and to all who I have met, I want to thank you.  The time spent simply being friends or conversing is often enough to start a whirlwind of thoughts for me, and often it helps me to learn important things about myself.

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I'm out from work with the flu a sinus infection/bronchitis  ヘ(>_<ヘ)  but that wont' stop me!  ヾ(⌐■_■)ノ♪

Time expands and contracts, like my glands.  In my sneezy solace I have taken to watching talks given by J. Krishnamurti.  I have never seen such attention and penetrating insight!  Here's a song about the relativity of time.  

  Alien alarm clock buzzin’ in my ear

Wake me with your purring at the start of the year

Feed me with the rhythm of your otherworldly beat

One more year for me is only a day in the world where you come from

  channeling a message while you’re dreaming 

January, February, Spring melts into Fall

You peel back your hours as my calender falls

March remembers April may bring June’s new clarity

But what it means to me is that time’s slowly passing, time’s slowly passing

Alien Alarm clock, ringin'

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Welcome, sun people

Hello, and welcome to Sun People Blog.  I'm Benny Oyama!  I am a double-hyphenated Jewish-Japanese-American musician based in New York.  This is the Sun People blog, where my good friend and collaborator Amos Rose and I will be sharing our thoughts about music, recordings of songs, videos, and other things we find special, important and worth reading about.   

    On Music and Becoming My Father's Father

 I am always refining my approach towards creating something truer, more resonant, more awesome.  I am learning that composing music requires a certain surrendering to a process that is not fully conscious and cannot be accessed in a world that language creates.

 For a long time, writing music in solitude had been infinitely easier than working with other people as it removes the messy (albeit highly rewarding) inter-subjective space that arises when people get together.   I like to feel free to scream, guffaw, cry, and run around the house without any of the self-consciousness I might feel when I'm not alone.  This is just my own thing; i'm not sure what other people do.  Often my solitary writing sessions happen with the companionship of a cup of coffee or a capped mug of tea, and perhaps the orange glow of a setting sun is present and reminding me that change is a constant, and requires a constant surrendering much like the process of creation that put me in that orange room in the first place!  I'm also slowly and surely learning the art of composing new music with my collaborators; but that's for another blog post.  

 So, even something so penetrating as music has all of this language built up around it. Some people also think of music as something transcendental; that it moves us to a place beyond language, beyond history, towards revealing a deeper reality.    I think when we create music we are trying to vibrate at that fundamental level; narrative or storytelling offers the artist an opportunity to explore that vibration by rooting it in experience, delivering that experience through language, in the hopes of accessing something deeper.  Simple!

I've written a song for my father, a song that was born out of the orange glow of sessions much like the ones I described earlier.  It's here:  "Bobby O".

 I have felt sad because I recently have had to take control of my father’s finances because his ability to take care of things, following a series of strokes, is slipping away.  It has been and continues to be a hard lesson in growing up and accepting a responsibility I'm not fully prepared to handle.  As I issue him monthly allowances while offering a necessary reminder to him that is all he will get for the month, I am slowly becoming my father’s father, offering him the boundaries he needs right now out of love.  There is no shame or guilt here - just a dutiful sense of what needs to be done.  

I carry out my task with the love and gratitude of the gifts he has given me, namely his musical talent and flair for entertaining.  Even as he fades, he still manages to summon forth the slickness and charm of the 50's by harmonizing acapella doo-wop with his friends during our holiday get-togethers in Riverdale and at our family friend's apartment on 123rd st.  In April of 1943, my grandparents left the Japanese internment camps in Jerome and wound up a year later in Morning Side Heights where this photo was taken:

I stumbled upon this amazing photo online in a Japanese American database; I love how elegant my grandfather looks as he presents the vinyl record, as if extending his hand into the future and offering the gift of music to me through his first son, who was born just three days before this photograph was taken!  My feelings these days are captured well by this photograph, and in this poem.

My father points me to the past, He is who I became. I point my Father to the future, I am who He hoped to be. My mother points me To the past, she is my longing. I point My mother to the future, I am her joy That speaks to love without end. We Three together have broken the shell Of ignorance, we have traveled far For travelers who knew not their way. But the wind of faith wrapped itself Around us, its direction the dying yellow Of leaf squeezing out its last breath. We Gave into death as day gives into Night, as the dreams carried us through, As dawn billowed out of sleep. I Found myself alone that morning, I found myself crying out alone. But The wind no longer blew and the leaf No longer clung. And I am no longer pointing. -Paul Lichtenberg

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"Fine By Me" @ Abilenes.  Rochester, NY 2012.  

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Amos and Benny at Contra Mestre Carcara's wedding in the summer of 2012.  We put together a Pagode group with a great group of local Capoeiristas and Eastman School of Music musicians.  Thank you Ken, Emma, Buji, Julio, Jim, Carcara, and everyone else who made that an awesome time.