New video - Threes

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bupd9LPub1Y

Wow! My YouTube channel now has over 17,000 subscribers. Thanks everyone for your continued support. Click to tweet this video: http://www.clicktotweet.com/zETp8
To read along with this video blog go to http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2010/12/threes.html

Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs, March Report

1. Changing Your Brain
2. What Is Reality?
3. Timelike Entanglement
4. The Quantum Observer
5. Photons and Free Will
6. The Quantum Mind
7. Language and the Mind
8. Is Spacetime Flat or Curved?
9. Novelty
10. Cymatics

Previous lists:
. April 08 . May 08 . June 08 . July 08 . August 08
. September 08 . October 08 . November 08 . December 08 .
. Top 100 Blog Entries of 2008 . May 09 . June 09 . July 09
. August 09 . September 09 . October 09 . November 09 .
. December 09 . Top 100 Blog Entries of 2009 .
. January 10 . February 10 . March 10 . April 10 . May 10 .
. June 10 . July 10 . August 10 . September 10 . October 10 .
. November 10 . December 10 . Top 100 Entries of 2010 .
. January 11 . February 11 .

Based upon number of views, here are the top blogs for the last thirty days.

And as of March 26th, 2011, here are the twenty-six Imagining the Tenth Dimension blog entries that have attracted the most visits of all time. Items marked in bold are new or have risen since last month.

1. Jumping Jesus (1)
2. What's Around the Corner? (2)
3. Mandelbulbs (3)
4. An Expanding 4D Sphere (4)
5. Just Six Things: The I Ching (5)
6. Roger Ebert on Quantum Reincarnation (6)
7. The 5th-Dimensional Camera Project (7)
8. Creativity and the Quantum Universe (8)
9. Vibrations and Fractals (10)
10. How to Time Travel (9)
11. Light Has No Speed (11)
12. Dancing on the Timeline (12)
13. Our Universe Within the Omniverse (13)
14. Poll 44 - The Biocentric Universe Theory (14)
15. 10-10-10 Look Before You Leap (17)
15. Monkeys Love Metallica (15)
16. Magnets and Morality (16)
18. Consciousness in Frames per Second (18)
19. Is Reality an Illusion? (new)
20. Simultaneous Inspiration (19)
21. Polls Archive 54 - Is Time Moving Faster? (20)
22. Poll 43 - Is the Multiverse Real? (21)
23. Alien Mathematics (22)
24. Seeing Time, Feeling Colors, Tasting Light (23)
25. When's a Knot Not a Knot? (24)
26. Complexity from Simplicity (26)

Which means that this worthy submission is leaving our top 26 of all time list this month.

Flow (25)


By the way, if you're new to this project, you might want to check out the Tenth Dimension FAQ, as it provides a road map to a lot of the discussions and different materials that have been created for this project. If you are interested in the 26 songs attached to this project, this blog shows a video for each of the songs and provides more links with lyrics and discussion. The Annotated Tenth Dimension Video provides another cornucopia of discussion topics to be connected to over at YouTube. And as always, here's a reminder that the Tenth Dimension Forum is a good place to converse with other people about these ideas.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Courage

New video - Bees and Tangential Thinking

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9a26ej-H7aU

To read along go to http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2010/11/poll-69-bees-and-tangential-thinking.html

Trying to Escape

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDzFQwdwuDM

So far we've looked at We All are Chemicals, Gimme a Beer!, and Just a Shy Guy from my 1983 concept album Alcohol and Other Drugs. By the way, this 11 song collection is available for download from tenthdimension.com/digital, thank you to everyone who have already checked out that link.

To recap: these songs were written for a live theatrical show which toured the high schools of Saskatchewan back then, and the subject of this particular song speaks to the eternal problem of being a teenager and trying to figure out where you fit in. Using alcohol or other drugs as a means to escape the pressures of life? Our hero becomes the victim in this song.

Also to recap: these songs feature my friends Cal Harle on drums and Jack Semple on guitars and bass. Since we were recording this in our basements and living rooms using a Tascam 244 and a Tascam 144 four-track cassette machine back in the pre-midi, pre-ProTools world of 1983, creating a song with this many individual parts and only four audio tracks was a time-consuming process involving lots of sub-mixing and bouncing: both Cal and Jack went above and beyond the call of duty to help me create this album, and Jack and I spent many many hours working on the overdubs for songs like this one.

As I mentioned last time, Cal continues to work as a professional drummer, and also works for my studio as a foley artist. His experience and natural feel make him one of the best in the business at both of those jobs. Jack has become a nationally known guitarist, his main focus has been on R&B, but he's proficient at a great many styles: you'll see what I mean if you check out his music for sale on his website.

With Trying to Escape, we never discover the fate of the song's central figure, a boy named Jimmy Smith. Last time, with Just a Shy Guy, we talked about how these songs relate to the idea of our fifth-dimensional probability space, which is a way of thinking about the quantum superposition of different outcomes that are pre-supposed by Everett's Many World Interpretation. Is Jimmy Smith like Schrödinger's cat, neither dead nor alive but both simultaneously, until we observe him? The truth for that famous cat is artificially simple. For Jimmy Smith and all of us, the possible outcomes from any particular moment are immense, and understanding that none of us are trapped into a single path is the power of this approach to visualizing the dimensions.

TRYING TO ESCAPE
- words and music by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

He was trying to escape
Any chance he would take
To get to something new
Nothin he wouldn’t do
He was trying to escape

Jimmy Smith was a young boy
Never did so good at school
You know his momma always told him
“Jimmy boy, life is cruel
It’s push and shove and give and take but mostly it’s just give
All it takes is one mistake so careful how you live”
Folks in town started talkin when he went to the doctor
Doc said he could see what the problem was

He was trying to escape…

Jimmy Smith at a party
He was like a boy possessed
He would drink down a twelve-pack
You know his momma never guessed
All the jocks never liked him much cause sports just weren’t his thing
Didn’t fit in with the stoners cause he just liked to drink
Sometimes it felt like he was caught in the middle
Sometimes he felt there was nowhere to go

He was trying to escape…

Whadaya think he was thinking of
What was goin through his head
The night he went out on the highway
When he left the road he was goin a hundred and ten…

He was trying to escape
Any chance he would take
To get to something new
Nothin he wouldn’t do
He was trying to escape
He was trying to escape
He was trying to escape

Next: Livin on the Edge of the World

Just a Shy Guy

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzdAhrFEY-4

As we continue to look at songs from my 1983 concept album Alcohol and Other Drugs, the song this time is called Just a Shy Guy. Alcohol is sometimes referred to as a "social lubricant": for somebody who's Just a Shy Guy, alcohol or other drugs can be what they use to get themselves loosened up enough to be more outgoing in potentially tense social situations. As the middle section of this song discusses though, sometimes the popular media's portrayal of the effectiveness of these substances is not realistic (despite what Charlie Sheen may be trying to tell us): no big surprise there!

Many of the songs on this album tie into my approach to visualizing how our reality is formed, which as I've said before began for me when I read Madeleine L'Engle's wonderful book "A Wrinkle in Time" at the edge of eight. Both this song and the next one we'll be looking at (Trying to Escape) tie nicely into the idea that we are each navigating through a fifth-dimensional probability space, gradually becoming one version or another of ourselves through chance, choice and the actions of others. These songs, written for a show aimed at teenagers, are about how for teens that probability space may seem more obvious - we go through our adolescence trying on different hats, different personas, trying to decide which version of ourselves we are going to try to be. This probability space is a constant theme in my book and this blog: read Are Bees More Sixth Dimensional and Entangled Awareness and OBEs for some of the more recent explorations of this concept.

Let's talk about the process of creating these songs a bit. They were recorded back in 1983 on a Tascam 244 and a Tascam 144 Portastudio: this was an innovative four-track mixer/recorder that used standard cassette tapes. I had become convinced at the time that this was the breakthrough everyone was looking for: finally, a machine with good enough recording quality that it would allow you to record in your basement or living room and create something that could be good enough to play on the radio! Nowadays, with people making high quality digital multi-track recordings in their bedrooms using powerful but inexpensive computer-based systems, this accomplishment may not seem as notable. But back then, in a pre-midi, pre-ProTools world, attempting to record fully-produced pop music without going into a recording studio was still pretty much unheard of. Recording a full band with multiple overdubs to four track also required lots of "bouncing" from track to track or machine to machine, and of course every "bounce" adds to the tape hiss, so this is not an easy thing to do! The fact that songs like Just a Shy Guy and Courage actually made it to being playlisted on our local FM rock station back then is still an accomplishment that I'm very proud of.

These songs feature myself on vocals and keyboards, Cal Harle on drums, and Jack Semple on guitars and bass. The three of us have played together in a number of bands over the years, and we're still good friends. Cal is also one of the best foley artists I've ever had the pleasure of working with, and he continues to do foley for all of my studio's film and television work. Jack has built a very successful career for himself as a guitarist and composer, check out his website at jacksemple.com. Recording these songs took many hours and I'm grateful for the time these guys put into this ambitious project. Here's the lyrics:

JUST A SHY GUY
- words and music by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

Sometimes I don’t know what to say
Sometimes I don’t know what to do
Sometimes I don’t know how to act
And the fact is I’m scared that you’ll find out too
I don’t wanna be a big star, but I
Don’t wanna have to play the clown
Tell me why can’t they see that I am just a shy guy
(He’s just a shy guy)
I’m just a shy guy
The other people in my neighbourhood
They same to do just fine
Everything seems understood
There’s no one wastin time

But I just don’t know where I stand
And when I stand it’s always wrong
And when I try to play it cool
As a rule it’ll end up I don’t belong
There’ll be someone with a new name
That they made up to hang on me
Tell me why can’t they see that I am just a shy guy
(He’s just a shy guy)
I’m just a shy guy
What if I was a little more
Like all those TV shows?
The kind of guy that the girls adore
The guy sayin anything goes

It’s a different world on my TV
They’re all working on some new cocaine deal
Life’s a never-endin party
Fine wines with their Cheerios
Sometimes I just can’t believe it’s real

And so I guess I’ll carry on
I’ll keep on runnin in the race
To a space where I feel like I really belong
I’ll keep on looking for myself now, tryin to
Find the one I think is me
Someday I might find out who I am
Someday I might find out who I am

Next: Trying to Escape

New Video - Psychedelics and Spacetime

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wr5oO9fJWU

To read along go to http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2010/11/psychedelics-and-spacetime.html

Next - Just a Shy Guy

Gimme a Beer!

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKr5uMg-MoI

As we continue to look at the songs from my 1983 concept Alcohol and Other Drugs, here's one that starts out sounding like a beer commercial, but by the end the singer turns into the Beer Monster, continuing to have one last beer long past when he should have stopped.

As I mentioned, the songs from this album accompany a Globe Theatre musical play which toured the high schools of Saskatchewan back then. The creative approach for this project was quite unique: a collective of actors, most not that long out of high school themselves, were brought together to discuss their own attitudes towards alcohol and other drugs, and to improvise some scenes based upon those discussions. Playwright Rex Deverell (whose name you may recognize from my book and his connection to my songs Everything Fits Together and Senseless Violence) then developed those themes into a play, and I did the same to write songs which explored the ideas the collective had brought up as important to them.

Beer as Mind-Altering Drug
Each of the songs in this collection takes a slightly different viewpoint on people's attitudes towards mind-altering drugs, and this one reminds us that beer goes on that list. Even though the underlying message in this song about the dangers of overindulgence is obvious, for me this is more about the portrayal of alcohol consumption in popular media, and the sometimes ridiculous fantasy world of beer commercials. I hope you enjoy it.

GIMME A BEER!
- words and music by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

Gimme another one over here
Make it foamy golden and clear
Ice cold heaven, set it right here
Gimme a beer, gimme a beer

Good friends and a brown one, they go together fine
A case of beans means good times, in the warm sunshine
Racin at the Indy, or ropin long horn steers
Goes just that much better with a couple a beers

Gimme another one over here…

Sittin in the barroom, shuffleboard or pool
Pickled eggs and sausage, and a beer that’s nice and cool
Put a quarter in the jukebox, turn it good and loud
Bring us forty-eight draft and a shaker of salt
We’re a mighty thirsty crowd

Six pack, twelve pack, gimme a case
Set up a round for every guy in the place
Ice cold heaven, set it right here
Gimme a beer, gimme a beer

(instrumental)

Sittin at home with the late night show
Everybody else said they had to go
I go to the fridge throw open the door
And gimme a beer, gimme a beer
Gimme a beer, gimme a beer!

“Next time you want a party, don’t just ask for a drink… tell them GIMME A BEER! “

Next: Just a Shy Guy