Requested Blog: You Better See It For Yourself

It’s been a minute since I did a requested blog, apparently since 2023, at least in the formal sense. I did one a few months ago that wasn’t a branded “requested blog,” but was still one that had been requested of me. That being the “Geek Out” blog with actually kicked off a new series. I just haven’t gotten that many requests to write on specific topics until today when I received one from the passenger seat.

Ev & I had wrapped up a Saturday morning work out & were out & about running a few errands when he turns to me & says “I know what your blog today is going to be about.” I said “oh do you?” He said “yes. It’s going to be about the need for people to see things for themselves in this day & age & not just go off of the opinions of random people on the internet who often have no actual credentials to be nagging on the things they’re nagging on.” He didn’t say that exactly, but I want to spare his example because I plan to use it later in this body to illustrate the point he is having me make & that I agree greatly on. I’m going to talk about a few things here within, & naturally most of them will consist of recent pop culture. I don’t expect all of you to agree on everything I am going to say here but I hope to have you all walking away from this evening’s blog entry with a newfound desire to check your sources & maybe try things out for yourself before you join the vocally negative in miligning something that is genuinely good or at the very least has potential. I’m going to use Evan’s example first, because it is fresh on the brain & I apparently can’t keep up & build anticipation.

Earlier this week Katy Perry’s Lifetimes Tour came through Nashville, Tennessee. I honestly would have had no idea it was in town had I not seen a couple of friends talking about the show that evening. Out of curiosity I popped onto the dread Ticketmaster & went to see 1. if there were still tickets & 2. how much they were. There were a lot & they were relatively cheap, so Evan & I opted into getting a couple in the lower bowl. If you are unfamiliar, or not chronically online like Ev & I, you may have missed the poor reception that the early shows on the tour received. People were posting videos of her, making fun of the dancing, claiming all of the instruments weren’t actually being played, claiming that Katy was lip-synching the whole show, etc., etc. So that’s what Evan & I were expecting going into the show. Boy were we wrong. The show was incredible! She clearly sang the entire time, the instrumentalists were ripping solos left & right, she had literal feats of acrobatics & athleticism throughout, & the production design was amazing. At one point in the show she held a side plank while singing, alternating through to another core braced position. She sang while tumbling through the air. She sang while spinning upside down suspended in a cage. The segment that people had posted mocking her “tired dancing” came after her literally running two laps around the figure eight stage & going straight into the dance. The only gripe that I had with the show that most people also were complaining about beforehand was the extensive use of AI in the on screen visuals.

Literally everyone that I know, who went to the show, whether it was here or in other parts of the world had the best time at it & were completely confused as to why the internet had panned the tour so aggressively. In all honesty it made me really sad, especially as a fellow artist. Here Katy had put together an incredible show, a setlist that flowed & changed aesthetics frequently, just to have it dead in the water upon arrival because a few people on the internet decided that they didn’t vibe with it. Were these people concert critics? No. Did they themselves work in the music industry? No. Were they themselves artists? No. Just some influencers that got offered free tickets or bought tickets to sit & laugh at the ‘cringe’ with their friends & it breaks my heart. I just think of all the people who didn’t go to the show because someone on the internet told them it was bad or how many people who may have been fans of hers may have opted out of the show because they didn’t want to be disappointed by it. And again, as an artist, having your work prejudged by loud voices with zero constructive input, healthy criticism, or even a desire to give the show a chance, kills me.

This isn’t the only example of this recently. I’m a fan of two very popular, very commercial franchises: Marvel & Star Wars. Both of which have seen their fair share of this exact negativity over the last couple of years. The show The Acolyte on Disney+ was maligned for being ‘woke’ before it ever came out because it featured a cast made primarily of actors of color & featured a same sex couple. People never even gave it a chance despite it having some of the coolest fight choreography & concepts of Star Wars in recent history. Was the writing perfect? No, but there was definitely a lot there that did work & had potential for growth. The same thing happened with the Marvel film The Eternals, which I would argue is actually one of the better MCU films out there, & The Marvels, which was just all around a fun time at the movies.

So the list goes on & on. People form opinions on art or content without even taking the time to view it themselves. They shirk it off & what ends up happening is that studios & artists end up playing it safe out of fear of never being able to succeed monetarily from their exploits which then creates the same ‘copy & paste’ installments over and over & over again. It makes it so people don’t even want to try out of fear that they’ll be ripped apart before anyone even gives them a chance. Worse still, in the case of the Star Wars & Marvel films above, it tells executives that stories featuring non-white, non-male, non-straight protagonists or stories aren’t worth the investment. It sucks, truly & it creates this air of “everything is bad” around concerts, music, film, & television. Is there always room for genuine criticism? Absolutely, but that’s not what we’re talking about here, we’re talking about unqualified individuals with large outreach plastering their out of context opinions all over the internet & the general public taking it as bible.

So what’s the solution? What’s the point of me making this blog or Evan’s suggestion that I write it? My point is to go & see things for yourself. If you have even the slightest interest in something, go & see it! Then if you yourself like it, tell everyone! The only way to fight misinformation is by presenting an alternative. You are allowed to like the things you like whether or not someone thinks that’s cringy. You’re allowed to go & have fun even if that’s the only thing you get out of the moment. That’s still experiencing something that fills your life with meaning. & if at the end of it all you don’t like it, at least now you know for certain. At least now you gave someone’s project an honest shot which is more than most people out there are willing to do these days it seems! Go see it yourself! Go to the movie, watch the show, go to the concert, listen to the album, but do so before you ever form any sort of opinion about the merit of the work itself.

As Always, Much Love To You All,

-C

Geek Out: Fish In The Lembeh Strait

Introduction:

Welcome to a new blog type, the “geek out,” as we’re calling it!

In these blogs that I hope to take on from time to time, I will basically be info dumping. I’m going to take a topic, an occurrence, or a bit of recent news that has come across my mind that has effectively blown it. You can thank my friend Blake Rackley for this series, see Rewind The Podcast, as he suggested it to me this afternoon.

If I’m being real, I had no idea what to write about today, do I posted a prompt this morning asking folks what they would like to read. Blake was the only person to respond & he simply said “geek out on something!” As I have mentioned many times across many different blogs & many different sectors of my life, I am in a fairly high percentile for ADHD & with any form of neurodivergence, comes hyperfixation. When someone of the neurodivergent persuasion experiences a hyperfixation, it basically acts as a burst of passion. We get hella focused on that one thing, often to the detriment of our own health & wellbeing. It consumes us, we forget to eat, procrastinate using the bathroom, self isolate for hours on end, doomscroll any video or post we can find on the topic, gather & read books, watch videos, etc., etc., etc., all to eventually take that information & spill it out to the nearest person with an ear. There are a lot of topics for me that fit this category; Star Wars, Marvel, Crystals, Marine Biology, Astronomy, Quantum Physics, Plants, Food, Drinks, Animals in general, whatever else have you. & while I could ramble extensively about many of those topics, the thing that came to mind when I thought about things that made me ‘geek out,’ were two stories that I acquired while diving in the Lembeh Strait in Indonesia.

Context:

The Lembeh Strait is a fourteen mile stretch of water that sits between the volcanic islands of Sulawesi & Lembeh, hence the name. It is primarily used by cargo ships arriving at Bitang, as well as by locals for fishing, & happens to also be one of the top dive destinations in the world. The reason for the latter aspect is multifold. For starters, the Lembeh Strait has almost no current, until you get to the North or South ends of it. This allows for all of the sediment; all of the debris blown by the wind, all of the silt washed down from the rains off the islands, anything else dropped by humans or other animals, to matriculate & collect on the bottom creating what is known lovingly in the dive world as ‘muck.’ People come from all over the world to ‘muck dive’ in Lembeh because of the wide array of biodiversity found there within. Where Lembeh typically might find itself short on pelagic wildlife (whales, dolphins, sharks, manta rays, etc.), it certainly makes up for in macro (sea slugs, nudibranchs, small crustaceans & octopus) as well as unique marine life (stargazers, ribbon & garden eels, rhinopias scorpionfish, seahorses, pipefish, lembeh sea dragon, wonderpus, flamboyant cuttlefish). I had the privilege of diving the strait back on October of 2021 & these are two stories that I still ‘geek out’ over to this day!

Clownfish:

This story is going to involve a few different characters. The first you may have guessed, a small school of clownfish. We’re going to be focusing specifically on the large matriarch of the group as well as the carpet anemone they all inhabited. The next players in this play are a small school of threadfin cardinalfish. They unfortunately play unfortunate rolls in most of my Lembeh stories in which they are involved. The last will be the humans, of which there are three: Sam (my dive buddy for the trip), Puri (our dive guide for the trip), & me (your narrator for this first hand account). That last group will also be present in the following story.

I’m not quite sure the specific dive site that this all took place on, I’m sure if I went back to my Indonesian Travel Blog, that I could tell you, but it’s an unimportant detail, so we shan’t concern ourselves with it any longer at this present moment. I want to say we were about halfway through the afternoon dive at this point when we came across the clowns & their anemone.

Now normally when you’re diving, especially in the South Pacific, clownfish & anemones are about a dime a dozen, you don’t pay a crazy amount of attention to them. This time, for whatever reason, was different.

We had come out of the murk to find this carpet anemone that had to be about 2-3 feet in diameter. It was teeming with life. Not just from the half a dozen or so clownfish who lived in it, but also the handful of porcelain crabs & the nearby school of threadfin cardinals. As soon as we approached all of the fish, cardinals included, pushed in on the anemone.

A bit of science before we continue. Clownfish & certain anemones share a symbiotic relationship. This is possible because the clownfish produce a specific type of mucus which coats their skin & keeps the anemone’s stinging cells, known as nematocysts, from stinging them. Other fish do not share this advantage. The clowns gain protection & a food source from the anemone, feeding on parasites & damaged cells from the anemone, & the anemone gains a caretaker in the clowns. The clowns clean the anemone, keep it from other fish or predators that would eat the anemone, & occasionally do something else quite different…which we’ll get to here, for the anemone. The anemone also feeds on the waste of the clownfish & many times the clowns will even outright feed the anemone. Mine in my reef tank will always pull over big chunks of krill or squid into their anemone. Back to it.

So we’re gathered around the anemone, pointing out all the little invertebrates cohabitating when something interesting happens. The largest clownfish, the matriarch, leaves the anemone.

She definitely ventured out farther than she should have, a handful of feet, which is still a lot for her in a large, barren stretch of ocean with three ‘predators’ hanging about. But she’s not fleeing from us. No, she’s making good on that promise of mutualism that she & the anemone has. For you see, madam clownfish has gone & grabbed a leaf of cardboard & drug it back to sit in the middle of the anemone. It is then that the proceeds to yank the cardboard up in the water, release it, & as it drifts back down, scurry underneath. She does this at least three times before the realization hits me & I am floored by the connotations. Miss ma’am is fishing.

I know I’ve only mentioned them twice thus far, once in passing, but do you remember the second character in our story, the threadfin cardinal fish. There in lies the prey we are after to feed our anemone.

The clown is fishing using two things; the cardboard but also the fear the threadfins have of us as three large beings who appeared out of the haze & approached the only slight bit of shelter in the surrounding area. She is trying to get the cardinal fish to hide under the cardboard with the rest of the clowns, knowing that the weight of the cardboard will push them into the stinging tentacles of the carpet anemone below. She either recognized us as a threat, but not a great enough one to not risk using it to her advantage, or recognized divers & knew that her school was not at risk, but that she could use our presence to her advantage. Whichever angle you take on it blows my mind. It feels like something you would see on a nature documentary with the narrator talking about “something that has never been filmed before.”

Butterflyfish:

Originally, when I was thinking about the layout & construction of this blog, I was only going to include the clownfish story. Then I figured, ‘well, since we’re already talking about diving in Lembeh,’ I should offer you another moment that caused me to “geek out.” This is the tale of the butterflyfish.

Again we have three parties at play here. We have the divers (Sam, Puri, Me), we have the butterflyfish, & our unfortunate party this time around, the damselfish. Now, don’t go feeling too bad for the damselfish, they are notorious assholes. They are the one fish who has attacked me time & time again while diving. I’ve also had to remove many a damsel from my fish tanks over the years as they breed & become highly aggressive. We don’t feel sorry for them here, understood? Good.

This story does not take place on a muck dive, in fact that is one of the other appeals of Lembeh Strait, you don’t just had a singular type of dive that you spend your whole week doing. In addition to the muck there is the next step up, rubble dives (rock, broken coral, sparse reef) & the reef dive. This story takes place on the north end of the strait at a site called Angel’s Window.

Angel’s Window is a reef growing out of a one hundred foot spire on the north end of the exact middle of the strait. It is deeming with life. If you want to read more about that dive see part two of my Lembeh Blog. We’re going to focus on the end of it.

We’d gone down, swam through the window (yes, there’s an actual ‘window’ down there), seen the eels, & were making our way back up gradually, enjoying the views along the way. As we began to wrap around the western edge of the tower we suddenly found ourself amidst a school of probably around 50-100 blacklip butterflyfish. They immediately surrounded us in a cloud of yellow, white, & black. In the middle of this amazement I was suddenly struck by something, a damsel. It had come off of the reef & made a b-line for my hand. As soon as it made contact, the butterflies were gone.

The butterflyfish, much like the clownfish, had made an interesting observation it seems when it came to divers. It seems as though damselfish are much more interested keeping the larger of the potential predators, us, off the reef & away from their eggs, then they are about keeping a school of butterflyfish from them. The butterflies had seized the opportunity & swung in while the damsel was away to eat as many eggs as they could scavenge before the damselfish returned to shoo them all off. The crazy part is, the butterflyfish didn’t stop there, they followed up around the reef.

I remember not wanting to leave the feeding frenzy. Puri had a board & a pencil with him, which he flashed to me. On it he had written “they will follow.” I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by that until we went on our way & I turned around to find the entire school of butterflyfish in our wake, charging in to clear out caches of damselfish eggs as the damsels came off the reef to attack us. They were using our presence on the reef to get a quick & easy meal.

In Conclusion:

I hope you enjoyed my two “geek out” stories this week. Blake, I hope something like this was what you were looking for from this blog, if not, we’ll chat. If any of these stories sounded familiar to you it’s probably because I’ve either told them to you in person or because you read my Indonesia Travel Blog where you can find these & many more of the Nat Geo-esque stories from that trip!

As always, much love to you all,

-C

Requested Blog: The Music Man & The Sea

Today we have ourselves another blog request. It’s funny, for a long time I put out feelers on weeks where I was feeling a bit like the well of my creativity is running a bit dry & most of the time those have come back with zilch. Once I rephrased the blog type as basically being my own personal request line, the requests came flooding in. I got a ton of suggestions this week but this one, which retapped the well & that felt the most intriguing to me to explore. This week’s prompt comes from my line time friend, the ever brilliant Dr. Morgan Turner. Doc Turner proposed the question: how do the ocean & music relate in my world, or how do they not?

A truly intriguing question!

If you’re someone who knows me or follows me in any small capacity you may have taken notice to my undying & blistering love for the sea. Why I don’t live by one, ask Nashville. But you see, there lies the disconnect. I have these two great loves; music & the ocean & yet the nature of the music I do & the place I inhabit keep these two worlds apart for me. Could I move to Los Angeles & be by the ocean, yes but I also have the conundrum of not wanting to inhabit a shoebox for the price of what I have here in Nashville. Really what it boils down to is that I’m unable to have my cake & eat it too, at least in the capacity that I want to be able to. So I guess that’s how they’re dissonant on a logistical & physical level, going deeper than that requires a bit more thought though.

How does the ocean relate to my music, or how does it not? To be quite frank & curt in my response, I’m not sure they do & maybe that’s a problem. Maybe a part of the reason why I feel so disjointed, disconnect, & lost most of the time is because I have forced my two great loves to be separate entities that I have to portion myself out for both spiritually & physically & maybe I need to find a way to marry the two. Maybe I need to spend a little time in & by the ocean sampling the sounds, the subtle nuances, & figuring out in what ways they inspire me to create. In all honesty, I’ve never tried to join the two & maybe that’s part of the problem.

Maybe I’m looking at my life the wrong way. Maybe instead of seeing myself as this person looking down a million different paths trying desperately to choose the right one, hoping I do, maybe I need to look at my life with the path starting in a different location.

On another note I think the ocean has always been an escape for me. It’s the place that I go to be at peace, to disconnect, to be in wonder & marvel at the world. I don’t know if it’s a place that I feel inspires me in the musical sense. Music occupies less of a therapeutic lens for me & more of a lens of enjoyment & fun. I make music because performing is what makes me feel alive. I make music because my narcissism loves a stage & a crowd & if I’m being honest, being the center of attention, something that I feel like I loathe in my day to day life. The stage is where I go to feel like I matter to society at large, the ocean is where I go to heal & dissolve away into nothing. So I guess in a lot of ways they sit at opposite ends of the spectrum.

This got a lot more introspective & revelationary (I know it’s not a word, but it should be) than I thought it would! Maybe I do need to attempt to bridge the gaps in my life a little better. Maybe I should look into finding a place that allows me to have all of my loves in one place while still keeping me out of life in what is basically a dormitory. Maybe I should be more open to that idea & the idea of relocation if I feel it’s something that will serve me & mine.

Keep these recs coming, they’re fun! If you have a blog suggestion please don’t hesitate to reach out, I’m definitely going to start a list & keep track of the ones I feel drawn to even if another occupies the weekly space!

As always, much love to you all!

-C

Requested Blog: Grown Ass Artists

I think I’m going to start doing these, I’ve definitely done a few unlabeled “requested blogs” in the past but I think this is going to be a thing, & I think I’m going to put up a submission form somewhere for people to send in their suggestions for what they would like to read me write about. That was a fun sentence to say by the way, read me write about. Anywho, our first official “requested blog” will be coming to us from Bryan Oliveira, who is a phenomenally talented designer that I will link in a button below! I want to also state that this blog will be more about what this request stirs in my brain than specifically answering & embellishing everything stated by Bryan.

Their prompt for me was as follows: (write about) …How as artists, life keeps pulling us away from our art, & the older we get the more of a fight it becomes to carve out time to create, but that time created is what keeps us going & fed & our creativity sustained.

The statement in & of itself is incredibly profound & honest & a feeling I’m sure many artists such as ourselves feel deeply, especially as we age out of what the industry as decided to claim as ideal time for our success. As a now thirty-one year old still trying to make it in music, I define feel this, in fact it’s something that often keeps me up at night.

I remember distinctly being asked by a higher up in a massive company in the entertainment business how old I was. When I answered “twenty-seven (at the time)” his reply was to say “well you’ve still got a few more years that you can make it in, I guess.” This sentence rings through my brain at least twice a week, if not more. It seems, at least to all of us on the outside of major label/publishing deals, that turning thirty in Nashville or LA is a death sentence. It’s a “well you tried, time to sell your soul to an office job” simply because we lacked the connections, the funds, or whatever to be in the right rooms at the right time, completely devoid of whether or not we actually have the talent & drive to take it from there. The more time passes, the more the pressure is increased to ‘give up’ & ‘find a real job.’ As if art isn’t the thing that everyone on the planet consumes & actually remembers…

In the song “Nothing New” by Taylor Swift she sings the line “how can a person know everything at eighteen but nothing at twenty-two?” A line that she wrote when she turned twenty-two out of fear that the industry would do all it can to replace her as she aged, calling attention not only to the misogyny of it all, but also that the industry has this knack of signing people who are still children & claiming their most profound & impactful work when they still are lacking a fully formed frontal lobe.

I do recall it being a lot easier to find creative time & energy when I was younger though. Time & to-do lists tend to get in the way the more the years creep on, but what I can also tell you is that what I was creating was not nearly as deep nor was it an open & honest expression of who I was & am. The blessing of time & the lessons that come with it are that we gain insight & perspective. We learn & grow & become fully fledged humans with interests & passions that surprise us. We learn to stop hiding behind the walls of perception & feeling like we have to create in a certain style or pattern simply because the people we look up to did/do. We learn that true art is the expression of the individual & not creating something just because we feel like it’s the right more or it’s what’s commercially viable or trending. In all honesty, I wish more artists were signed around my age, selfishly of course, but also because I feel like most of my friends who are in their late 20s/early 30s actually have something to say & contribute, but no one is willing to take a chance on them because of something as trivial as age. Yes there are the rare exceptions; Sia, Chris Stapleton, Old Dominion, etc., but they are definitely that, the exceptions, not the rule unfortunately.

It saddens me that grown ass artists don’t seem to be given the time or resources that our younger compatriots are, because I think it wholly eliminates & diminishes an incredible talented group of people, their individual outlook on life, & their lived experiences. Maybe we as humans are more inclined to the “mess” of growing pains & the lessons there in but a lot of those of us who are old also have that lived experience & the benefit of weaving it into our art.

If you are a grown ass artist, with a fully formed frontal lobe, keep going. Don’t give up because the industry you’re in tells you to or your parents start asking about what other careers you might be interested in or society says one thing or another. If you are talented, genuinely talented, express that! Share it with the world. Someone will connect with it, someone will see the greatness, & it will spread like wildfire. I believe in you & wish you nothing short of the best.

Love Always,

-C