Takers opens in theaters this Friday.
One of the tracks from my 2006 album, Straight Ahead will be included in the movie. Rumor has it that Hayden Christensen will be mimicking the recording onscreen.
Link: Takers Production Notes (Music)
There’s an article that I found years ago on Slate.com called “How we read online.”
The article discusses how internet users read the internet, and how writers need to tailor their writing to this new medium.
Cam and I (who run MusicianWages.com) get a good number of emails asking to guest blog for our site. We have a lot of rules for our guest bloggers (the biggest one: no self-promotion).
At the end of the rules, I always point the writers to this Slate article and ask them to try to follow as many of the rules as they can.
It’s a great resource. I recommend it to anybody who frequently writes online.
I was in Washington D.C. in April speaking to my congressional reps about the Global Conservation Act of 2010.
The trip was organized by the Pew Environmental Group and the Alliance for Global Conservation, which includes Pew as well as Conservation International, the World Wildlife Federation, the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Nature Conservancy. It was a great event that I was grateful to be a part of.
As part of the event I was interviewed for a radio spot. Press the play button below to hear the short interview.
I should note that I only meant to say that it’s “possible” that I might get cancer again in 20 years, not necessarily “likely”, as the interview states. Who knows? I hope that won’t happen.
April 21, 2010
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NEW YORK – Half of all the pharmaceutical drugs discovered and produced in the last 25 years have ingredients derived from Mother Nature, although there is growing concern that destruction of natural habitat could bring availability of these life-saving drugs to a halt.
David Hahn is a New York cancer survivor who says he can thank a little plant in Madagascar for providing the ingredient needed to make his chemotherapy more effective. Hahn wants to see action to protect such plants and their environment around the world. He points to a bill now in Congress that could help in the future – and in case he faces a relapse.
“This bill itself is not the cure for cancer, but it allows natural areas to be protected long enough for scientists to go out into them and look for the cure that I am going to need 20 years from now.”
The measure (HR 4959) would establish a comprehensive global conservation strategy for the United States. It is intended to improve the effectiveness of our conservation assistance to developing countries.
Jeff Wise, director of global conservation for the Pew Environment Group, says rainforests and coral reefs are home to plants and animals that provide many medical remedies and cures. But he warns that 80,000 rainforest acres are destroyed every day, and 30 percent of the world’s coral reefs already are lost.
“It really is now or never; plants and animals that we get these compounds from that go extinct in these areas, they never come back.”
An estimated one in three Americans is fighting a chronic condition with the help of drugs derived from nature. Hahn says he had never heard of the flower that helped push his cancer into remission.
“A very powerful drug that’s made from the rosy periwinkle flower, indigenous to Madagascar. You know, it turns out there are a ton of drugs out on the market that are derived from natural plants.”
More information about the legislation, called the Global Conservation Act of 2010, is online at www.actforconservation.org.
Mike Clifford, Public News Service – NY
I wrote a few short songs this week to raise money for the BP oil spill clean up. All proceeds will be donated to The Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Gulfport, MS.
For more info, please visit:
celltones4ringphones.com
I have a very small email list that I write to now and then. It’s a real simple thing – I like to write once a month or so and keep in touch. I tell everyone what I’m up to, maybe a story about a recent gig, or what I’m currently listening to or reading. I link to articles, blog posts and songs that I’ve written recently and I talk about my upcoming gigs.
If you’re interesting in joining the group, please use the form to the left. I’d love to have you join!
Note that I’m very serious about your email privacy. I promise not to send spam or to sell your info to evil marketing people. No one else on the list will see your email address or even your name. It’s just you and me.
Thanks for joining. Hit reply anytime – I look forward to hearing from you!
Sometime last month I started writing ringtones for my friends on Facebook. It got out of hand, which is to say that it became a hobby. Except that I don’t really do hobbies very well. I’m not a person that often has casual interests…it’s usually full-blown obsessions for as long as they last.
But in this case, it’s nice to have a outlet for songwriting. I’ve been writing songs since I was an early teenager, but it’s never been a focus of mine. Songwriting has been a side-effect of a life in music, a straggler without nowhere else to go that has followed along for the ride. Recently I’ve just had the itch more than normal.
There’s another change – words. I’ve always been waiting around for somebody to come along that can write words to my music. An Ira to my George. Sounds like fun. But here I am nearing 3 decades on this earth, and if I’m going to wait for something to write for me, I’m going to be waiting forever. So I’ve been writing words too – and singing for heaven’s sake. I sing terribly and I know it, but I write songs for myself that aren’t hard to sing and I do a lot of takes and I eventually get it right.
So the ringtones. I’ll tell you why I like the medium – you have to fit a good song, a plot, and a character into 30 seconds. It’s a challenge. What I’m trying to do is write real songs, not just dinkety-dinkety midi files for a phone. You know how Ben Folds writes wonderful little vignettes and songs about people? He is like a portrait painter with his songs – it’s so effective. So what if you could fit that Ben Folds kind of portrait songwriting into 30 second clips and call them ringtones?
Logistically speaking it’s not a bad idea. I mean, ringtones sell for $1-5 a song, and full songs on iTunes sell for $0.99-$1.29. So if you do the math…you could actually make just as much money selling ringtones, except that you only have to write a 30 second song instead of an entire album. So? So why not try it. When it comes to selling music, I’ll try anything.
I’ve made a site to hold the ringtones:
It’s up and running. I feed the recordings into SoundCloud, which makes the little players, then upload the ringtones into Myxer.com, where I can sell them. So far I’ve made $0.40. Pretty lousy, but whatever. I’m trying something, and experience has told me that you should keep trying new things and adapting in this business if you want to keep making a living.
Please listen to the songs – ahem, “premium ringtones” – and buy one if you like them. A lot of them can still be downloaded for free, so try it out.
I traveled to Washington D.C. this past week to voice my support to my congressional representatives about the Global Conservation Act, a bill recently introduced to the House. I met with an aide for Congressman Charlie Rangel and staffers for Senator Gillibrand. I also had a radio interview and met a lot of great people who also support the bill.
After the event in Washington the Wildlife Conservation Society asked me to give a short speech before their 5k run at the Bronx Zoo. I came and told my story to the 5,000 people attending the great event. The weather was beautiful and the Bronx Zoo is incredible.
The story I tell is about having, and beating, cancer using chemotherapy drugs that were derived from nature. The ABVD chemo I received has 4 different drugs, at least 3 of which were discovered in nature. Adriamycin was found in soil microbes in Spain, Bleomycin comes from toxic bacteria, and Vinblastine was first found in the Rosy Periwinkel flower, native to Madagascar. I met people this last week that had been saved by the most amazing things – the spit from gila monsters…venon from black vipers…bark from trees in China. Nature is an amazing pharmacy.
It might sound self-interested, and maybe it is, but one of the reasons we need to save natural areas around the world is so we can save ourselves. There are certain to be valuable medicines in the rain forests that we are cutting down. Who knows what we’ll find if we just save them long enough to look.
I feel invested in this argument for many reasons, not the least of which is that cancer may come back. Survivors of the chemotherapy I was treated with are at an increased risk of developing secondary cancers several decades after the treatments. If that happens I hope that we’ve found a miracle drug that makes chemotherapy look barbaric, and that I won’t have to go through the same ordeal I did the first time in order to get better.
There is a lot of information on this topic at the website for the Global Conservation Act.
In 2005 I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. I went through 6 months of chemotherapy treatments and came out alright in the end. I wrote about the experience on a blog I called the Chronicles of a Cancer Patient. CCP used to be located at PreservationRecords.com, which is an old URL I owned at the time. Today I moved the blog to it’s new location:
www.ChroniclesofaCancerPatient.com
Over the years the cancer blog has been found by many organizations around the world – from a hospital in India to the Boston Globe newspaper. In April I’ll be traveling to Washington D.C. to speak to congressional representatives about environmental conservation and medical research – an opportunity that came entirely from the cancer blog.
I’ll lose 5 years of links with the move, and likely a lot of traffic in the short term, but, long term, I think it’s a better home for the material.
I’ll be in Washington D.C. from April 19-21st to speak with my congressional representatives on why environmental conservation is important to me. I’ve been invited by the Alliance for Global Conservation through the Pew Charitable Trusts. We will be lobbying on behalf of the Conservation Act, a piece of legislation that – to quote the AGC website:
The Global Conservation Act dramatically enhances the ability of the United States government to address an international conservation crisis that if unchecked will impoverish developing countries, cause runaway climate change, and drive most of the world’s species to extinction.
I’ve been chosen to talk to congress not just because I feel very strongly about conservation and environmentalism, but because my life was saved by a drug derived from nature. Vinblastine is drug made from the Periwinkle flower, and it was a drug that was instrumental in treating my Stage IIIB Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in 2005. Without that flower I might not be here today.
And what other plants are out there, undiscovered, in the forests of the world? Is the cure for cancer there? AIDS? MS? We don’t know – and that makes blind destruction of the world’s natural areas a medical threat to mankind.
You can read more about the Conservation Act at ActforConservation.org.
It was interesting to hear today about Big Star and the death of Alex Chilton. It sounds like Chilton was a really influential force in the rock scene of the past 50 years, but I’m just hearing about him.
Here’s a song I found on Last.fm that I dig:
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