UW Attic 101: Back Where I Belong

Introducing "Back Where I Belong" from my new music project Ten Thousand Days and beginning a reading of my book Refuse to be Afraid. This begins a 10-week (ish) series that will feature a song from the album and an excerpt of the book. You can collect all 10 podcasts to get the picture slowly but surely, or you can go to my bookstore or CD Baby or iTunes to buy and/or download the book and album in their entirety today.

Here's your handy guide to today's episode:
Intro/Not to Return - Randy Bachman
Back Where I Belong - w.p. bluhm
(Robert Palmer concert ad)
Buy For Me The Rain - Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
Cheese Curds, Booyah and Beer - Fred Alley
(Roy Orbison for Coca-Cola)
Refuse to be Afraid - Introduction - Warren Bluhm
The Banana Boat Song - The Tarriers

Click on the Pod icon or here to listen/download UW Attic 101 - Here are your links to the album and the book. Have fun!!!

Ten Thousand Days preview: You Can't Be Trusted

Hi folks! Happy Election Day. Here's a tune for the day from my upcoming album Ten Thousand Days, releasing Nov. 9. Also watch for Uncle Warren's Attic #101. Click on the pod icon or right here to listen!

A conversation about fear, friendship and fun - oh, and the book too

Wally Conger and I chat about Refuse to be Afraid and ... well, I'll let Wally explain here.

Oh, and during the conversation, I mention putting up a way to e-mail me. There!

'Mr. Worf, Fire!' and other great cliffhangers

A recent discussion of The Amazing Spider-Man #33 got me thinking about great cliffhangers.

Wally Conger reminded his readers that this month is the 45th anniversary of the great three-part webslinger story about a mysterious villain named the Master Planner and his gang trying to take over New York.

Issue #32 ended with the Master Planner being revealed as none other than Spider-Man’s arch-nemesis Doctor Octopus, who during the inevitable slugfest drops an enormous piece of machinery on the webbed one’s back, pinning him to the floor helpless.

Oh, did I mention the room under the Hudson River is about to collapse? He’ll probably drown when it does.

Oh, did I mention Aunt May is dying and the serum that could save her life is on the floor just out of Spider-Man’s reach, losing its potency minute by minute?

Wally wrote about how the opening pages of the next issue are probably the most inspirational moments in comic-book history, and they are. Spidey has no choice but to dig deep and find the strength to push the weight off his shoulders, save himself and rescue Aunt May, and he - just - keeps pushing - until - he - DOES IT!

I still get goosebumps.

But step back a month. One reason the opening pages of Issue #33 work so well is that creators Stan Lee and Steve Ditko did such a masterful job of building the suspense, and then cut the story off at the end of #32 just as we readers were the most involved.

They had spent nearly three years making us care about the characters, and most of two issues putting first Aunt May, then Spider-Man and of course the city of New York in jeopardy. I couldn’t wait to grab #33 off the newsstand and see how it ended — and the payoff was simply awesome.
I’m sure there are more, but I could only think of two other cliffhangers that made me sweat that much.

“Mr. Worf, fire!” The third-season finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation was one of that series’ finest moments. A new character arrives — ambitious Commander Shelby (Elizabeth Dennehy) who wants Will Riker’s job, the Enterprise’s first officer having been offered a captainship of his own. But Riker’s not sure he wants to leave the side of Capt. Jean-Luc Picard just yet.

Then Picard is captured and assimilated by the Borg, the half-human, half-machine collective that cannot (as far as anyone knows) be stopped. With his half-mechanized captain staring at him through the view screen and demanding his surrender. Instead, having modified the Enterprise’s technology to create a powerful makeshift weapon, Riker orders the crew to fire on the Borg and his beloved captain.

The screen fades to the words “To Be Continued.” Are you kidding me! I can’t recall ever looking forward to a television season premiere as much as I did for “Best of Both Worlds, Part II.”

“Frodo was alive but taken by the Enemy.”  At the end of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers, Samwise Gamgee discovers that his friend Frodo Baggins was not actually killed by the giant spider Shelob but is indeed a captive of the evil orcs.

The book, second in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, was published in November 1954, and 11 months would pass before publication of the third installment, Return of the King.

I had the luxury, as a geeky teenager about 15 years later, of shrieking in panic at 2 a.m. and grabbing immediately for the third book. I can’t fathom what the wait until October 1955 was like for the original Tolkien fanatics.

What these legendary cliffhangers had in common was the care that the writers took to invest us in the characters. By the time they reached the edge of the cliff, we loved Spider-Man and Aunt May; we loved Riker and Picard; and we loved Frodo and Sam. We wanted them to overcome, and we cared about how they would do so.

And in these three examples, the payoff also is memorable. Many’s the cliffhanger that promises a terrific escape and conclusion but falls short. What makes these stories legendary is the delightfully excruciating buildup, the promise of something terrific and, in the final chapter, a climax even more terrific than we expected.

Deliver even more than you promise — always a good policy in any business, and especially so in good writing.

Refuse to be Afraid: The Book

We all live with fear, ranging from little anxieties to sheer, stark-raving-mad, paralyzing terror, and everything in between. Fear of failure, fear of success, fear of getting started, fear of being stopped before we’re finished, fear of what to do next after we’re finished. Fear of hate, fear of love, fear of hating, fear of being loved. Fear of sickness, fear of health, fear of other people’s habits, fear of our own.

Fear of death.

Life is scary. But you don’t have to let your fears control your actions.

As I've been blogging these themes have come up time and again, and I've long been tinkering with compiling them into a book. The book is here. Thanks for your encouragement.

Veterans in Upper Michigan fight for the right to smoke

Frankly, I see this as a healthy sign for liberty.

Now Foucault-Funke Post 444, where the ashtrays never came off the tables and smokers line the bar each afternoon and evening, is at the center of what could be a decisive showdown for the new state law and — as the vets see it — for the individual liberty and self-government they fought to defend ...

The new state smoking ban, Shepard said, is just one more encroachment on personal freedom, a decision handed down by out-of-touch politicians 500 miles away. She likens it to restrictions on gun rights and creeping government intrusion generally.

"We're not a communist country yet, but we're only one step away from it," she said.

The leaders of the Baraga post said they didn't go looking for a confrontation with the state or local health authorities. But when the new law was signed, they decided it was time to take a stand.

Out-give the government

Dave Ramsey has a revolutionary idea in the podcast of his Aug. 19 show, as he talked about the power of giving:

We gripe in this country a lot about the taxes and the government taking all of our money, and we should, because they do, but the truth is, I think that if people of faith gathered together and for about a decade out-gave the government, we could make the government irrelevant as a social organization. They could be irrelevant; no one would care that they’re there, if we the people start doing a better job of taking care of we the people. You could out-give the government and put them out of business, and then the taxes would go down because you wouldn’t tolerate taxation at this level if people who were hurting were all being helped by outside organizations and other people.

Worth a shot? Worth discussing amongst ourselves - as long as we don't talk so long we forget to act.

Ten Thousand Days minus 150 equals ...

I DID write "coming soon" in this post, didn't I?

Well, in that "we are just a blip in the timeline of eternity" sense, my set of new songs Ten Thousand Days is indeed coming soon.

And so is Refuse to Be Afraid.

And so is The Imaginary Revolution.

And so are podcasts with the "Uncle Warren's Attic Productions" imprint on them.

All in their time, my friends. All in their time. It's been a busy year away from cyberspace. Much has changed. And much has not.

Thank you, so much, for checking in to see.

Self Help: Words that could have been written this morning

I am still amazed that the opening paragraphs of Samuel Smiles' book Self Help were published in 1859. Except that he uses an occasional word or turn of phrase that people don't use anymore, Smiles could be writing about the contemporary debate about government bailouts versus the power of the individual and the private sector.

Smiles' book is packed with examples of real-life (19th century) success and encouragement. No wonder it created an entire new genre. I'm tickled to be in a position to re-introduce this classic to modern audiences. Check this out (and click on the book cover to find out how to buy or download it):

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“Heaven helps those who help themselves” is a well-tried maxim, embodying in a small compass the results of vast human experience. The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual; and, exhibited in the lives of many, it constitutes the true source of national vigour and strength. Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates. Whatever is done for men or classes, to a certain extent takes away the stimulus and necessity of doing for themselves; and where men are subjected to over-guidance and over-government, the inevitable tendency is to render them comparatively helpless.

Even the best institutions can give a man no active help. Perhaps the most they can do is, to leave him free to develop himself and improve his individual condition. But in all times men have been prone to believe that their happiness and well-being were to be secured by means of institutions rather than by their own conduct. Hence the value of legislation as an agent in human advancement has usually been much over-estimated. To constitute the millionth part of a Legislature, by voting for one or two men once in three or five years, however conscientiously this duty may be performed, can exercise but little active influence upon any man’s life and character. Moreover, it is every day becoming more clearly understood, that the function of Government is negative and restrictive, rather than positive and active; being resolvable principally into protection — protection of life, liberty, and property. Laws, wisely administered, will secure men in the enjoyment of the fruits of their labour, whether of mind or body, at a comparatively small personal sacrifice; but no laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober. Such reforms can only be effected by means of individual action, economy, and self-denial; by better habits, rather than by greater rights.

The Government of a nation itself is usually found to be but the reflex of the individuals composing it. The Government that is ahead of the people will inevitably be dragged down to their level, as the Government that is behind them will in the long run be dragged up. In the order of nature, the collective character of a nation will as surely find its befitting results in its law and government, as water finds its own level. The noble people will be nobly ruled, and the ignorant and corrupt ignobly.
Indeed all experience serves to prove that the worth and strength of a State depend far less upon the form of its institutions than upon the character of its men. For the nation is only an aggregate of individual conditions, and civilization itself is but a question of the personal improvement of the men, women, and children of whom society is composed.

National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice. What we are accustomed to decry as great social evils, will, for the most part, be found to be but the outgrowth of man’s own perverted life; and though we may endeavour to cut them down and extirpate them by means of Law, they will only spring up again with fresh luxuriance in some other form, unless the conditions of personal life and character are radically improved. If this view be correct, then it follows that the highest patriotism and philanthropy consist, not so much in altering laws and modifying institutions, as in helping and stimulating men to elevate and improve themselves by their own free and independent individual action.

It may be of comparatively little consequence how a man is governed from without, whilst everything depends upon how he governs himself from within ...

Good stuff, huh? To access more of it, click here.

W.B. presents: The Poison Belt

There is a message for us in the creative life of Arthur Conan Doyle, who tried to kill off his most immortal creation.

Doyle got tired of writing the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and wrote a stirring final episode in which the famed detective dies. The public outcry was such that he had to bring Sherlock back.

As an alternative to Holmes' death, Doyle instead breathed life into new characters, notably the bombastic but brilliant Professor George E. Challenger and the three friends with whom he discovers The Lost World. Instead of destruction (killing Holmes), Doyle chose the creative act of assembling an entirely different iconic character.

While the world largely knows Challenger through The Lost World, there are four other tales, three of which are collected in The Poison Belt, my latest little product under the Richardson Press emblem. In the title novella, the four adventurers reunite to face a graver threat than dinosaurs: a section of outer space the Earth is passing through that may result in the death of the human race itself. In "The Disintegration Machine," Challenger investigates an inventor who claims to have created a device that can scramble a person's atoms and then bring him back — sort of an early version of Star Trek's transporter. And "When The World Screamed," the professor theorizes that Earth is one giant living being, and he proposes to get that being's attention. Still to come to complete my little Challenger trilogy: The Land of Mist, a novel steeped in the spiritualism that marked Doyle's later years.

The lesson from Doyle's work: Don't dismiss the good you've done before. Do keep finding new ways to exercise your creative chops.

Challenger is not as immortal as Holmes — but The Lost World and its sequels are still something special nearly 100 years later.

W.B.'s Book Report: Thou Shall Prosper

Rabbi Daniel Lapin's book is one of those eye-opening, game-changing books. He purports to explain what money is and how money works.

The laws of the marketplace don't change — you can try changing the rules as governments often do, but it won't work. Lapin explains the rules as clearly as I've ever seen, drawing on the ancient teachings of the Torah itself.

Business and money itself, Lapin says, are products of humanity's spiritual nature. As such they only work well when values like trust and integrity are at play. Again, some folks find temporary success with business and money without trust or integrity — but the emphasis there is on temporary.

This is one of those rare books that needs to be read more than once — studied and absorbed. I would be doing a disservice by trying to relate its concepts based on my still-growing understanding.

This much I can and will say: The attitude of our nation's leaders and most entertainment venues toward business and business people is based on falsehoods and a complete misunderstanding of the free market. I knew that much instinctively before I picked up this book, and Lapin does a nice job of explaining why it's true.

W.B. presents: A Little Volume of Secrets

In the past year I've encountered three remarkable little books that have changed the way I think and approach this interesting experience called life. As A Man Thinketh, Acres of Diamonds and The Science of Getting Rich are all in the public domain and readily available online and in ebooks. In fact, I've downloaded them all and printed them out so that I can read them either on screen or in the old-fashioned way.

But I kept thinking it would be nice to have in one place, in traditional book form. In this marvelous print-on-demand era, that's entirely possible. And in this wonderful print-on-demand world, I don't have to keep this convenient little product to myself.

So here is A Little Volume of Secrets, which compiles these gems by James Allen, Russell Conwell and Wallace Wattles between two covers with a brief introduction by a lesser talent named Bluhm. The title I chose is a not-too-subtle allusion to a more recent book that purports to have uncovered something new about human nature and the universe. As you'll find in these pages, the principles have been there for at least a century and indeed much longer — as ancient as the saying, "As a man thinketh, so is he."

A taste:

Man is buffeted by circumstances so long as he believes himself to be the creature of outside conditions, but when he realizes he is a creative power, and that he may command the hidden soil and seeds of his being out of which circumstances grow, he then becomes the rightful master of himself.

— James Allen, “As A Man Thinketh”

Let every man or woman here, if you never hear me again, remember this, that if you wish to be great at all, you must begin where you are and what you are ...

— Russell H. Conwell, “Acres of Diamonds”

You are to become a creator, not a competitor; you are going to get what you want, but in such a way that when you get it every other man will have more than he has now.

— Wallace D. Wattles, “The Science of Getting Rich”

Warning! Don't expose yourself to these guys if you are perfectly content to live your life the way you've been living it. They definitely will turn your perceptions in interesting ways.

Click here to get a look at A Little Volume of Secrets.