This is likely to be my final written post here on ipanemic.com as I bring this chapter of my life to a close and move forward. The post is very long. It’s important to me so I hope you’ll take the time to read it through. I’ll put in some pretty pictures, break things up by section with headlines, and try to use wit along the way to keep your attention in the event that the story itself doesn’t. I may throw in distractions because I myself get distracted, and sometimes distractions are nice. (Is “I myself” right? Do I need commas there? It seems like I do. My writing has become atrocious.)

Really, I won’t blame you if you bail. Just so you know, though, I’ve set out a drink for you beside paragraph 20 to help you make it through. Replenish!

This is the First Headline

As I’m beginning to close up shop here at ipanemic.com I want to tell you about the journey to this place where I have lived for the past four years and what has transpired during my time here, publicly and privately. For better, not for worse, my real life has been intertwined with a virtual life on the internet for well over a decade. This is the story of both. Plus a little extra to complete the story. Some of the history is familiar to those who have been following along. A lot of it isn’t. Very, very few know the direction I’m heading, as transparent as it seems.

I tell this story with one intention, one hope: to make very clear the path I’m taking, why I’ve made the decisions I’ve made, and my purpose. As I said, it is long, but God is in the detail.

So. Let’s lift the curtain and meet the wizard!

A Brief History of My Life on the World Wide Web

Ipanemic.com was born not long before I left South Carolina to move to South Beach just under four five(!!) years ago. Prior to ipanemic.com, I ran the site twigleaf.com, which was an expansion of the first little site I maintained under (gasp!) Geocities.

My site on Geocities was created in 1999(?) for one very specific reason: to share photos of the lives of my little family (wife, two small boys, and yours truly) with extended family and friends as we had moved to Wellesley, Massachusetts, a million miles away from where the bulk of our relatives lived in North and South Carolina. It was a way to share with them.

In 2002, we returned to South Carolina. Twigleaf was born. (The reason for the choice of domain name is irrelevant.) Now that we were back around family, Twigleaf was still about family photos and simple things, though I had taken to writing often. And putting up whatever the hell I felt like putting up. Twigleaf became an extension of me, writing about whatever moved me, designing it in whatever fashion pleased my eye, and sharing with others the things I was thinking about.

INCOMING!!!

(insert foreshadowing link here)
Twigleaf was born while I was married to my first wife, the mother of my children. We split. Life became the three amigos. Alec, Zach, and Scott. They would spend the school years with me, summers and alternating holidays with their mom. Twigleaf reflected our lives.

And then I started dating. A lot. Truthfully, from my youth, I had hoped with all of my heart to find one woman. THE woman. I hoped to find the woman who would love me as intensely as I would certainly love her. I’ve always loved deeply and passionately. I strongly believe that love is one of the greatest experiences we have on this earth. (Outside of, you know, transcendental sex.)

But just as much, following my divorce, I hoped to be able to show my sons what love could really be. What it is. What it meant. I wanted to provide them with the best possible example of what a good relationship could and should be. My marriage had not been love. I wanted my sons to know love, not dysfunction.

As time went on, Twigleaf and I became more and more attached at the hip. I wrote very candidly about the events and people in my life. The women that would come into my life… they would became part of Twigleaf. Often, I would express how deeply I felt for them. Or simply relate entertaining stories about some adventure or another. On occasion, I would write long poems for the object of my affections. Sometimes, I would even pen haiku:

“You ARE the Big Fish.
Mount you on the wall? Oh no.
Kitchen table? Yes!”

(PRO-TIP: Chicks dig sexually suggestive haiku. Also humor.)

Love/Sick

I was in numerous relationships that I felt deeply about in the years following my divorce, each one ending, obviously. The last woman I was seriously involved with in South Carolina while still running Twigleaf broke me. I was certain that she was the woman I had been looking for all of my life. I loved her like none other. I saw such tremendous beauty. The sky had opened up with her and all of the clouds were gone. I bought a ring and proposed. We were engaged.

Our split was so devastating to me that I went into a deep depression which, in turn, took a heavy toll on me physically. My chronic neutropenia – permanently low white blood cell count – kicked into high gear and I suffered a number of health problems. Eventually, it led to me voluntarily leaving my web development job. I had been out of work off and on so much and had a surgery scheduled which I knew would put me out of the office for a long period of time. I felt it was best for the company to find a replacement.

Love was lost for me. My health was waning. And my life was so intricately intertwined with Twigleaf.com that… it was time to move. I had too much emotion invested. It would be months later before I actually moved. Shutting the site down, turning it back on… everything was at war inside: mentally, emotionally, and physically I was fighting on too many fronts.

(“All the aims I have pursued, will soon be realized. Life is a state of mind.”)

With my ex-fiance, it was three days after our first date that she sent me an email saying, “I love you and if I have anything to say about it, I’ll marry you.” Three days. She was the straw that broke the camel’s back. My relationship with her and it’s unfortunate end shook me to the point that I decided to step back and look at relationships, love, and sex… everything between a man and a woman with an analytical eye. I stopped romantic endeavors. I strove for objectivity to reach understanding. Every relationship I had been in post-marriage developed at lightning speed. Each one quicker than the one previous. It was time for evaluation. It was time for a change.

So Much Larger Than Life

Eventually, I moved to Miami, accepting a job offer as a consultant. And while this fact falls on the heels of that previous section, I moved for a host of reasons. Two of the larger reasons were: 1) that it was simply a great career opportunity, and 2) that it would put me right beside the ocean which would be optimal for my health. (Salt water is the best natural cure for some of my ailments.) And yes, I wanted to get away from the place where I had been suffering. I wanted a fresh start.

But is wasn’t simply those things. The stars just sort of aligned. For years following the divorce, I had planned on moving the three amigos once the boys got to be a certain age, trying to make a clean transition in where they were in school. South Carolina was never the place I wanted to raise them. I had never wanted to be there at all. South Carolina held no connection for me. But I wanted my sons to have broader experiences and allow their minds to flourish. I wanted them to have more opportunity. I wanted to build a better life for them. For me. For all of us. The time was right. Life was looking up.

The Birth of Ipanemic.com

Long before leaving South Carolina , I had already settled into my new home at Ipanemic.com. I was moving forward.

When I chose the name Ipanemic, it represented to me the two largest personal issues in my life: 1) my constant search for that perfect girl personified in the Girl from Ipanema, and 2) my blood disorder. With anemia (a shortage of red blood cells) being essentially the flip version of neutropenia:

Ipanema… anemic…
Voila! Ipanemic!

Good Times, Noodle Salad

Carol Connelly: OK, we all have these terrible stories to get over, and you-…
Melvin Udall: It’s not true. Some of us have great stories, pretty stories that take place at lakes with boats and friends and noodle salad. Just no one in this car. But, a lot of people, that’s their story. Good times, noodle salad. What makes it so hard is not that you had it bad, but that you’re that pissed that so many others had it good.
-from As Good as it Gets

During it’s virtual life, Ipanemic has been all over the place. Again, an accurate reflection of my life during this time. At times, wildly without direction. Sometimes, very focused on one thing, jumping over to that spot, then over there… wait, that would be a good spot for me!

Through all of it, there have been stories to tell. I’ve packed in a great deal of life experiences while I’ve been here, none of them involving Space or Cameo or <insert any club name here>. Some of the more notable events:

• I’ve done flat out weird things (oooh, a serious blast from the past with non-working pages!).
• I tried dating once (insert foreshadowing link here).
• One of the important items in the list, I discovered a new passion in photography. And I pursued it. And, much to my surprise, I was good at it. And people liked it. A lot. (Those numbers are many millions higher now; that was over a year ago.)
• I did something that few others in the history of this planet have done. (Although, really, who in their right minds would?)
• I’ve lived very comfortably alone, I’ve lived with dear friends, I’ve lived in hostels.
• Through the people I have come to know, I have found love on a wholly different level. I have been awestruck by the beauty in life. This was one of the other more important points on the list.
• And during my time here, I’ve experienced personal tragedy beyond anything I could ever imagine. Not a notable event. A life-changing event, putting a solid kink in my very purpose for moving here. A solid kink in life itself.

A Slight Detour Back in Time

I have become the person I am today because of ALL of my life experiences and the lessons drilled into me at an early age. As a youth, I was raised in a very traditional Christian household. It was the All-American, God-fearing childhood. Only in Saudi Arabia. Hand-made clothes as a toddler. Cowboys and Indians. Family vacations. Birthday parties. Trips into the desert. Trips to the suq. Church on Fridays. Movie night at home. Church again. The fascination with girls as puberty hit. School. Cheeseburgers at the snackbar with friends. Riding my bike all over town. Swimming in the community pool. Shrimp night at the town’s Dining Hall on Wednesday nights where families you knew sat at every table. Pancakes for breakfast Thursday mornings in the same Dining Hall, watching through large plate-glass windows, the young teenage girls (much older than me) competing against one another in tennis tournaments.
Sigh. Girls.

My parents were great parents. Throughout my life, they have been great parents. To all three of their children. They provided us with a solid family life. And they worked to instill values in us that I, naturally, believe are good values. Love, honor, respect, honesty. All of the classics.

And I’m going to pull now from a recent discussion I had with someone I’ve known since my childhood.

Let Me Reiterate and Stress…

I would not be the person I am today were it not for my parents and the decisions they made in helping to shape my life. My parents are strong Christian people who have been involved with the church throughout their lives. My mother has always been active in church groups and hosting gatherings of all shapes and sizes for as long as I’ve been alive. And my father, in his retirement, spent a number of years traveling to numerous third-world countries to help those less fortunate with Samaritan’s Purse, doing things like planning the building of schools and whatnot. Even, literally, giving the shoes off of his feet to someone without. A captain of industry with a strong sense of humility.

Those who know my parents respect them. They live their lives, not sometimes but at all times, with conviction and belief.

They are admirable not just in their devotion to their beliefs but in simply the people they are. They are good people. And I respect and love them both.

Similarly, they love and respect me even though some of the decisions I’ve made in this life would definitely not be theirs and we don’t share the same beliefs.*

In my youth, my parents decided that I should attend Stony Brook, a Christian boarding school, whose motto has been “Character Before Career,” an approach to life that seems common sense to me. In my opinion, the character of a man is far more important in the end than what he does for a living. We each have the ability and the opportunity, whether we like it or not, to influence the lives of others and our character determines the influence that we have…

*I don’t subscribe to any particular religious doctrine. I don’t judge others who do. To each, their own. But I do believe in good. Even in the worst moments of my life, I believe.

A Natural Conclusion

After everything I’ve just typed, I’m going to outline my direction in three simple points.

1) As I said, I believe in good. My natural instinct is to be good. To do good. And I believe in the goodness of humanity. And just as much, I believe in the butterfly effect.

2) There is today a rather substantial number of people who appreciate and follow my work. Somewhere in the range of 10-20,000. I surpassed 15 million total views on Flickr alone… I don’t even know how long ago that was. Day by day, the numbers grow. Day by day, I gain more exposure across more and more networks, on more and more sites. The work that I do, of course, is erotica. Photography and films. I have a knack for it. I’m good at it. And I enjoy the work that I do. Sex sells. And that’s the business I’m in.

3) My plan is very simple: I plan to grow my reach exponentially and through it spread goodness throughout humanity. I want to make the world a better place. And I’m in a unique position where I can do it. The more people I can reach, the greater impact I can have on society. I want to show others that the world doesn’t have to be so ugly. That there is beauty everywhere. I want to raise awareness of issues; not just of issues important to me, but ones that are important to many. I want to inspire and bring out the goodness in others. I want to reach in and pull it out of them.

It’s that simple.

Where I Am

Right now, I have absolutely nothing on (string of NSFW links to follow) my new website, my new twitter account, my new facebook page, my new tumblr account, nor my new blog that is doing anything other than further promoting the erotica that I produce.

Reason? Because I’m being very meticulous about this. I want to make sure I do it right. Even with the various sites I’ve listed, my plans actually extend well beyond them. I’m being as careful with this as I’ve been in developing this erotic Goliath I’ve built up to this point. I’ve spent the past four years working my ass off at this. It’s been a very, very concentrated effort. Not a day has gone by that I haven’t worked on erotica in some way or another. Even days when I wasn’t publishing anything, I was doing some related work. My trip across the U.S? I cannot tell you how many hours I spent EACH DAY working on erotica in a coffee shop somewhere. It has been non-stop. I have poured my heart and soul into this. With little sleep. Burning out more than a couple of times. And even in burnout stage, I would sit in front of the computer and do work of some sort.

Every. Single. Day.

Now You Know

So now you know. Now you know my plans and what I am doing and where I am going. Now you know and hopefully understand my direction.

I realize that my methods are unorthodox. But I’m not really an orthodox kind of guy. I see that I have a gift. And I’m going to use it to do something good.

Hello. I Am Scott Alexander.

Before I end this, I want to answer one remaining question: Scott Alexander. Why?

When my oldest son Alec was born, he took my middle name for his middle name: Benjamin Alexander
When my youngest son Zach was born, he took my first name for his middle name: Zachary Scott

Scott Alexander represents for me a circle that binds the three of us together. It is personal and it holds my heart.

With this name, I will do good things.

Epilogue

(Because this has been like a novel)

I don’t fault anyone for judging me for what I do. For finding fault with my way. I realize that I tread on morally questionable ground for most and that my views on sexuality fall well outside the norm. And I’m not going to go into my views on it because that’s a story about as long as this one. But your opinion about what I do is fine with me. I still feel the same way about you that I always have. There’s a great quote from the movie Adaptation that expresses well my approach to others. I have carried this quote with me since I saw that film when it came out. I want to share it with you now.

Charlie Kaufman: There was this time in high school. I was watching you out the library window. You were talking to Sarah Marsh.
Donald Kaufman: Oh, God. I was so in love with her.
Charlie Kaufman: I know. And you were flirting with her. And she was being really sweet to you.
Donald Kaufman: I remember that.
Charlie Kaufman: Then, when you walked away, she started making fun of you with Kim Canetti. And it was like they were laughing at *me*. You didn’t know at all. You seemed so happy.
Donald Kaufman: I knew. I heard them.
Charlie Kaufman: How come you looked so happy?
Donald Kaufman: I loved Sarah, Charles. It was mine, that love. I owned it. Even Sarah didn’t have the right to take it away. I can love whoever I want.
Charlie Kaufman: But she thought you were pathetic.
Donald Kaufman: That was her business, not mine. You are what you love, not what loves you. That’s what I decided a long time ago.
-from Adaptation

The problem with being a one-man operation is when one of your team members comes down with something, everyone in the office catches it and production grinds to a halt. Such was the case with me this week. Tuesday night at my day job, I began to get the chills driving around the beach. The temperature was in the upper 60s, maybe lower 70s so I knew I was screwed. Other employees had been coming down with whatever had been floating around so I pretty much knew right then that there was no escape.

I was scheduled to work the next two days and then have the following three off. I told my employer that night that I would likely be sick the next day but would, of course, call in early either way to give them time to try to make arrangements. I called in sick. The following morning, Thursday, I did the same.

Down with the Sickness

I don’t recall when the last time was that a sickness took me down so completely. To put it in terms relative to me: I typically sleep between three to five hours a night. Prior to last night, I would say me being awake three to five hours a day during that three-day cycle did not happen. And while seemingly irrelevant, I typically make and drink about three to four pots of coffee a day. The thought of brewing coffee barely registered with me. I brewed the first pot since Tuesday last night after 11pm.

I smoked a lot less. Yes, I still smoked. I have both an addiction and it’s something I enjoy, plus… now, it’s complicated. It’s going to be hard shooting smoking fetish videos if I can’t enjoy a cigarillo off-camera. So screw you, people that hate on smokers. Seriously. Your intolerance makes me want to punch you.

Hold on. Let me light a smoke.

…
….

…

Breathe deep. Exhale.

Oh. So much better. Sorry about that. Tension, you know. Oh, you look so much cuter now with your little thoughts about smokers being like devils. I just want to blow this smoke RIGHT in your chubby little face and pinch those rosy cheeks with their awesome circulation!

So basically, I spent three days somewhat detoxing in my own special way. I figured I had pretty well abused my body for a bit and that this was it’s way of saying, “Yeah, time to take a break.” And it gave me absolutely zero sayso in the matter. Well, I like to think of it like that, anyway. In actuality, I probably had the flu. Maybe I caught pneumonia. Who knows.

When I get sick like this, though, I give it my all. Or, rather, I guess, it’s all taken from me. Mind. Body. Spirit. Ultimately, I always hit the deeper issues that I typically ponder on somber rainy days.

(FetishVision)

The Secrets that I Keep

I kind of wish I had set up a camera as in Paranomal Activity so that I could explain how it is that I started sleeping flat on the bed and ended up with my legs flat against the wall at the other end later. Or what was troubling me so that I had to sit up right then?

On Wednesday night, I was grinding my teeth so intensely that I actually chipped out an entire tooth. Not a piece of a tooth. The whole tooth. I fished out what was suddenly crunchy in my mouth at I don’t know what hour and threw it on top of the book beside my growing collection of masks. Then I had to sit up and make sure I knew exactly where it was because there were too many small and sparkly things there. The next afternoon, during one of my waking moments, I called the dentist and told them I needed to see them on Friday if I could.

I talked, perhaps screamed out in my sleep. I would wake up to the echo of my voice. What the hell did I just say?! Secret to the universe, Scott! Remember, quick!

Delerium

I get delirious when I’m really sick. I never took my temperature so I don’t know what it got up to, but I have a history of running deathly high fevers and losing my shit. I remember once in boarding school, sitting on the stairs of the infirmary with friends who had come to visit between class and sports and me telling them what must have been insane stories because they looked at me like I was a lunatic. Later, one of them said they had been worried. I’ll never forget the expressions.

I remember trying to count all the holes in the ceiling but that’s a game every kid did at that school who suffered the misfortune of having to stay in that small, pasty building with it’s large, pasty nurse. The entire building, from the minute you walked through the front door, smelled like a sickness that had lingered within that preparatory school since the 1920s. I think I estimated around 186,000. But that could be a wrong memory. And there’s no prize.

Later, during my professional years, I ended up in a hospital in Charleston, South Carolina. Really sick again. Sometime before I was ever admitted (and completely unrelated), a friend of mine and I had been having a discussion about that song from the eighties, “Our House.” Neither of us could remember who sang it. This was right at the cusp of the internet exploding so there wasn’t any googling. In my delirium on a hospital bed, I recalled the band. So I called him and left a message. Or maybe I talked to him. All I remember is yelling into the phone, “It’s Madness, Mike! It’s Madness!!!”

I really polished the shine on my crazy with that one. I also enjoyed watching A Very Brady Sequel (which has some of the funniest damn lines ever written) during my stay there. That was a solid win. Along with the jello cups.

A Visit to the Dentist

On Friday morning, I was up for my appointment with the dentist. I hadn’t bothered setting any alarm since I was sleeping so hard. I knew this would be a fairly quick visit, thankfully for them. I showed up, and the guy who’s so nice to me and I swear it kills me that I can’t remember his name (I see him on occasion around town), came out while I sat in the lobby. I stood up, opened my mouth to show him the gaping hole, held up the tooth which I had fished out of my pocket, and with my other hand, pointed back and forth between the two. That was the best I could muster for communication.

About twenty minutes later, my tooth is repaired and I’m walking out. At the reception, they tell me there’s no charge. But when do I want to schedule my next cleaning, I’m asked. I am caught entirely off-guard.

“Uh, I’m moving in a few months, so probably sometime before then.” I have no idea what I’m saying. I think about the way I looked before I left the apartment.

Dishevelled. I assume my clothes were clean. I picked them from the laundry I did Tuesday before I got sick. Homeless and wild hair. Showing up with a missing front tooth, now magically back in place. Eyes bloodshot. Half-open. Deep worn lines underneath. My doctor, who’s got a helluva bedside manner, inadvertently rescues me from this moment when he pats me on the back and says, “You know, Scott here is a great photographer. Very tasteful work!” He winks. People always wink. I look at the women behind the counter. I’m just lost now.

“Ok, thanks,” I say and leave.

T Minus

I picked up some cough medicine on the way home. Though I have no idea where it is. And more apple juice. The juice that a friend had been kind enough to bring by the previous night was gone.

Since Tuesday, I’ve had two bowls of Lucky Charms. One of my ex-wives sent me a text and said I should eat greens. I watched with great fascination as a psychedelic rainbow of greens swirled in my sink as the mallows made their way down the drain. That was the only green intake I had. Not surprinsgly, Lucky Charms are not magically delicious while you’re sick.

But it’s irrelevant at this point. Right around 72 hours from the time I started feeling sick, I broke a sweat in my sleep. And then all was well. There’s still some bronchial issues going on. And I’m still fairly run down. But there it was. That moment of awakening. That moment came sadly, after what was one of the most awesome car chases of my life(!!!) where I was literally running sideways on a wall trying to get into the passenger-side window of my friend’s Panamera as we were trying to get away only to kick the lamp over beside my bed and wake up. I need to find my spare lightbulbs.

I guess I should go ahead and say,

Kids, do not follow Scott’s Guide to Healthy Living. While I know my body and what I can do, these are not appropriate decisions for most individuals. As with all lifestyle choices, you should consult your physician first.

Oh. Point to all of this: Production has resumed. New content is already being produced and distributed across the various networks.

Dat ass.
Shakin’ dat ass.
Jess in blue microbikini, shakin’ dat ass.

JUST fyi…

I’ve launched ScottAlexander.xxx and will slowly be transitioning away from ipanemic in the coming months. ScottAlexander.XXX is one of my new internet homes and will focus strictly on erotica, fetish, and sometimes pornography. I won’t be sharing any content of my personal life there unless it directly deals with my work.

The more erotic content that I shoot going forward will only be found on ScottAlexander.xxx. As for the existing erotic content found here, eventually I will be removing it and storing it over at the new site. It will be purely static content. That is to say, photos/videos from previous shoots will exist in more of a historical archive (as they are found here) and won’t be updated.

Similarly, ipanemic.com will eventually grow stagnant as I stop posting new content here. I won’t be posting photos/videos from NEW shoots here, though I will complete the existing shoots.

This is the trailer for a new short smoking fetish film I shot yesterday afternoon and spent the bulk of today editing. I’m very, very pleased with the final film. It’s simple, very real, intriguing (even watching it now having filmed it)… it has a personal appeal.

The full version is available for download in my NSFW studio/store here. Though I’m distributing it in a very, very NSFW place, the film itself is actually entirely safe for work. There is nothing sexual within it. There is no nudity. It is simply a girl smoking a cigarette in a park. And honestly, this is one of my proudest little moments.

About five days ago, I took to my social networks to announce that I was in love. I SOOOOOO am.

Of course, it’s not with a woman. It’s that electronic gadgetry you see pictured in the photos. The synthesizer. The vocoder. The MicroKorg XL. This was my gift to myself this year. This is the first instrument in what will eventually be my very own personal studio. I feel like I should name him, to be honest, but I can’t even think of one except for “Beautiful.”

The Piano Man

I can’t tell you exactly why I started taking piano lessons as a kid. I think my parents thought it might be good for me to have something to do. So around the age of eleven or twelve, I started lessons. I enjoyed piano. Both of my older sisters played. So maybe it was just tradition that each of the children learn to play the piano. Almost as soon as I knew the basics, I started playing around, putting a chord here and there together. Putting some melody with some bass line. Sounds that pleased my ear.

It was the very early eighties. My first recital, if I remember correctly, I actually played the theme to Star Wars. Given my level, it was actually beyond my skill at the time. I was like that for a long time with piano, more advanced than I should have been. I was always the star pupil of piano teachers, the one that was their pride and joy.

Synthesis

I mention that it was the early eighties because it wasn’t long after I started taking piano lessons that New Wave music hit the scene. Synthesizers were everywhere. Musicians like Howard Jones, Thomas Dolby. Bands like Human League, Duran Duran, Naked Eyes were ruling the airwaves. Steve Winwood, with Arc of a Diver. And then Herbie Hancock’s Rocket. Who could forget that?

You had musicians like Vangelis and Jean Michel Jarre blossoming out from that strange world of experimental synthesis to appeal to mass audiences worldwide. Jarre would produce groundbreaking concerts like nothing anyone had ever seen before, using city skylines as backdrops and filling the open air all around with synthesized music. It was a time when the keyboard, the synthesizer, the drum machine, the vocoder… when electronic synthesis dominated the music scene. Even rock and roll dove in to the world of electronic music with Van Halen’s landmark 1984 album hitting the airwaves with straight-up pop synthesis.

The Arabian Gulf

It was in this environment that I grew up and developed my love for music. These were my heroes, my idols. About the time I was in eighth grade, I began looking at synthesizers. I lived in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia at the time, and sometimes on Wednesday nights or Thursdays (Thursdays/Fridays are the equivalent weekends in Saudi), my dad would drive my mom and I down to Khobar for whatever reason. Browsing. Dinner out. Shopping. It was family time. And Khobar was a third-world wonderland for shopping. There were always two stores I wanted to go in. One sold cartridges for the Atari. Another store, right behind it, had these really fancy Casio keyboards. They weren’t synthesizers, but they could make music. Crappy, cheesy music. Would they be getting any synthesizers in, I would ask. (Because this was crap. These weren’t the machines I could use to make music I wanted to hear. These were for churches.)

Things didn’t just happen overnight back then. There was no internet. There was no email. And in Saudi, things sometimes took months upon months. Even if you could mail off an order from a catalog to some company in the US, it would be quicker to wait until vacation (whenever that was) and just bring it back with you. (Or have someone else going on vacation bring it back with them.) And it became apparent very quickly that the best thing you could hope for would be that your parents take a vacation to China because you could get the latest models there and at a fraction of the cost in the States. (I had a friend that came back from one such vacation with this gorgeous 88-key keyboard from Roland. I hated him for that. No, not really.)

I would pick up the pamphlets for the keyboards anyway, take them home and look at them. When we’d travel back to the US on vacation, that was when I would strike gold. I would always somehow get my parents to take me to a music store. There, I would pick up the latest brochures on the latest keyboards that the store had in stock. For the remainder of the vacation and until the next time we’d go on vacation, I would look at those glossy pamphlets with all of their specs, eventually wearing down their stapled centers. A pepsi stain here or there.

I would soak up every detail from the pamphlets on the synthesizers. Their wattages. Their oscillator settings. The pictures of how the knobs were laid out on the keyboards. The LED power light lit beside the power switch. The logo: Moog. Yamaha. Korg. Roland.

8-note polyphony. Resonance. Cutoff. Frequency. Sine Waves. Modulation. Attack. 1/4″ Jack. Back panel jacks. Pitch wheel. MIDI (new even AFTER my new-found passion). Buttons to press. Knobs to turn.

And at the end of it all, glorious sound and music would come out. Beautiful long pads. Deep chorused basses. Minor sevenths that never sounded so good!

I loved every bit of it.

So eventually, I did get a synthesizer. My first synthesizer was a Moog Opus 3. My parents had surprised me for Christmas one year with it. I say surprised, but truthfully (and Mom and Dad, I never told you this), I knew I was getting it a month before Christmas. I spotted the box one day. Hidden in the back of my parent’s closet. While probably looking for wrapped Christmas gifts. Because why else would I be there? (I don’t normally do that kind of thing, but I think I knew I was getting a synthesizer that year.)

And from that day until Christmas, everyday after school, I would go into my parent’s closet, take the box to my bedroom, lock my door so our housekeeper wouldn’t come in, carefully unpack the box, play it for as long as I could before I knew anyone would be home, pack it back in the box, and sneak it back to the exact same place in their closet. There was a Peavey amp as well; I can’t remember if I was pulling that out every day or not.

Still, it didn’t ruin Christmas. Though, if you ever wondered how I knew my way around it so quickly, Mom and Pops… there’s your answer.

About a year or so later, I saved up enough money to buy another synthesizer. A Korg Poly-800. THAT keyboard had pads that satisfied. It wasn’t overall, an aesthetically superior keyboard, but it was pretty enough for the time and it sounded great. It had that technical appeal to it. There was something just magical about the electronics of it all.

And I was hardcore about it all, too. Keyboard Magazine (I think?) used to have these little build-it-yourself projects in their magazines. This wasn’t building a picture frame. This was building your own phase-shifter. In ninth grade, I decided to build my own sequencer (which I could then use) as a project for my Physical Science class. I want to say that I built it entirely by myself, but I remember my dad having an electrical engineer friend of the family come over one afternoon to help with something or other, it seems like. Maybe I ran into a problem. I don’t recall. So I was just soldering capacitors, resistors, and god knows what other electrical nonsense was in the schematics to a little green circuitboard, all for the sake of enhancing audio capabilities. To make better music. My science teacher was amazed. I was probably just as amazed. I can’t remember, really. It’s who I was then. It was my passion.

The Development Years

By the time I was in boarding school, I had two or three syntheszers, drum machine, sequencer, cables everywhere… I don’t even recall. I was THAT kid in school. The reputation I had developed in junior high as that musical kid carried 8,000 miles across the planet to high school.

When I got to college, I studied classical piano, taking all of the general music courses, spending countless hours in the soundproof practice rooms, And once or twice a week taking lessons from my professor in his dark and damp basement office where, lining the left side of the grand piano, a row of perpetually wilting plants sat which he jokingly referred to as “death row.”

In my junior year, I met a girl, we dropped out of school, got married. Real life began to happen. I had to get real work. Do a real thing that would make money. I still played music. Spent a lot of time writing, playing. Sometimes spending hours in front of those beautiful blinking LEDs. One of my favorite things to do was to generate some really nice loop, have it running on the sequencer, turn off the lights so that it was dark or nearly dark and just improvise on top of that, letting whatever melody that could be found hit just right. Just soaking in every bit of audio goodness and everything that was electronic at that moment. Red lights pulsating off and on. The LEDs displaying the patch numbers of the program, or the tempo. White keys down. Black keys. Hold. Sustain. Blink. Blink. Blink.

God, I loved that.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder

When my oldest son was born, it was right before Christmas. We were relatively poor at the time but I really didn’t want him to go without for Christmas. Even though, WTF? It’s not like he wasn’t going to be all that cognizant of the affair. So I sold all of my musical equipment. By that point in my life, I had amassed quite a bit of equipment, each very personal to me. I remember feeling like I had sold my soul. But it was worth it, I knew. And it was the right thing to do. And I told myself then that one day… One day, I would get it all again.

Over the two decades that followed, a piano that belonged to one of my grandmothers was passed around between the grandchildren. So there was a period when I played the piano again for a while. I remember when I was working remotely for this software company up in Massachusetts, I would sometimes take breaks during the day, turn around and just decompress on the piano, working through Hanon exercises (piano books and sheet music somehow stayed preserved over the years), re-learning old pieces, learning new ones. Chopin preludes and nocturnes. Nothing could soothe me more, massage my soul into a place of peace.

The piano is now with my middle sister, I believe. A few years back, I discovered Sony’s ACID software, which is in essence a loop factory. When I took my trip across the country, I had the good fortune of hooking up with someone from Sony and in addition to them setting me up with their pro video software, Vegas, they were gracious enough to give me the pro version of ACID as well as tons and tons of audio loops.

(This was a band I was in in junior high. Clearly, the 80s. That’s me at the piano. We played two songs I wrote. After the concert, my parents thought I was a troubled teen because of the lyrics. Words have never been my strong suit. )

Since then, I’ve been using ACID to create these little audio compositions that you hear in all of my videos. (The videos are, of course, all done in Vegas.) I love ACID Pro. There’s really no limit to what you can do in terms of music creation. With the ability to splice, stretch, arrange tracks, and its wide variety of processors and filters (pitch shift/parametric equalizers/reverbs/delays/fade/pan/mute and so on), you can build each note one by one and create really anything. I think I have somewhere in the range of ten- to twenty-thousand loops on this computer or on external drives.

I enjoy using it. It’s not the same as playing a keyboard, and randomly finding just that right sound. And honestly, it’s almost overwhelming with the number of loops I have. It’s sometimes difficult to create an audio construct because the sound isn’t quite right. Or I don’t want to take the time to splice a loop to hell and back to have THAT note hit for the right syncopation.

It’s synthesis, for sure. Synthesizing loops, synthesizing rhythms, synthesizing patterns. But I’ve missed the control and the freedom. And above all, the joy of just playing.

Looking toward the future, looking at my longer term goals, looking at what I’m doing now and what I ultimately want to do, I realized that now is the time.

Today

Photography has been a lovely creative outlet. Video work has been a lovely creative outlet. I believe I continue to get better with these things. With music, I hope to do the same. And I hope that I am able to weave all three together to create art of some sort that people enjoy. To tell worthwhile stories, whether they are about a train trip to nowhere or an erotic film where someone’s come to fix the cable. (And yes, beyond using the vocoder for non-erotic work, I’m hoping to do some really different, sensual and creative stuff with female audio for the erotica that I shoot.) Yes, I’ll definitely be putting together a lot of porn music. That might be what it ALL sounds like. Porn music. For porns I shoot. But I hope to use it for everything. All the stories. And maybe stories which are only music. Who knows?

The audio constructs that I create are, and always have been, for my satisfaction only. My interest and my passion in hearing or creating sounds and music that please me has never been about anyone other than me. I don’t sit down and throw sounds together wondering if that’s the sound that others want to hear. I sit to create something that pleases my ears. Like photography and video, it’s what is is stimulating to my senses. If the music I make sits well with others, then super. Back in the day, everyone knew that I WOULD be a musician. It was what defined me then. People encouraged and supported me then the same way they do with photography today. Yeah, it would be neat if I am able to find sounds that resonate today with people the way my photography does.

I don’t hold any high hopes or beliefs that it will. All of this work that I’m doing now… this game-plan-focus over the coming months before I leave here… it matters not if I am successful at it. I am truly doing something which I enjoy and I believe I’m good at. I have a passion for what I do and I’m striving to do better at it. It is art for the sake of art for me. If I make money doing it (which I am now, finally starting to truly pursue, and finally actually making), then that’s just great.

Beautiful

The MicroKorg XL, shown in my pictures here, apart from being a superb synthesizer in terms of sound, is just a beautiful machine with fantastic retro styling. I had a long inner battle in deciding between this and the original MicroKorg which had a an even more retro wood frame finish (my Opus 3 had the same finish). Ultimately, I chose the XL for it’s USB connection. My little workstation is quickly becoming wires and cables. And blinking lights.

So now? Now I look forward to the day when once again I sit alone in the dark, surrounded by a sea of blinking lights, headphones on my ears, a rich full pad flowing in my head, a deep rhythm pulsating, and one lone voice resting and singing above it all progressing it’s way down.

I’m glad you’re here, Beautiful. We’re going to be great friends.

(By the way… the video? My god, all those cables and wires… the freakin’ spatial controller(?!)… standing alone, creating that perfect sound, and having it go straight into your ears? This video is porn for me.)

Erotic films available in my studio/store on clips4sale.com here.

I’m pleased to announce that I’m now making available for download and purchase the erotic films that I produce. I will be making the films available in full-length as well as providing shorts taken from the film which will focus on specific fetishes or elements of erotica. Some of the films/videos being released will most definitely fall into the category of pornography though I am going to, as much as possible, keep it on the artistic side of things.

I am distributing all videos through my studio/store on clips4sale.com (that’s a very, very Not Safe For Work link). The first film which I have released is the morning after featuring Katie Cummings. The full-length feature and all of the shorts (10 films total) are available in full HD.

Couple of notes about the studio/store.
1) All films and clips will be available in seven different formats, ranging from smaller iPod versions to full HD.
2) The different formats for each individual clip will be released over a period of two days, with the studio/store updating three to four times a day.

I’ve received a number of requests for custom videos since opening the store already. I haven’t made any decision yet as to whether that’s something I’m going to do or not. When I decide what I want to do there, I’ll make that information publicly available.

Also, I am open to suggestions for shoot/fetish ideas. I will be shooting enough content from here on out that there shouldn’t be a day where the store is not updated with fresh new content or at least alternate versions of existing content, providing as many download options for fans/followers/viewers as possible. With that in mind, I am open to suggestions on different erotic/fetish themes.

Thanks for your continued support and I hope you like the films!