New Gold City

My new novel,  Beyond the Will of God , is intended to remind readers of, or introduce them to, the playful, exotic, and mysterious elements of loud music that I believe we've forgotten.  Beyond the Will of God  seeks to thread the needle between serious mystery and quirky cosmic thriller. It is funky, humorous, and pathetically romantic -- the way we used to be back in the day.   The book gets its title from a line in the Jimi Hendrix song, "1983...(A Merman I Should Turn to Be)," : ...And you know good and well It would be beyond the will of God And the grace of a king. In many ways, this story is a murder mystery...but it's wrapped in the magic of music...and then rolled up into cosmic questions that we used to ask ourselves all the time. What is the relationship between mind and body? What is telepathy? Why is the truth about altered states of consciousness so delicate and hard to understand? Where is the communal power of music coming from? And what about the ps...

Hopefully, a lot of you are thinking about the future of paper books these days. Books are objects. E-Books aren't (although the iPad and the Kindle reader, and many other electronic tablet type thingies, are pretty amazing pieces of technology). There's just no question that digital text is going to have a massive impact on the publishing world's business planning for the next decade. It seems pretty clear that paper-based books are going to shift in significance for people. By that I mean they're going to become more valuable and more meaningful -- although, it's likely that sales will be dwarfed by e-books. I predict that you're not going to be able to find 1st-Run books in paper form at bookstores and libraries by 2020, but once a book "proves" itself in the marketplace (electronically), you're going to be able to buy it as a hard copy in real space.  You're going to have two options:  1) a print-on-demand (POD) edition that may or may not ...

Sometimes you are blessed with good friends who have so much artistic talent they inspire the hell out of you. As I work through final edits and publication formatting for Beyond the Will of God , I have the privilege of listening to some of the most interesting music I've heard in a long time. My good friend Jim Hamilton, percussionist extraordinaire (a big-time student of Brazilian rhythm of all kinds), has provided me with a rough cut of extended compositions by an iteration (or something) of his electro-trip-jazz band GLOBAL iLLAGE . Rest assured, if you pay attention, the most amazing music you will ever hear is yet to come. I have no idea when these tracks will find their way into finished form, but you really need to be on the lookout for this album. It's establishing one helluva supreme manifestation in my head. My novel  Beyond the Will of God, is all about the transformative, transcendent power of music. It is a murder mystery wrapped up in a music mystery wrapped up...

A book announcement. The 1970s were the pinnacle years for conspiracy theories in America. Uncertainties about JFK's assassination got things rolling in the 1960s, but the stories got weirder and weirder the more we watched our great cultural heroes pass on into death well before their time -- Kerouac, Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, MLK, Jr., even Elvis -- to name just a few. For years it was said that no one ever saw The Doors' Jim Morrison's body after he died and that his grave in Paris was empty.  Conspiracy theorists had a field day when evidence of CIA misdeeds came to light during the Church Committee Hearings. No one had ever heard of Remote Viewing. The experiments performed by various military and CIA intelligence units on unwitting citizens using psychedelic drugs seemed like proof that the mysteries of LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin were more than psychological fancy.  As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s & 1990s, abandoned missile silos throughout the p...