britwolfson.com

So let’s see what’s happened since my intention to work hard.

The first day, which was Sunday, was quite a powerful day for me. I worked on a website for about 8 hours and the whole time felt really good about the process. Then, I went out and street performed for an hour, came back and ate, and then went out for another hour.

It was a definite breakthrough for me in that it was the first time I went out and I was truly not afraid of performing. I set up my box in front of a large group of people (another previous fear) and just started dancing. It went moderately well financially, but I had a great time doing it. I practiced some things I had been wanting to work on and I just focused on connecting with people and sending out joy.

Then yesterday I headed back out again to perform and the fear hit hard! I showed up at Union Square and for the first time was going to have the primo location. There were over 100 people standing around and I took a little walk to steady myself and calm down. When I came back, the spot was taken. And so the story ends. Act now or forever hold your peace I suppose.

Either way, I am finding this hard work thing to be as hard as it seems. I went to bed late last night but my intuition said to get up at 8AM this morning. I didn’t set an alarm and woke up at 8 just like that *snaps fingers*. I got out of bed and just got hit with a wave of lethargy and I got back into bed. As I was lying there, I realized that a huge part of my life is spent hanging out, talking, researching, thinking. Not filled with “doing.” I picture Jeremy Pivens’ character on “Entourage,” running around, making deals, calling people, making things happen. This has not been my tendency as a way to live. I’ve been more passive, allowing things to just sort come as they may.

So I’m excited about more activity but at the same time I’m finding a lot of resistance appearing, because the activity leads to wanting to do things that I’m afraid of–contacting people, putting myself out there in various ways, making difficult decisions.

Either way, I’m committed to it and now I’m headed out to street perform again.

I’m not sure what the purpose of this experiment was today. I feel a little hazy as to why I wanted to do this so much and why it was so challenging, but it’s probably a similar phenomenon to how you can’t watch yourself grow taller. It’s too much a part of you.

I’m really grateful though. I am intending to have a lot of work on my plate, to be working morning to night, being on the phone (another fear), having to go out into the world and make things happen. I intend increased activity and increased discipline.

Technorati Tags: street performing, hard work, dedication, perseverence, 30 day challenge, big black brit, britwolfson, brit wolfson

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So the signs are all around me. As I woke up today and took a little morning walk, I saw 2 guys going through the trash, pulling out all of the recyclables from each trash bin. When I came back, they were still there, working hard. Yesterday, I had some errands to run and I passed a guy my age, looked kind of like me, asking for change. A few hours later, I was out again and there he was, still there, still asking for change. Working hard.

I wrote a friend last year that the universe was trying to tell him to work hard. Ever since I wrote that letter, I always had this weird feeling about it. Like maybe I had sent it to the wrong person. Like maybe the actual intended recipient was me.

Yesterday was a tough day. I spent much of the day thinking about the past and mostly about the future, where my life is headed, uncertain, confused, head awash with ideas. I worked on the Ordinary Miracles website with V V and she showed me some other websites as reference for what she was looking for. I told her, very defensively, that these websites were beyond what I knew how to do and that she was asking too much. After this conversation, I spent more time looking at these websites and had a bit of a revelation.

My whole life, especially my adult life, from one perspective has been about me thinking that I am so good, so talented, so capable. So entitled that I didn’t have to work hard. And it dawned on me suddenly that no matter how talented I am, even if i am Einstein incarnate, my talent is not ever going to be able to compete with the hard work of others.

Realistically, honestly, I probably work on average 5 to 10 hours per week. And there is just no way that this is going to compare to the work of someone who works 5 to 10 hours per day. I have justified this by spending much of my time looking for shortcuts–ways to do things faster, ways to cut corners, ways to modify other people’s work so that I don’t have to do as much.

But the whole thing is rotten at the core. To live the life I want to live, to provide real value to other people, to earn a good living, all requires hard work. And I have been so averse to hard work that I have quit just about everything I have tried when the going got tough. Sports, mathematics, video editing, street performing. It really runs the gamut.

And so I’m really grateful for this lesson and this realization because up until now I was truly blind to it. If I spend a day working for eight hours, I congratulate myself for a month and take it easy. I can only imagine what is possible if this were to just be the norm, working hard everyday out of habit if nothing else.

On top of that, I realize that so much of my confusion, so much of my money worries, so much of the time I spend living in the past and future is little more than a way to avoid the present, where there are many things on my plate, all of which require hard work to actually achieve. And the time I spend worrying and confused and uncertain is time spent in my own unique way of procrastination, avoiding the work in front of me.

Now, I say all of this with no judgment on myself. I was truly blind to this aspect of myself and of reality. And now it is a brand new moment and a brand new chance to do things differently. My dream is to be a performer and this is yet another thing that requires incredibly hard work. I realized that I spend much of the time complaining about my genetic defects and lack of flexibility and strength. But as I look back, those few times where I have really put in the work to stretch and exercise, I have gotten great results. The problem was that I only kept up the work for about a week at a time.

I street performed for about a half-hour yesterday. I went out on Saturday at 10 AM. There were very few people around and those that were there seemed completely disinterested. I got very discouraged by this and quit. I read a story yesterday about a professional violinist, a guy who had played in the New York Philharmonic, the largest stages in the world. He decided to take a year off and street perform around the world, financing his trip solely by street performing. He succeeded, and said that on an average day, he began performing at 6AM and worked until midnight. I truly, at this point in the development of my belief systems, can not even fathom working 18 hours a day. It doesn’t even compute. But these are the people who are living the dream I want to live. This is what it seems like they all do. What they all have in common is a lot of hard work. Work that sucks as well as work that is gratifying.

I am scared that if I really work hard on this website that it won’t be that good. That people will finally see what I am capable of and they won’t be very impressed. And I think that this is the fear that underlies them all. The fear that my self-image of being so talented and competent will shatter in the face of reality. So why give it a chance? Just coast through life and say you haven’t seen what I’m really capable of, yet.

So I commit myself today to working hard and doing my best, whether the work sucks or feels great. Because sensations change, things feel good and then things feel bad, but there is always chop wood, carry water.

Technorati Tags: street performing, hard work, dedication, perseverence, 30 day challenge, big black brit, britwolfson, brit wolfson

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So this post covers Saturday to Tuesday. The interesting thing that all of those days have in common is that they are all days that I did not go out and street perform. And I’m ok with that. I guess this is a lesson that not every challenge will end with a 100%-success-checkmarked-report-card, even though I feel like a 100% success internally.

I could give lots of reasons that I didn’t go out and street perform, everything from the great old friends I saw in Staten Island to the immense amount of creative output that has been flowing through me, but at some fundamental level it was the fear again.

My old friend. In this arena of performing, I’m beginning to almost befriend my fear. My old companion, how have you been? I’m seeing that after the excitement of jumping over one hurdle, oh look, another hurdle! Just like that! Like clockwork. But each fear is a little more expansive, is built on the previous success, is pulling me toward an even greater expansion.

And the new fear is definitely engaging people, talking to them, motivating them, dancing with them, teaching them, hugging them, loving them, laughing with them. And hey, I think it’s pretty understandable. I don’t see a lot of other people out on the subway doing that (as in 0), so we’re getting farther out on the ledge now.

But at the same time, I’m really excited. Because I know that one day (maybe even tomorrow!) I will come back with a glowing report of how I really did it, I really did it, I engaged people, they liked me, they loved me! That someone came up and thanked me for what I said. That someone gave me a really tender hug. That there was this one moment where I just let it all out and was free and really danced and people were clapping and screaming. I can see it and feel it clearly. And I know at the same time, that’s a lot of energy for me to muster. It’s something I’ve never done in this context. And as much as I can type about it excitedly, actually going out there and doing it has thus far eluded me.

But I’m a survivor my man. I am not giving up. I am going out swinging. So I feel good. I feel like loving myself for what I’ve already accomplished. I really wasn’t sure in January if I was ever going to be able to do this at all, and now I’m right in the middle of it. It’s a good feeling. I think my next 30-day challenge may actually be 30 days of self-love and complete self-acceptance. Because it feels like this is what this challenge is pushing me toward. Because it’s not easy, and it’s not easy to “fail” and then report on your failure. We live in a society that likes winners.

Anyway, that’s my spiel. I made my first drawing since I was probably 12 years old on Sunday and finished it today. I *REALLY* enjoyed making it. It was exactly what I wanted to draw. I took that drawing class and they taught me how to draw things realistically and I didn’t like it at all. It was so formulaic. I felt like an architect or something. Like a scientist. I thought it was supposed to be magical. Well, making this was magical. I fully intend to develop this style further and further, making it trippier and trippier and trippier and more and more geometrical and fractalline as I go, because that is what I love, tripping and geometry and fractals (which of course are geometry themselves).

Delving into all of these forms of art has really been helping me discover what I like. It’s so easy for me to know what I like in drawing, but much harder in dancing. But the knowledge and confidence I achieve in one transfers directly to the next, in a way that you can’t get in any other way.

So here’s my drawing:

I call it “Alien Dreamtime” in honor of my favorite guy ever in the history of guys, Terence McKenna. Love you Terence!

I’ve also written about 5 new songs, wrote the outline for my new one-man show which is probably about a year away from taking a form that could be presented, wrote a story that I ultimately want someone to animate, and learned a ton of new stuff about Photoshop (like how to make stuff like this), and worked on the treatment for the Ordinary Miracles script. I want to take this time also to give myself credit for the vast explosion in creativity that I have experienced in the past year. It is what I said I want and it is definitely what I am experiencing. I intend to collaborate more. I’d like to have a band/rap group/musical experiment. So I’m excited to see how that comes together.

By the way, Bashar is big on March 15 aka the Ides of March being a major major portal for visitations from past societies on Earth. Did anyone experience anything like this? I had a weird experience with what felt like a 30 foot needle being removed from my sacral chakra, but I didn’t really associate it with a past society (boy I have sure gone off the Western culture deep end to write about 30 foot needles being removed from sacral chakras with a straight face). But let me know if in recollection anything interesting happened to your on or around Saturday.

Here’s the vlog:

And I bid you adieu.

Technorati Tags: terence mckenna, britwolfson, brit wolfson, alien, breakdancing, street performing, busking, challenge

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So, another day, another day, another day. Today was a new kind of learning experience. I had my music and I went out and there were huge crowds (it was about 10:30AM) and people were really watching and I was really dancing and I made mad loot straight off the bat and I was dancing hard and within an hour it was just over. I was zonked and so tired I didn’t even have the energy to do anything worth paying for.

So the lesson there was that I can’t just dance hard. I’m getting pushed toward making my show, which will push me toward preaching. I’m basically being pushed toward opening my mouth, which I still have been too scared to do! I love the way life works when I write, when I can sit back and analyze it rather than being caught up in the emotional maelstrom of it.

Life is just constantly pushing you toward what you are deep down “supposed to be doing” because when you don’t do that, it just never works out exactly right. For instance, if i had just talked more and danced less, I could have gone much longer and stayed as long as I had hoped to. As Bashar has always done said, if you aren’t getting 100% results, you can be guaranteed you aren’t doing it 100%.

But that’s OK, cuz I’m ok, and I don’t have to be ready to do it 100%, and by the time I do do “it” 100%, “it” will shift and there will be another new thing that I will be too scared to do at 100%. And so it continues, on and on and on and on.

I just read that Jung said that… might as well just look it up… yah, so Jung said, “Enlightenment is not imagining figures of light but making the darkness conscious.” So life is just a perfect formula for making darkness conscious. It just makes you want to do everything that is dark, and urges you gently, then stronger, then stronger, then stronger, and then eventually if you don’t do it, it just blows up your whole life and you are such a wreck that doing that thing doesn’t even seem like such a big deal anymore.

No wonder I do the puppet dance so much! Whenever I’m comfortable enough to admit it, I really do think of myself as not much more than a puppet. Voices in my head tell me to do things or ideas magically pop into my head of things that would be exciting, and then the monkey-suit starts machinating.

So anyway, it was a good day, another new learning experience, many ups and downs, and I made enough money to buy myself a tea and cookie at Barnes & Noble.

The simple things in life.

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Another eh day following an exciting day of growth. I was super manic last night and stayed up all night doing various things and then slept all day. By the time I woke up, it was dark and my energy and enthusiasm were low. I went out anyway, and all of the spots were taken at Bedford, Union Square, and 6th Ave. Technically, I could have just started dancing along with one of the guitar players, but I didn’t have it in me tonight. I felt discouraged and that’s that.

I’m still moving forward with this, and tomorrow is a new day.

It’s funny. I was hoping for this challenge (like all things I do) to be so inspiring to everyone. How this guy was so afraid and he immediately just overcame all of his fears and transformed into a whole new person and inspired them all by how brave and courageous he was. And well, then life came along

Onward ho.

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Like Ice Cube said, I gotta say it was a good day. About midway through the day I didn’t think so, but life showed me otherwise. I feel so proud, really, truly, I do. I went out at 2:30 and performed for about 2 hours.

I honestly think I can say I changed someone’s life. I think I may never hear about it, but I can feel it as I write it. I really went for it and was free and had fun.

When I moved to New York, I spent 12 hours in the subway one day warming up and getting acclimated to the whole situation. One of the things I noticed was that, much to my chagrin, there were huge groups of kids all the time at the Bedford station. These huge packs of black and latino teenagers that were so loud and so obnoxious and so just about making fun of everything and thinking things were stupid.

I was scared that they would make fun of me. And I realized that deep down, I have always feared rejection by black people. That if I was just me, just talked me, just acted like, just danced like me, that black people would make fun of me for how uncool and white I was. I have taken great strides in this department over the years, but at my core, I still believed it. And straight out the hood, black and latino teenagers probably topped that list, especially since teenagers of all races can be so annoying and so quick to make fun of things.

Anyway, at one point I had 50 teenagers surrounding me who were totally into me and what I was doing and we were cracking jokes and having fun and I was battling them at dancing and they were screaming at how good I was and on and on and on. The weirdest part was that out of the $10 I made in 2 hours (NOT BAD HUH!!?), I think half of it was from black and latino teenagers, the people who I would assume from my white middle-class perspective would be the people least likely to give me money.

So that was really, ya know, touching.

I also had my first voice lesson tonight which was really great and I totally hit it off with my teacher and then she was playing in this *CRAZY* band tonight at Zebulon. I can honestly say it was THE STRANGEST MUSIC I HAVE EVER HEARD IN MY ENTIRE LIFE. It ultimately took me into a parallel dimension it was so dischordant and aharmonic. You should seriously just listen to their songs to trip out at how weird it is. And the conductor dude is SOOOOO into it, he was this total inspiration and made me realize the border between creative genius and completely insane person is basically completely subjective.

So a really good day, a day of growth.

And on top of that, I took 8 of the 10 dollars I made (need $2 to get into the subway tomorrow) and took myself out for some really nice Thai food. It felt so good to go out to eat with the money that I made street performing.

It really did.

LOVE YOU ALL!

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So I wrote and recorded another song today. I am having my first voice lesson on Monday with a woman I found on craigslist. Here is the song and you can even BUY IT from this very widget right here:

It is a weird thing making these songs because when I hear them a few hours after I made them sometimes they sound to me like someone doing a parody–like something you’d see on SNL of someone who can’t sing. But it’s funny, I like them. I like listening to them pretty much as much as listening to Jack Johnson or The Beatles. Cuz it’s MY SONG. This goes right in line with what Terrence McKenna has to say about reclaiming your mind and creating your OWN culture. i.e. Listening to songs and videos you made with your friends has its own innate joy that you can not get from someone else’s creativity.

Anyway, enough of my high-falutin’ ideas. Here’s the first Dance of Reckless Abandon. 5 minutes of uncut Youtube madness:

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When I watch dance footage of myself, 99 times out of 100 I feel ashamed and embarassed and bad about myself and think that I should just give up and stop dancing. My lines are sometimes not good, there is a lot of awkwardness in how I move occasionally, I don’t look like a smooth soul brother all the time, I don’t have the physique or the flexibility to perform certain maneuvers as well as others I know.

I have wanted to be the best popper in the world for as long as I can remember. But it’s dawning on me that this desire to be the best (and what a ridiculously subjective idea that one is) keeps me feeling bad about myself and feeling some need to be GOOD.

So, I’m beginning to embrace how bad I am. I was the smartest kid in school, I was the smartest kid in college, I have walked around thinking I’m so good for as long as I can remember. But it’s not the truth. I’m also really bad. My smarts have thus far not translated to riches or fame or success in the eyes of the world. Other dancers don’t even consider me one of the best, let alone the best. And I’m seven years in at this point. Others who have been dancing half as long as me are world-famous in our community.

But what I bring to the table is me. What no one else can do, what I can be the best at it, is being me. Awkward lines, strange looking white guy dancing, the whole nine. I bring that to the table. I bring the ability to turn all of that and make good. I’ve been running from it for so long. Pretending in my head that I look smooth like my black teachers when I dance, and I’m finally opening my eyes and seeing that it’s not true.

It’s not that it can’t be true at some point in the future, but I’ve been avoiding seeing this for about seven years now. All the while, thinking I looked like them. And so now I begin the march toward freedom, where I’m not even trying to look like them, where I’m trying to look like me, to feel what I feel and express that.

So here I come. I’m about to be the best me this world has ever seen.

And for practice, I’m going to start making a series of videos called “Dances of Reckless Abandon” where I just dance for a whole song and let youtube capture it directly. No editing, no second takes, just here goes nothing. Because another thing I noticed is that I almost NEVER just let myself dance. I’m always thining while I’m dancing, always plotting about how I’m going to be better and all that. I’m over it. I’m about to be really bad and love it–love how bad I am like you’ve never seen.

Because when I think about it, the most popular dancer of this internet era, in my opinion, is not that good. But he is most DEFINITELY himself.

Good night and good luck.

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Link to my Vlog entry for the day on this shitty service that I don’t recommend called vlip.com which I used because youtube was down. I’m not sure if you’re ever gonna be able to get the vlog to play.

So day 4 has come and gone. This was the day that VV left to go back to LA and we were putting finishing touches on the script right up until the end. After that, I just felt really creative and started going for it. I ended up sending out a ton of emails and recording my first song and playing around with a lot of new ideas.

I didn’t think I was going to go out today but that just felt so bad and so moving in the wrong direction that I decided to go anyway. At 3AM! As I walked to the subway I was a little nervous because I was afraid people were going to be like who’s the crazy bastard breakdancing and miming in the subway at 3AM, that is, if there was anyone there at all. So I went, I saw, I conquered. It was really fun and definitely a little weird. I wasn’t sure I was going to make any money but I stayed out for 30 minutes and made $3 which means $1 of profit (the ticket costs 2 bucks)!

I’m really glad I did it and I *did* beatbox while I was down there. It was actually not so much beatboxing as sort of making sounds while I danced which is something I’ve done for as long as I can remember. I would start beatboxing but then it would just sort of devolve into my sound-making. I am very grateful for the people who gave money, including the guy who stood in the corner waching for about 20 minutes before he got on the train and dropped in a buck.

So that’s day 4 and I feel good. There’s still a lot of growth and I don’t feel like a mind-blowing performer that makes people HAVE TO put in money because I’m so good yet, but all in time man, all in time.

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Here it is! History being made! Another guy takes up music! With nothing but the illusion of a guitar!

The Final “Mastered” Take of I Love You VV

Buy it here!

Yah as you’ll learn there’s no guitar involved in the production of these songs. Maybe I can play the instrumental while street performing, and play an air guitar, and sing my songs! I like the idea already!

So I want to put this up while the iron is hot and I don’t have time to regret it. First off, I have never sang before on anything that was going to be recorded. I have always been really embarrassed about singing, while at the same time loving it more than anything except dancing. I really got into singing with my Jewish friends who do these long jam sessions of niguns that are just about the most transcendent fun thing I’ve ever been involved in that wasn’t a psychedelic drug.

I’m just remembering this as I type, but I was reading “Think and Grow Rich” and there was some exercise about deep hidden desires and out of nowhere, my inner voice screamed SINGING. How synchronistic is this. Following this impulse from about a month ago without really even remembering I was doing so. Well, I’ll tell you one thing. I LOVE IT!

So to continue my rambling, I was sitting with VV one day and she was having a conversation with someone else that I found boring. So I decided to write a song about loving VV. I know this is about the most cliché thing one could ever do, but hey, I’m a cliché guy and everybody’s gotta start somewhere. Even Robert Zimmerman and Jack Johnson started somewhere! So I’m really happy about this turn of events.

My inspiration was my main homey Tim Boucher who has been making songs like this one. I love them and I love this act of expressing. I’m just gonna keep running with it. I have a feeling this is where a large segment of the population is ultimately headed. As Michel Gondry pointed out, there is something special about listening to your own (or your friends’) music or watching movies you made starring you and your friends.

So here is my digital expression. The way that I made it was that I downloaded a “folk loop” off of soundsnap.com which is a super-rad royalty-free all-free sound and music archive. I then loaded the loop into Ableton Live and used my trust USB mic to record myself singing. I used a few effects in Ableton to make my voice sound better and that was that. I recorded 3 takes and now, for your listening pleasure, are the first take and the final take. I want to include the first take as much as an archive for myself as for any other reason. Enjoy, especially you my sweet VV Dachin Hsu!

And here’s the rough cut…

The Rough Uncut First Take of I Love You VV

And here are the lyrics:

i love you vv

i got a girl named dachin hsu
i love this girl and she loves me too

born in hong kong met in la
been a mommy so long time to come and play

a psychic a dancer a filmmaker oh my
so in love with this girl that it’s makin me cry

i love you vv, vv hsu
even at my worst you love me too

i said i love you vv, my sweetest girl
i’ll be your oyster if you’ll be my pearl

couldn’t believe it when i saw you
a sight to behold
victorian dresses and chucks
long-legged beauty far from old

the more i get to know you
the better you get
every day i spend with you
is the best one yet

temper like a bull
feed me til im full
know if i wrong ya
you’ll be smashin my skull

and that’s why i love you, ms. vv hsu
can’t get away from me cuz i’m the tamer of you

i said that’s why i love you, my sweet dachin
and i’ll sing this song about you again and again

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