After leading an art gallery talk last Thursday night I had a realization about how being able to choose to be calm and relaxed is a crucial part of any kind of performance. Whether you’re sparring in an MMA gym or performing music in public or at your day job leading a presentation, the ability to remain calm in the storm of performing is a cornerstone of any victory.

Here are some thoughts…

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This year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love in San Francisco in 1967. During that auspicious season about 100,000 young Americans traveled west to the Fog City to twist in the gyre of a countercultural hurricane while similar youth movements blossomed in Canada an across Europe. Suspicious of government oppression, aligned against the Vietnam War and consumerist values, the hippies seeking out the Summer of Love embraced sex, art, music, meditation, and the expanded consciousness that could be accessed through drugs and meditation. From this scene a radical value system based on communal values, community care, cultural transformation, and freedom from bourgeois hypocrisy and political tyranny came to light. They were weird, wild, wacked-out, and their impact on the culture has been permanent and lasting despite their many critics and naysayers. Here’s the story of the Summer of Love from PBS’s “American Experience…”

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This year we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the David Lynch sci-fi epic, Dune. While the film was a commercial bomb, it’s gone on to garner cult status and the theatrical release of Jodorowsky’s Dune — which tells the tale of director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s failed, earlier attempt to bring the Frank Herbert classic to the screen — will only create more interest around the Lynch film’s birthday.

While Lynch’s Dune is fraught with miscalculations, bad editing and now-cheesy effects, it’s also full of visionary, unique elements that are supremely “Lynchian.” Where does this guy get all these strange ideas? Why not ask the man himself?

Catching the Big Fish is an artistic memoir of sorts that finds Lynch ruminating on his creative process, his on-the-job education and the importance of meditation to his art. This book is read by Lynch and the effect is like a master’s lecture from one of our most important filmmakers and artists.

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