Welcome to the next episode of Make It Mini, which is a series that reimagines recipes using lecressé's mini-cucuts. Next up, we've made a mini version of the classic Dutch baby. These poofy little pancakes can be made savory or sweet. We opted for a sage-brown butter and sprinkled them with nutmeg and flaky sea salt. The Dutch babies bake right in the sage mini and get a golden, puffy crust with a buttery center. Like and follow for more.


Hi Governor Rick Perry. How ya doin' Miss?  I can't believe your father never spray a painted the N word over it. True. So true.   Oops.


I don't know. Anyway, dude, no one understands Book of the New Sun. I'm just interested because it takes place in that theater. I wish I had written this book, that one. I'm sorry, Rachel, but I don't like her last name. ["The Last Name of the Year"] May TBR. I cannot believe it's May already. What the heck? Hey, well, my TBR is blessedly liked in May, so yay for that. Without further ado, here are the books that I'm reading in May. The Year of Game and Continues with Coraline. Kind of, I scheduled my Year of Game in publishing order, which I think I've mentioned, but anyway. So I'm kind of sad that Coraline is now instead of like Halloween time. But I think, no, great, her book is also not in October. I think one of the short story collections is in October. I don't know. Anyway, Coraline. Technically, Coraline takes place in spring, so I guess now's as good a time as any to read Coraline. I love Coraline. I love the edition illustrated by Chris Riddle or Reddell. I'm actually not sure how he pronounces it. If you've never read Coraline, it's a creepy good time. It is quite scary, so if you're thinking of this for your children, I'd recommend reading it before you let your children read it because it is shockingly dark for a children's book. I find it quite creepy and I'm an adult. I love it. I think it's really good, but it is quite creepy. And it'll also quite short. So I said my TBR this month is short. Not only is my TBR short, but like the books on it aren't super long either. So with one notable exception, so maybe it's just as well that the rest of my TBR is light. So anyway, Coraline. Next up, we are concluding the Book of the New Sun read-along on my Patreon with Earth of the New Sun. I didn't know, I knew that this was kind of like tacked on, but I learned since from one of my patrons that the reason this was tacked on was because the publishers, Gene Will's publishers were like, dude, no one understands Book of the New Sun. You need to write a fifth book explaining yourself. So he wrote Earth of the New Sun grudgingly is my understanding of kind of what happened with that. So I'm interested slash anxious about reading this because this wasn't really the author wanting to write this or to explain this. So I'm a little worried about how it's gonna go because that doesn't, it's not a pretty, it's not a particularly fortuitous kind of like beginning or genesis for this, but I have to admit to being quite baffled by parts of Book of the New Sun. And so if Earth can shed some light, I welcome it because I fully admit to being possibly too dumb for Book of the New Sun. Though I am enjoying Book of the New Sun. So yeah, Earth hopefully will explain some things and not be too bad. Hopefully, Gene didn't completely kind of like phone it in, but we'll see. I'm intrigued at the very least. Next is the book that both my patrons are reading as our buddy read like Book Club discussion book for us. This is also the book that they voted on for me to read and vlog for them. So it's a two-fer. And that is a reread for me which is Daughter of Smoking Bone by Lainey Taylor. It's been quite a few years since I read this, but I really, really loved this the first time that I read it. And I always love telling people about the blurb on that this is the international edition and on this edition, the blurb on the back is, I wish I had written this book. So I don't really think you can get a much better blurb than that. This was such an immersive experience for me the first time I read it. The first time I read it when I started reading it, I was like, okay, this is interesting, I guess, this is fine. And then the like quintessential Lainey-Taylor-ish thing where suddenly the story that you thought this was not at all and it's a different story now. From that point on, I was like glued to the book, could not put it down. I was like reading it with my whole body. I was exhausted at the end. So I'm guessing the experience won't be quite that the second time because part of that was not knowing where that we were at go and what would happen and being, you know, anxious about it. So I do know where it goes now. So I don't think it'll be quite as like gripping, but I am looking forward to rereading it. And I'm very grateful to my patrons for letting me have this two-fer. Next up is the next book in the Witcher Read-A-Lie and that is Time of Contempt by Andrzej Sapkowski. And the live show chat for this will be on chapter three podcast on the last Tuesday of the month. The date is going to be the 30th, I think. So yeah, I'm very much looking forward to reading this and I'm looking forward to chatting about it with Bethany on chapter three podcast. Next up are my two book of the month club books. First is my book of the month and I chose The Only Survivors by Megan Miranda. I have actually started reading this already and I'm not really liking it, but I also am quite confused by it. I think I need to start it over again. I think I missed something in the beginning because I either it's not well written or something about it has me lost right now. So I'm gonna start over and see if that helps because right now I'm kind of like, huh? But anyway, it's a thriller mystery, isolated close-circle mystery I believe or at the very least it's a mystery. Seven hours in the past, seven days in the present, seven survivors remaining, who would you save? Yeah, we'll see how it goes. Book of the month, you know, we'll see. I'm actually much more excited about the add-on that I chose. I was actually considering skipping my box and then I saw this was available as an add-on and I was like, okay, well I want that. So I'll get like one of the actual books of the month, that one, so that I can get this add-on. Which is The House is on Fire by Rachel Beanland.  I'm sorry, Rachel, but I don't like her last name. Hey, what was this about? It's about a theater, I think. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. When the theater goes up in flames in the middle of the performance, Sally, Cecily, Jack, and Gilbert make a series of split second decisions that will not only affect their own lives with those of countless others and in the days following the fire, the paths of these four will become forever intertwined. Well, there's more, how much more can there be? Part moral thriller, part transporting historical drama, The House is on Fire offers proof that sometimes in the midst of great tragedy we're offered our most precious and fleeting chances at redemption. I'm just interested because it takes place in a theater and there's a fire and it's got like a thriller component. I don't know how good it's gonna be, but it intrigues. I also quite like the cover. So hopefully this will go well. Next up is the book that I was like, okay, one of these books is super long, so thank goodness the rest are short. And that is Iron Gold by Pierce Brown. The Red Rising read-along continues. I'm very excited to reread Iron Gold, although it is massive, not as massive as Dark Age. Dark Age is even longer. Iron Gold is not short. So the live show for this, I believe will be on Alex's channel towards the end of the month. Date is still TVD, I believe. I'm still filming this right now. But yeah, the new books, I like so much better than the originals and I love the originals. So down to tell you something. I'm so excited to read this for the third time. And of course I'm excited to chat about it with Alex and Angela, it has been such a blast reading these books with them. So I hope you'll join us for the chat and there will be another giveaway for like items more related to this book. So come join us for the live chat so you can enter that giveaway. And yeah. And last but not least, the reason that I'm wearing this lovely sweatshirt is Mara is finally embarking for the second time on her first law journey with me. So we are reading The Blade itself. Yes, this will be my sixth time, seven, sixth, sixth time reading it. And I'm very excited to read it. Very excited to read it with Mara. Very excited to chat about it with Mara. And yeah, it's about time I haven't been in the world with first law for, you know, a few minutes. I mean, we finished Wisdom of Crowd's last November, I think, or a chapter three podcast read-along and I haven't touched first lessons then. So I'm having withdrawals. It's been like five months. Huh, your girl needs some first law. So as we know, I am happiest when reading first law. So I will be at my happiest in May or at least starting in May. So, hooray. And those are all the books that I will be for sure reading in May. Let me know in the comments about your thoughts about those books if you're joining us or any of the various read-alongs. If you hate all these books, if you love all these books, if you've never heard of these books, if, whatever, whatever you wanna let me know. I post videos on Saturdays, other random times as well, don't leave Saturdays, so like and subscribe to my Patreon if you feel so inclined. I'll see you when I see you.


Welcome to this panel on the snow leopard, or as Mary Lide calls it, the no leopard. We're going to each make some comments and talk about some different things and maybe open it up for a little Q&A at the end. So I guess Peter is going to start us off. I don't have any prepared remarks to say about this, so I'll pass it back to you. No, but except anecdotal thoughts, I read the snow leopard more than 20 years ago when I was trying to write my own first book and I took his structure for my book. My book was a memoir and so I liked what he did.  And that worked for me and I've always said to people, I was reading a bunch of travel books at the time and so I've always said to people, it helps if you have a model to work with, if you have an idea of a novel or particularly a memoir, what is it that you've read that you think, I thought I could do the snow leopard, but I see how that works and you're going to talk about structure, but that worked for me. And it gave me in the flailing around of the beginning of the writing, of writing what I hope would be a book, that sort of showed me a path of how to do it. So I read it then and I loved the book. I was struck by what we're all struck by, which is Matheson's writing and then of course his Buddhism and his, I mean it's a travel book and it's a spiritual book and then it's a very personal writer's book. It's very much a writer's book and I want to say Matheson's quite disingenuous in it. He says things like, why am I here? We know why George Shower's here and we know why the Sherpas are here, but why am I here? And I'm absolutely convinced that the reason Matheson was there was he knew and as this film says, he knew he could get a really good book out of it. I think he was so as lost or as uncertain of his motives as he claims. He's clearly a very ambitious man and he had then, you know, he made his mark in a number of areas of writing and he was clearly on the lookout as a professional as an ambitious writer is for something to what's his next big thing going to be. And as he says, you know, if he can't make something out of this and he did, he made an incredibly wonderful book out of it all. I've studied Buddhism too, as many of us have, but I've never read such a cogent, distilled, elegant description of what Buddhism, particularly Zen Buddhism is as he does. So he's magnificent in cutting to the essence of a thing and getting beyond the, I mean, a lot of Buddhism is full of, you know, platitudinal writing and metaphorical stuff. And Matheson makes it, I've got all these things like page number and I can't really go back to that. But his explications of Zen are terrific, very distilled, very simple, very clear. And so in this film when somebody said, you know, many people have come to Buddhism, through Zen Buddhism, particularly through Peter Matheson, I could see why. Because it's, I've read these other books and they're great, but they're different. They're not necessarily by writers. They're by noted Buddhists or thinkers and stuff. And Matheson is first and foremost a writer. I thought that this was, I thought that the actual going to the, for Matheson to see a snow leopard. And then, I mean, obviously for George Schaller, the reason to go was to see these sheep jumping around in the Himalayas. And Matheson says, as I say, disingenuously, he wanted to see the snow leopard. But I think it's a really a very romantic book, a really, really romantic book. It positions the narrator, the author. So in this, it's kind of very much a confection. And I think we should realize that. It's a, it didn't just sort of fall out of his trip. I'm sure he went with a, with a big check from Sean from the New Yorker. And he really knew he could get a book out. And he wrote this incredibly romantic book of a writer going off to the ends of the earth. And no one was as prepared as a writer to see what was there as Matheson was. And it reminded me of the razor's edge. William Somerset Mom's The Razor's Edge, which has as its epigraph. The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over. Thus, the wise say, the path to salvation is hard taken from the Upanishads. And I think he went about it just as in a very calculated way. And to write and deliver a really romantic book, you know, in its excitement and stuff. The thing that I know, 20 years ago when I read it, I really was knocked out by it. And I thought, here's a wonderful book. And it is. And I still think so. I was struck this time though by the writing. And the writing seems to me it's very much a performance.  Some actors, the actor disappears and you just see the character. But if you see Lawrence Olivier, you see the actor. He's sort of, he's doing a fantastic job.  But you don't actually necessarily, you do see the character. And I was struck time and time and time and time again in this book by a kind of, not quite purple prose, but a very self-conscious writerly prose, which is his job. So I mean, I'm not attacking him, but I haven't remembered that before. And I think he's really, he's masterful and he assembles his stuff.  And he assembled a very beautifully written book, but it's still very beautifully written. There's nothing wrong with that.  And it's very painterly and really excellent in that way. And the marriage, the juxtaposition of things like that with the spiritual or the, you know, the complimenting of things with the spiritual are really wonderful. But I was, I just was struck again by, wow, what a really terrific exercise this masterful, ambitious professional writer has made out of this. As opposed to say perhaps, I haven't actually read Cheryl Strait's Wild. But I think that is a book that has, you know, it's in this contemporary well-regarded book. I think that came out of the experience first and then the book was assembled afterward through a thing. I just, I make this point just because I think, you know, I think it's really good to bear in mind as writers that you need ambition and you need to approach things in a very, it helps to approach things sometimes in a very premeditated way. And not to forget that these really great writers and these really great books are actually, there are things that are fabricated, they're Faberge eggs or whatever made by masters and that that's what this is. Matheson's prose here is very stately, I found. I loved words like, he uses words like improvident, which I love the word improvident. But I felt there was a stately kind of, you know, really he sort of wound himself up to a platform of some kind of stately, authorial deliverance of a performance. And so I'll let it go at that. Those were some of my initial thoughts reading this book again 20 years later. I remain in incredible adoration for it and it rings true. Thank you. I thought I would talk a little bit about the book's structure and because I talk a lot about memoir and essays with nonfiction students and I'm sitting next to someone who actually wrote a memoir and essays. That would be you. I want to kind of think about this book as a memoir and essays, that if you took each passage that's in here, it would be a mini essay. And Baron and I were talking earlier about what you can do with a thousand words and probably if you took each chapter, it would boil down to a thousand to fifteen hundred, maybe two thousand words. And that if you string them together, it makes this beautiful necklace that he's made. And that achieves the goal of memoir, of remembering an event and in particular this event of looking for something that isn't found. But also the book belongs to a larger tradition of journey narrative, for lack of a better word. To which of course someone like something like Wilde by Cheryl Strait fits in to a certain extent. But I'm thinking of way back like Basho's The Narrow Road to the North as a journey narrative. So to place it into a context that's a little bit richer than Cheryl Strait and to say that Peter Matheson becomes then to a tradition that's much longer, older and rich and also multicultural for that matter. There is this excursive structure that is part of this book that almost demands present tense, I think. And the use of present tense is kind of an interesting element because I've heard some fiction writers rail against the new tendency in fiction to write in present tense. Yet for me in a narrative like this, present tense seems to be the only tense to use to import a kind of immediacy to the event that it's actually describing. And kind of piggybacking off of what Peter said about Matheson's lostness. I think that's part of his, it's a narratorial device and it's really an artifice. It's part of his persona. We tend to think that it's Peter Matheson writing this book but it's actually Peter Matheson creating a narrator who also adopts a persona to tell this story. And the persona is one of this man, well the narrator is a man whose wife has died, whose son he's left behind, who has an interest in nature. But the persona is this seeker and he's a confused lost seeker. So I don't know if you can see the difference between those two elements but I like to talk a lot about persona and narrator. And for me the difference is that the narrator, it's all nouns.  But the persona is something different. He's lost, he's seeking, he's doing all these other things that are very active. So with that there's also a great use of character. Other characters, the scaffolding characters in this story. There's the other protagonist of George Schaller who balances Matheson's like kind of lost Zen Buddhist, you know, miraculous in nature character with this taciturn, and when you see him in the film you think, wow is that the guy that Matheson was describing? Because he seems so nice and human and warm and he doesn't seem at all like this man that Matheson has described. And I would imagine that if we met Tuckton and Guy Alston and Jung Po, if we met all of those characters we'd see something very different in them too. But what happens in particular with Tuckton is very interesting because he's planted as a device so that we keep coming back to him. He's like an echo that keeps resounding. And in fact the word ringing keeps resounding in this book too. So we keep coming back to him as this point that we can land on and he grounds the other characters because he suggests there's some mystery about him that's there and we're also very invested, I think at least I was, in what is going to become of this character especially when they haven't shown up for so long. So he really milks that suspense of them not showing up. It's one of those little narrative threads that goes through the whole book even to the end where he can't find him, right? So it makes sense. He sets out to see the snow leopard and doesn't see it and then at the end tries to find Tuckton and doesn't find him either. So I think that's kind of the fate of these characters propels us forward if only to learn what becomes of them. So one of the things I like to harp on with people is what are the pivotal moments in a narrative and what are the pivotal moments in the life of a narrator and how does that help us define narrative and story? And I was struck by this one passage and I won't go on much longer but when we say that you need to write to discovery, especially in a nonfiction narrative what that means is letting yourself go and that's the other great wisdom in this book of course is letting go of your preconceived notions of things but letting yourself go long enough so that you discover what Frost famously called what you didn't know you knew, right? So if you can't get to that discovery moment, maybe you failed and maybe failure is a good thing and a teaching device and I hope it is because I think failure should be instructive but on page, it starts on actually page 242 It's the November 15th section and he's looking around and then he realizes that he's hoarding his last chocolate for the journey back across the mountains and I love this line, forever getting ready for life instead of living it each day and then he says later that the beauty of this place must be cheerfully abandoned like the wild rocks and the bright water of its streams frustration at the paltryness of words drives me to write this is a little bit of what Peter was saying but there's more of Shea and a single she-pair in one withered sprig of everlasting than in all these notes and in the margin I wrote but is it? Like I don't think and then he says to strive for permanence and what I think I have perceived is to miss the point and then he keeps going and it's very clear that this is one of those pivotal moments where he's realizing really why he was there and it comes kind of late in the book but it's his way of thinking that shifts so he lets go of the leopard and seeing the leopard and of any kind of permanence or at least he does on the page and it's a really nice moment of discovery you know you kind of it's always wonderful when you think you can't make this shit up right so the impending snow the idea of impending snow is the idea of impending doom and that creates this other narrative tension so that I don't know about all of you but I was sitting here thinking they better get out of there soon he better go home like what about Alex who's waiting for him but that's all a device to drive you forward in the story you can't forget that that serves artifice so it was very interesting some of the things in the film that line he said my characters don't step off the page they step out of landscapes and he also writes in here he quotes shallower twice he repeats this maybe it's better that there are some things we don't see and I would add to that that I remember someone saying to me once maybe there are some things that are better left unfinished especially in writing so when Peter says this is a writerly book I think some of those there are things we're not seeing in the creation of this text as well and then there was a person speaking about Mathudson's use of environment as character and I kind of thought that that was an interesting point that we could all think about when we're writing that place can function as character very much if you think of Marilyn Robinson's book Housekeeping Fingerbone Idaho is very much a character in that place and then I guess the last thing I wanted to say is that this is just a general comment it didn't occur to me until I watched that film that his book Wildlife in America came out in 1959 which is the year I was born and so I had this terrible thought that in my own lifetime the destruction of the environment has been so rampant and then I see it exponentially increasing so that people who are another generation in this room can say the same thing that in your own lifetime so we've been talking a lot about Annie Dillard in our workshop and her charge to people that you should dedicate your life to something if you're going to be a writer you should also dedicate yourself to some cause of some sort and I guess I feel like it is perfect that we were watching this film and reading this author and how I'll wrap up is by saying that it made me very sad to think that in my lifetime somebody like Mathudson came out with this book and then Bill McKibbin you know what 30 years later something or less than 30 years later came out with The End of Nature and then recently I was at the Bronx Zoo and saw two snow leopards there and those snow leopards have a better chance of surviving at the zoo than they do in the wild and so if there's ever a time to be a writer with a cause in the world I mean there have been causes for centuries and millennia and I feel very strongly that now we're in that place where it's not hard to find that cause so since we're just watching a film about an activist and as I said to Baron you know we were talking about Leonard Peltier who is still in prison by the way and very ill you know think about those things that those are things around you that can motivate you in narrative very much and it's really kind of a breath of fresh air to see that activist part of Matheson's personality brought in that film that I think we sometimes miss I'll just stop there I want to say a little bit about what for me are some of the spiritual dimensions of the snow leopard I first came to the snow leopard I read it when it came out so I was living in the woods in Maine off the grid and it was a book that spoke to me enormously and you know to just harken to what Kim just said I think there are many levels of this book and the basic level I think is how the earth lives that seems to me almost the basic level of this book which isn't something to think much about because we take it for granted basically and I agree with Kim I don't think the human race can go on taking that for granted frankly because I don't think there's going to be much of a human race if we do so I think there's this desire in Matheson he saw it in the movie to continually probe that whatever you want to call it question, issue of how does the earth live what's happening basically and the snow leopard is so extraordinary and I'll talk more about this because it's what it's step by step literally people used to be pilgrims on this earth and they walked step by step to wherever they were going and we pretty much lost that we lost a lot of things and that's part of the genius basically of the snow leopard is that just step by step in which he encounters how the earth lives and you feel that in the snow leopard right when you see the birds you see all those rivers and streams you feel the life of the earth the snow that's going to come or won't come you feel how the earth lives you know it's animism the earth is alive and you feel that but then you also feel in the book how people live too there are all these people he keeps encountering and there are all different kinds of people even though to us we might think they're all the same village by village he articulates how the people are different and they have different approaches to living really in ways and yet you also feel the relentlessness he comments on time and time again all the trees are going to be gone the pressures are enormous in terms of the destruction of the environment so that's in there how other people live in the Sherpas in their whole world but then obviously where it really comes home is how do I live you know who am I here amidst all this and I very much agree it's a pilgrimage it's a quest book to try to find something out about that Peter used the word which I think is a beautiful word assemble I think this is all about writing in the sense that we're all assemblers we're always gathering this book is for me one of the great books of gathering basically a lot of people would look at this and come up with something a lot more disparate than Peter Matheson came up with in terms of how he focused this book so because he has that lens of his own life the enormous sense of what loss that informs this book in terms of what he has been through so he's empty in a way and it's not that this necessarily fills him but it comes into him I think he's open in a way because of that enormous loss I mean you see that you look at that picture of his wife it just breaks your heart she died young and then there's you know there's a there's another level I like to say in Emily Dickinson where she goes cosmic and that's how the universe lives basically I think that's part of the snow leopard too absolutely that he goes to this place that's what whatever you want to call it the inexpressible cannot be said what's in the blade of grass however you want to say it and he's not afraid of that place and I really deeply honor this book for that and he alluded to going to Japan with Bernie Glassman don't say Bernard Glassman Bernie Glassman and this is the book Night Head and Dragon River which is about his journey to Japan in the notes he quotes this is what he says in a note having no real vocabulary for what science cannot define we tend to dismiss all unexplainable experiences as quotes supernatural that is impossible and the many who have had them and dare say so are jeeringly condemned by a halo of fatuity or downright foolishness mostly these halos are deserved and yet and yet as Rilke said in his letters to a young poet and this is Rilke that mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm the experiences that are called emotions the whole so-called spirit world death all those things so closely akin to us have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied to say nothing of God and so I think Matheson that place and so the upshot of all these hows is what how to live and that we saw that beautifully I think in the movie that you know one thing I love about them is you know how to say it so profoundly no offense to anyone unprofessorial in the sense that this is about how we live on earth and it's important for every one of us in terms of how we do that literature is not something we just quote study literature is something we live with literature informs our existence so that brings me to the Matheson as the writer and I think Matheson and you see this again in the in the in the in the movie there's how we live which we know quite a bit about that but then it's also how we might live and I think that's a big part of the snow leopard you know just to read the snow leopard is basically to give us some sense of how we might live in terms of obviously just daily encounters with human beings with the natural world our own our own use of language I mean it's all there in terms of how we might live you guys want to jump in well I was to piggyback on what you're saying with what I was saying about his explication of Buddhism and how clear it is but he also you won't see a Buddhist doing this but he has sort of joined rather wonderfully and neatly and availability the world of physics with spirituality by on page 61 he says today most scientists would agree with the ancient Hindus that nothing exists or is destroyed that things merely change shape or form that matter is insubstantial in origin a temporary aggregate of the pervasive energy that animates the electron so what he's saying there is that anything can work any any idea any belief any spiritual basis can fit into can be accommodated by physics because we are all made of stars and star material and nothing no matter has been created and so I mean just a sort of like a reductive example would be people who say well there can be no such thing as reincarnation reincarnation because you know I mean there used to be 50 people and now there are 8 billion so I mean how did we all come back again but you can't because you know all that matter is that all those 8 billion people are not made of new matter they're not new matter they're just reassembled in the form of human form and there's no reason therefore according to what Mathis is saying here which I subscribe to that matter cannot be endlessly reshaped and that's what he's writing about here in the spiritual point part of the book yes I also was very struck the idea of I keep I keep this quote in my head from Ursula K. Le Guin of all people and it's well she has an interesting story we think of her as a science fiction writer but the K in her that middle K in her name is Krober and Theodora Krober was the author of Ishii in Two Worlds which is one of the most tragic books you might ever want to read about one of the last wild Indians in North America who was put on display in a museum by her father who was a linguist so when we say Ursula K. Le Guin just think of her history and where she turned her vision toward but she said true voyages return and I think she's alluding there very much to Joseph Campbell's idea of the hero's journey which is very much this is how this book is structured departure, initiation, return right those are the those are the three elements of this voyage of any journey literature I think that's what it is but what's interesting to me is I kind of bristle at the word journey until I read a book like this and he uses it and I say that's okay he's on a real journey and so maybe the idea of how to live and how to be and how to be a writer and how to live a writerly life is not the journey you're taking with the writing but the actual journey you're taking out in the world to see what the world is and to bring it back and put it on the page and that is the hard part I think and this idea of assembling it you know if we think all those notes just magically turned into a book I don't think so no it was I think genius is the word it was a man who found the perfect marriage between his literary ambition, his abilities and his sensitivity, his spirituality and place what he found he put all those things together probably better in this book than in any other of his wonderful books and sort of found a perfect way to encapsulate them all but what you're saying true is I think what you're saying and I wrote down here the objects of the journey, the sheep, the snow leopards they're MacGuffins and the journey is the whole point of the thing right my favorite line in this book is about, I'm very fascinated by the character of Takten and my favorite line is no I am because he's he's the counterpoint I think and the counterweight to Matheson's brooding sensibility he's the crazy wisdom you know the evil monk but I love this line there are no boundaries to this man he loves us all I mean wow that's a great epitaph like I want that one there are no boundaries she loves us all right it's kind of what I think is a really rewarding sentence to find in a book like this that he's made that discovery too about another human being on the face of the earth who he will never see again and that's the other piece is journeying with people you may never see again you know at least not in that form right yes yes yeah a couple more things I want to say before we turn it to you I think in these elements that he's assembling I think one element that's ideally crucial in writing but it doesn't happen every day very far from it is enchantment I think this is an this book is about enchantment he goes to a place maybe he suspects that's going to happen to him and that's one reason he wants to go there but he goes to this place where enchantment which we God knows what we associate with that word but it's literal in this sense I mean he goes to this landscape that is so much faster than any human being that it puts him in that place in terms of literally he's enchanted and you feel that I think as you read the book that it's something real and that's why I read you that quote about the so-called supernatural he experiences that and it emanates from what it emanates from the earth it emanates from the world of earth and sky I want to read you a couple quotes and then we'll open it up this is from this book Night Headed Dragon Rider which is in many ways an account of history of Buddhism and Matheson's you know coming to Buddhism this is from a Zen master teacher Dogen who is the originator of many of the koans that people are still trying to figure out to this day when we view the four directions from a boat in the ocean where no land is in sight it applies to Matheson it looks circular and nothing else however this ocean is neither round nor square and its qualities are infinite in variety it is like a palace it is like a jewel when a fish swims in the ocean there is no limit to the water no matter how far it swims when a bird flies in the sky there is no limit to the air no matter how far it flies however no fish or bird has ever left its element since the beginning again I think that's a lot of what's going on in the snow leopard in terms of the node limit but also that which is there this is about the writing part of Matheson he's writing about Dogen in the 13th century I think this is also Peter Matheson like all born writers he wrote for the sheer exhilaration of the writing in a manner unmistakably fresh and poetic reckless and profound though the risks he takes make the prose difficult one is struck at once by an intense love of language a mastery of paradox and repetition meticulous nuance and startling image swept along by a strong lyric sensibility in a mighty effort to express the inexpressible the universal or absolute that is manifest in the simplest objects and events of everyday life you're right, sorry I shouldn't say you're right he's absolutely saying this is me yeah and so as Matheson himself says in the book it is the precise bite and feel and sound of every step that fills me with life and there's that great from Rilke that half line which Denise Leveritov used in a poem of hers and the line is each step and arrival and I think that's that's what he's doing in the in the snow leopard having no destination I am never lost each step and arrival and that of course goes along with walking meditation in Buddhism which is a form of meditation in Buddhism and you know for me if you said what's the word from the snow leopard that I take from it when he hollers out at a number of times now because that is each step and arrival all there is anything more you guys have to I just want to say I mentioned Summers that mom is a razor's edge I don't know if anyone's read it he's sort of out of fashion but I didn't say what it was about it's about an American who goes to the east and discovers is enlightened and comes back and tries to fit in with the world and that was published in 1945 45 and I'm sure Matheson read it and it's a very romantic book it's a wonderful story and a fun Hollywood movie the first not the second but that's sort of what made me think that this is a romantic book too it's the same thing it's a romance a journey it's a get back book it's that romance of going back somehow which you see over and over again in this book there's this romance of trying to make our origins play in the fields of the Lord very much on this earth basically to feel to be with that to live with that what do you folks like to say I'd like to say something I didn't notice it at first but watching the documentary I felt it was eerily similar in an Orthodox way to a Korean traditional classic story one of the few that really remains to this day is called a direct translation is a cloud of nine a dream of nine clouds and in that in the opposite to what Peter Matheson did Buddhist monk that is born into Buddhism a young monk is one of the monks around and he sees nine nuns and he just feels a sudden desire and urge not just of sexuality but of an adventure of ordinary layman things and then he goes to sleep and the next day he's reincarnated as a boy in the normal world and he has no recollection of his memories but then and the story is about him going on a life of adventure he becomes a warrior and he becomes a politician and in that story he meets all these nine women and he has romance with all these nine women and after that before his death it's been so long since I read it but around the time he dies he wakes up again the next morning and he meets the nine nuns again and in that I think it's almost exactly the opposite of what happened with Peter Matheson's life and in some way in the snow leopard but I think it comes to the same conclusion which to me was the nothingness of Nirvana and that's almost the same theme in the story I just told you and I just thought I don't know if there is an American translation of it and if there is I don't think it's really possible because there isn't much right well there is that nothingness but at the same time when you read the snow leopard you certainly feel that in and this relates to what you're talking about Peter everything really is there is being the mountains are hold on they are there and there is a word in the Buddhist tradition which is Tatha and it means suchness just that which and saying just as it is and I think that's part of the enchantment of it it's not because you know our world is so much lived under the rubric of progress which means we're always making one thing into another that's what progress apparently is you know and so he's it's suchness that he you know again this get back this trying to encounter so certainly nothingness is sure you know but suchness matters too and I think because every step in arrival it's every step is a step on earth would you call suchness and Tatha particularity yeah that's a word that I use a lot in my workshops is that you know everything needs to be a particular thing rather than just a generic thing yeah okay let's take someone else Sonia I felt the really broke open when the first time you hear about his wife's death and I felt like that was where the landscape and whatever I was interested but suddenly I see something that's also personally urgent and I was struck as I was reading how spare he is with mention of her and his son and so you know I'm just wondering what you all think of that and I'm wondering if it's that saying you can wait for it but the restraint just really I actually think restraint I mean God if we could all be a little more restrained you know and because what he's I mean to say he's writing about loss would just be a terrible thing in a way because he isn't he's writing about finding something really spectacular out of the experience and I think the idea of suchness that death goes there too that it's all part of that puzzle that you can't appreciate you can't appreciate what is there without looking at what isn't there to a certain extent and the idea that he is restrained with it is very refreshing because I think I would have I would have been a little ooh I don't really want to read that I want to read about the snow leopard and what's interesting about that is he's restrained with that too because it's all the things you don't see about this animal that are important we just see sign of it you know sign everywhere scrape and sign the animal that gets killed and that is the same kind of restraint so that it's like I was saying before some things what Scheller says maybe it's better that there are some things that we don't see that may be a good mantra to have in writing too that maybe this is really a primer about how to approach a text on a certain level that the particularity the suchness the things we don't see the fine art of omission all of that Matheson's language also shifts tremendously when he talks from the you know not you know what I mean when I call it purple prose very careful sort of nature prose writing and then when he goes into his own life he becomes it's much planer and then when he goes into spirituality it's sort of shorn of everything but he's trying to express very simple ideas but that can be complex simply and so his writing shifts so there's these three sort of areas in the book and his writing is quite different in each place that you had you think that they would have let him publish the book like this today don't you think they would have said why don't you frame it up with your wife's dad let's make that the book possibly I think also this was sort of a seminal work in its time and its effect has been now it's sort of the paradigm for many things that came afterwards it really established a kind of commentary travel well I mean there have always been those but I do think today I think editors are very craven they're market driven and they might have said there's a little bit much about Buddhism I don't know I mean publishers are everything shifts with time so I think they would have they might have but again Peter Matheson even then had stature they couldn't really mess with it I don't think it would ever get published period I don't think the world would be open to that had a hard time then it didn't come out until much later then I'm going to go about five more minutes so a couple more speaking about particular and I'm so struck by his description of the girl and herself of the because she is very particular in a way he describes her as very particular without the you know so I love that type of imagery and that's very much a now moment it's also very much a sort of a sacredness in something that you wouldn't necessarily think is sacred but what he sees in her is very sacred he calls it I mean he describes it as a very sacred moment for him so I love that and what you said about what you're not seeing I think and I could be so wrong but there's a a saying about the the space of the bowl is actually it's like an art thing but like you know there is an actual something in the space does that make any sense yeah I was struck by how often his spiritual musings grew out some great most physical physicality I was looking at page 140 where his legs are tired and stiff and he's worried about the narrow ledge then we go into this whole thing about the meaning of death why should he be afraid of falling when he's accepted the idea of death and then we get this whole euphoria around his broken in boots and there's a whole so in other words you go from the particular to a yeah a kind of related set of thoughts that and it's always grounded in the physical it felt like absolutely I'm so glad you said that because working from the detail from the ground up we want so badly because ideas happen here and we want to go from here down and impose metaphor impose meaning, impose theme, impose this but when we work from the ground up that inductive way of thinking and you work from detail and you build up it is so much more powerful the stave the stave, yeah yeah people I say to me with poems, you know where do poems come from they come into your head come up from the soles of your feet that's where poems come from the viscera this is I guess sort of a question I guess you know reading like suddenly like Siddhartha or he starts off in this place and maybe like enlightenment and comes full circle to find it again like in reading that book I come off the page and I feel a sense of like peace and calm but the end of this I don't feel that I just simply sense that he's going to go through this cycle over and over and over again do you think that's because or I don't know why but because it's a westerner going into this and coming out of it versus you know Siddhartha which is based on you know eastern tradition and then returning to it I get a sense like maybe just because I'm a westerner he's a westerner I don't believe that he'll ever have peace or something yeah yeah no I hear you I'm inclined to say Siddhartha's a work of fiction and this is a work of nonfiction so this is a human being and so those cycles are endless I mean people always say about Buddhist teachers oh they do this wrong they do that wrong you know and the answer is where human beings don't well he's a seeker and you know a seeker never finds you just keep going he will always keep going and as a writer too he was just always looking and Siddhartha is also a work of fiction by Westerner I mean like so you could maybe say that you know it allows Sue said that the true Tao cannot be spoken so you could just leave it at that on that note I think we'll end the festivities


start recording this hold on on the other one yep okay ready to go three two one welcome to the metal voice once again our honorary returning member Don Dockin himself and of course my buddy Jaws Lavery co-hosting the show today Don thank you so much for being on the show good to see you guys again and last of my saw you like we just talked about a minute ago you had to open my the door to my room because my hands were so paralyzed I couldn't get in my room so thanks all cool I would have slept in the hallway and I'm not laughing at at it the situation I'm just the way you kind of told the story yeah that's not laughing at you October 27th heaven comes down on silver lining music the new Dockin album it's been whoa boy 10 years hey Giles well yeah it's been 10 years since broken bones or even 11 years maybe I think almost the only thing that out since was the Lost Tapes album just to hold us over yeah I mean this is and this is a great record I mean I I love all the Dockin records and you know some of them have had you know some experimental moments which I think is a good thing I love the darker stuff and you know you know not everything has to sound like under lock and key you know it's great when you expand and you know more minor key stuff but this Dockin album I think anyone who was a fan of the 80s Dockin is gonna be absolutely thrilled with this and there's a plug right there and I you know I don't like to prop myself up I've done records I wasn't proud of like Shadow Life I hated that record and so I wasn't much involved it was the band decide we're trying to get you know change and become monster magnet but yeah people are asking me I've done so many interviews I said look it's been 10 years to assess my life all the tragedies we had the bass player crushing his arm like a tar player had to have massive surgery I got paralyzed from an asshole doctor and we survived and but you know I really think that as you know if you've had the album every song is killer on this record yeah absolutely it's it's just it's like it's like a collection of hit singles but they're all new yeah and they're all kind of different you know yeah remember or gypsy or like a rose and then you you know we all dock and we always used to end our records with a big fast double bass a burner right to the nail till the living in lightning strikes again and I end this record with a one guitar one guitar me singing about my journey from LA to New Mexico you know Santa Fe great song very simple this guitar just a vocal I could have made a huge production out of it and I was talking to my producer Bill Palmer one night and that's how it happened and I said talking about my past because he's from Texas and I said how do you write your whole life in four minutes yeah that's tough you did it but I did it that's a cool song it reminds me a little bit of something that could have come off the solitary record yeah as well which would have been that direction I was always proud of solitary yeah unfortunate no record company wanted it that's a great record nobody they said guns only docking I said what does that mean I am done docking it's just ballads it's just my poetry put to music great every every docking record to me sounds like docking except for Shadow Life as you say which I don't really I don't really you know I don't want to start a big thing about that record but I don't really count that as part of the catalog you know the logo is different even you know like I just I love them all like I love me never everything from like a racist light right up to broken bones up it was amazing awesome I think after that yeah that was the breaking point again on Shadow Life and that's why historically you always have the docking logo which I own and I said I'm not putting my logo on Shadow Life because this is in docking this is you guys trying to experiment and you can't even tell it's me because the first day I met the producer Kelly Gray who played in means right for a few years first thing he says to me he's me goes well I just want to say I was talking to your boys and I don't like your boys I said excuse me you don't like my boys and you're gonna produce our record well you need to get the fuck out of here you know and so as you know on that record that he put things in my voice filters and most thing I start like this you know like puppet on a string kind of yeah and that's not it's like this all these effects that you know Manson used to do on his voice and I'm like well that's crazy and I remember George he like looks so excited he said finally you know we're gonna not make dawn sound like dawn because I hate his voice and I said well George my voice made you famous so shut up well no one needs to worry this this new record is far far far from Shadow Life this is this is right in line with any other classic docking records that people absolutely I said the only wreck one of my favorite records beyond the catalog we just sold from the 80s I loved to race the slate with red beach in the band that was a great it is a greater record yeah that was a cool record great record great but I think the Gemma the catalog I would say what the Japanese disc because like two of the tunes are on the Japanese version every bit is good is the best songs that were on the international version and the same the same for long way home there's like three tunes that should have been on the international version there should just be a disc that comes out that brings all these Japanese tracks together because there's enough of them to make a record it's always been a problem since we started they would say because in Japan you could if you want to buy a record in Tokyo or something or soccer you had to pay like say $24 and or the fans of Japan could buy the import for $17 yeah so the the meant the mentality was we'll put a bonus tracks on the Japanese versions to encourage the fans to buy the Japanese version that was the whole point of the bonus tracks because otherwise the fans would go well just buy the American version you know it's cheaper right so that's why we added the bonus tracks and I was really upset like you said some of those bonus tracks you can only buy in the Japanese for really good songs like dancing the Irish song that's a cool I love that song very Irish yeah yeah that was cool very thin Lizzie little bit there is totally totally I love that tune I always bought the Japanese versions for that reason you know what I find amazing about this new album is the production it's so crisp the guitar tone is so nice these songs are really playing to your voice yeah and I think there's a little more I don't know if we'll call it darker element to your voice you know you're not singing the higher ranges used to but you're still singing in the pocket right you still you the melodies are still there you know there's something great and fresh about this album and the production that you just don't hear what the bands that are coming out of albums today no and I agree with you I think the album sounds fresh and new and I realized after all these years after a break from broken bone I said you know I don't have anything to prove you know there's always the fans in the front row when I'm playing and if I don't hit that B flat above a and kiss a death the high scream and they look at me like they point like up like hey you didn't hit the high note well guess what guys that was 30 40 years ago so I wrote this record in my comfortable range and but it still has the docking harmonies and and and you'll notice on the record there's no really songs about love and love lost and love found what used to be my kind of go-to or sarcastic songs like you just got lucky or it's not love you know kind of like saying you got me but so what but these all these songs I think on heaven comes down are like stories like gypsy fugitive I remember probably only one that's kind of a reminiscent of I was thinking about my past and my life and I wrote the song I remember but they're all still rocking yeah absolutely and it's great what you said I think is really true it sounds like you're singing in a real comfortable area and range that I thought I think your voice sounds powerful clear the harmonies are great yeah and you know you're not you're not you're not trying to sing something that you sang in 1986 and fail you're singing right where you're comfortable and it sounds awesome and I did that for several years on tour and you know I wasn't singing well and I wasn't playing well and I just said look I have nothing to prove and I'm gonna sing where it's comfortable yeah so we just tuned down to E flat and I know my keys A E and D down lower and John knows me so long now 20 years being in the band so he songs he wrote he wrote in my comfort range so I could just sing and put a motion in the lyrics without trying to sing super high which I was struggling you know because I'm something something I noticed on the last record to like a song like Burning Tears that's so in your range you sound so comfortable singing it it's full of emotion this album has that as well and I think and I think that is every bit as good and as valid as anything that you sang in the 80s yep thank you for that it's sad a little bit that you know we're known for breaking the chains tooth and nail or knocking key back to the attack under lock and key but a lot of fans don't know we moved on and did dysfunctional one of my favorite albums long way home with John Norum a racist slate with red beach you know we lightning strikes again with John wasn't crazy about hell to pay that was my first record I wrote with John and you know John hadn't played in years you know he's an attorney and he had left the business and we struggled to find John had to find my way where I want to sing and he kept trying to write songs sound like old docking and I said screw that let's just write a song that we like so how to pay was so so you know but there were some good songs on it but oh yeah we're project learning tears yeah burning tears was cool but now I'm in my comfortable range you know I know a lot of bands I've gone to see in the last year they're still very famous and I noticed as soon as I got to the venue they're singing all they're playing all their songs much lower because their singers are in the 70s but they're using backing tracks to Don you know I mean the scorpions don't thank God scorpions are still close they've taken it down it sounds heavy it's it's got power it's not like it's a cop out or anything it sounds I agree I mean why torture Klaus I went to Vegas when they're doing their residency for a month and I went to like three shows like love the scorpions and Klaus sounded great he just sings lower I mean what do you want these guys man they're in their 70s you know come on and he does sing great even at that lower range done done you know the band you know everyone keeps saying when's the band gonna reunite the classic lineup but I mean a lot of people don't realize this is how you started in a sense you've come full circle right you weren't with George Lynch at the beginning you were on your own as Don Dawkins correct yep the first time was called Don Dawkins just just quickly summarize for the people out there you know you're you go to Germany I'm not sure why you went to Germany I guess we're a recording contract and from there you sort of started off as Dawkins correct actually backwards I had done two tours in Germany as Dawkins because New Wave was so popular in LA we couldn't get a gig anymore so I got invited we did those two little club tours same ones the Beatles did you know the top ten Chicago the Beatles started out in Germany people don't remember that and they're playing cover songs five hours a night but when I met Dieter Dirks and Klaus had had his surgery and he said you know oh you sing with vibrato like Klaus I said yes not a lot of singers don't use vibrato I'd love you to come to Germany and just do the high high high notes because basically I was a virgin right my voice was fresh I was in my 20s and so I sang on that record Dieter said you I tell you what I'll do I'll let you go in my B studio with Michael and make a demo and I made a demo and actually the manager of except Gabby Hauke at the time was there making wrestling wild wrestling wild so she took my demo to Hamburg to rock barlale who's the president of career records a French label and she came back I picked her up she had me a plane ticket that was it and I went he wants to give me a record deal well that's awesome it was 20,000 marks which broke out to 8500 US dollars pennies and they really were any and he said you got three weeks to make a record here's my problem I don't have a band it's just me so that's what I called Mick who I know the boys and wanted him to come do the drum tracks in Germany he was broke the band had broken up and he said why don't you take George to and I said hmm you know I'm a lead guitar player I don't really need George he's great I said yes I've seen him George is great so I hired Mick and George to come to Germany and we did break him the chains and that was it unfortunately we're only like two-thirds down with the record I woke up one day and there was a hotel the theater owned behind the studio and they left they went back to America didn't say anything they just left went back to the back to LA went now I'm screwed the record's not done so I had to finish break the chains by myself so that was kind of let's just say we start out on a bad foot but let me ask you this and this is this more specific it's kind of like the Van Halen thing like you're using your last name as the band which probably later on helped and hurt the band right and it sort of created that tension yes so you say guys the band's gonna be called docking what were their first thoughts when you're recording that album well I think they didn't care because they thought you're gonna pay us a couple thousand dollars and buy us a plane ticket and we're just gonna go play on your record and we'll go back to our other lives and continue on with their own careers so you know years later I remember I can't remember what record it was George and I were doing like a around the world press went to London we went to Czechoslovakia we went to Czech you know Germany Paris and they wanted George to go with me to promote Shadowlight which an album I hated and we went back to Japan and I remember one day I said George what is the problem why we can't get along and I was staying on the side of stage in soundcheck and he pointed up at the backdrop said docking and he pointed goes that's the problem and I went okay if we were probably called the dead puppies there would probably wouldn't have been a problem right you know but he always took umbage umbridge that the fact the band was called docking you know I said George I can't help that it's not my fault you know but George always wanted to do his own thing he started Lynch mob you know in 90 and that was a problem and he finally owned it and said I don't like being in the band that's named after you and I said well George that's ego I'm sorry that's ego and that was always the problem you know but he took them 20 years to admit it so it is what it is a sensory now it's been all of the internet you know George spent plenty of time bashing me in the press for years and I tried not to respond I said look if you're bitter and you're unhappy I don't know why anybody in docking was unhappy because we had a very unusual band agreement that all the money would be split split four ways so mixed the lucky guy Mick made millions and he didn't have to write shit he only had to play drums for a week in the studio and rehearse couple weeks he made a lot of money but that was a deal I made you know so I didn't understand why the band was felt like I was doing something that wasn't right when we were all making the same amount of money it was very bizarre yeah and the band was doing great you guys were doing amazing in the 80s it was it's hard it's hard to see why anyone would be unhappy with that I think it's kind of like the David Lee Roth Van Halen thing right like even though David Lee it's kind of like he's pigeonholed you know he's got it they got a pigeon pigeonholed on him because he can't go out as Van Halen you can only go out as David Lee Roth and he did and he did and he did and he did and they did the re-election and I felt so bad for David I'm known forever when they did that TV show in Times Square and here's David and he's doing his martial arts thing with this oh yeah and he breaks his nose which is the stick hits his nose they had to take it off they had to go off and pipe them up and then start the show again and he's just like playing what the fuck's going on you know where's David he's off the side trying to push his nose back together that was kind of kind of a bad way to start the reunion tour another great story is a lot of people don't talk about is how and again I don't know how true this is but when tooth and nail was released it was a slow burner right it was a lady was the label ready to drop you where management came in and said no you're not gonna drop these guys you're gonna let them do another record I mean how did that go down I was really freaked out you know when we did break in the chains tour it was our first arena tour we were playing with Royster called an Aldo Nova and Aldo Nova had that big kid you know like there's just fantasy can't you feel this fantasy life you know so we were the opening we got 35 minutes but we're playing in front of 10,000 people so I was really happy and I thought and then I would I swear every city we went to everybody every radio station when there was still radio was playing break in the chains so I thought we're on our way you know and there's a saying after the tour when they told us we only sold 100,000 I said well how's that possible we just did a huge tour how's it possible and we're on the radio everywhere I could hear myself in LA every half hour on KLOS KMET KMST breaking the chains and the term the record companies would say it was a passive hit everybody loved the song but nobody bought the record turntable hit turntable hit they used to call it to yeah turntable hits and we done the video silly video me chained up and you know it was our first you know time but I was sold the record company of course it wasn't just us an electorate they want to drop docking and I think Molly crew they want real smart thinking that two biggest bands let's do that yeah well they wanted to go what was happening they wanted to hire black r&b singers and new wave bands and they did they signed a lot of bands and the joke was it you know bands like docking and Molly crew and we kept that label going yeah and they wanted to drop us so yeah that's why we called the record tooth and now and actually the band we kind of broke up after that tour George was gonna be joining Ozzy and he went to London to audition he was like up to like the number one guy they're gonna take and for some reason I still don't know they put him on a plane and sent him home he didn't get the gig jakey lee got the gig so here I'm moving forward I'm playing the whiskey and I've hired warranty martini who was in rad and he when we were showcasing and I look out in the audience and there's George down there what the hell's he doing here at plays and Ozzy and it was kind of funny he kind of pulled war in a side where it was 18 and George like you don't want to be in docking you don't want to do this you know Don's an asshole you don't want to do this because George wanted his gig back that's the bottom line right and rad had just released that EP you know and wanted left the banks he didn't get along with George and rad exploded you know when they did round-to-round so that was that and I had to laugh I saw George standing from the stage the whiskey and he wanted to be back in the band and I said well you can't be like coming and going and either you commit or you don't commit so that the bottom line is like I titled the record to the mail which means it's your last fight it's your last chance and the record company between even with my manager was clip Bernstein returned up he's like the most powerful management company in the world you Brian that Metallica who can play anywhere they want they played the Antarctic they had Tesla they had Queens right they had smashing boom I mean clip is a genius and I thank Cliff for finding me and calling me and saying hey I found this record called breaking the chains it's an import and I'd like to meet you in LA and talk to you about managing you and he came out and met me and I remember saying well I'd love you to manage me and help me out but we don't have her I don't have a band I had Mick actually Mick was my roommate so you know Jeff was playing in club bands George was trying to do his own thing and I told him I don't I don't have a band so Cliff said you should reach out to George and and one you know and one said no I don't want to do it so we got Jeff found him in a bar and the rest is history you know and and it turned out I can't take credit for all the success of doc and I swear to God Cliff Bernstein was a genius that's probably why every band he ever managed had success but he had a plan and every time we got more famous gold records platinum records I kept saying why could we go out and headline nope you got away gotta wait gotta wait you gotta be a support band you know gotta wait be patient and I was very frustrating and then finally we got to the monsters of rock level so Dr. Cliff had a plan and then we broke up yeah I think he took that whole docking plan and just switched it over to Metallica same producer Bob Rock Bruce Fairburn they actually came to one of our shows we met him in the hotel room and I'm thinking oh my god we can get Bob Rock and Bruce Fairburn this album will be amazing and my and the three of them didn't want them and I was not happy and our management wasn't happy I said it's Bob Rock man it's Bruce Fairburn their body of work speaks for itself I mean God bless Bruce Fairburn's passed away but Bob Rock was the guy and my band members didn't want to use them and I thought this is so strange so that was a problem because the way I set up the band doc and it wasn't like a Bon Jovi where he's the boss everybody had equal say everybody if I made a dollar he made a dollar he made a dollar he made a dollar but it was kind of a mistake you know because there was nobody running the ship and it was three of them against me and that's the way it went you know because by then they were just went down the rabbit hole in the cocaine and the drinking and and I didn't do drugs so the kind of I was the odd man out and that really affected our career to the end even monster rock we broke up on the last show and I remember being on stage and the cameras would swing around to George on a solo no George we're talking about Giants where's George at he's standing by his amplifiers playing and the road he's holding a straw while he starts coke and I thought oh shit man this is not good and that's why I decide to end it you know yeah so this new record where would you personally put it in the docking in you know out of all the cattle where do you feel like good question your job where do you where do you feel like we're gonna put it done we're gonna put it I honestly I mean every musician has a new record and they say it's the greatest it's our best it's amazing you know I wouldn't say that but look we've got lightning in a bottle this record haven't comes down I'd say is as good as any docking record we did in the 80s you've heard the record yeah yeah I went out of my way that I didn't want any B songs when I call filler you know a lot of these bands you know you write the hit maybe two and the rest you buy the record you keep guys and must have gone through that and the rest about records like it's alright yeah that's like most records now like I said this is so refreshing to hear as I said earlier it's like and I'm not just saying this it's like an album of hit singles but they're all new yeah and I agree they're all hit singles will we get hit singles probably not the world's changed you know you know the problem is now you put a record out you know on Monday and then somebody puts it up on the internet and everybody downloads it for free so you can't make any money thank God we made money we don't care about the money we touring out because we love playing you know in the 80s we wanted a mansion and a Ferrari we wanted to be millionaires and that kind of drove some of the members I honestly lived in a very modest house down by the beach I just wanted to make music man and when I won that award you know when you guys were there when I got super drunk and you guys had to help me get into my room because people kept buying me drink drinks all day and my daughter was there and she was dad you better eat something you look like you're getting really wasted and I went yeah I think it's kicking in and so when I got that lifetime achievement award and I just it's so nice now this record I mean we delivered this record one year ago one year ago boss dude like I'm chomping at the bit you know I want to play these songs live they want to let us they don't even want to talk about it till now I'm saying because they're worried about iPhones and they hold them up we play a new song like Fugitive and it'll be on the internet the next day sounds like crap you know on an iPhone but they said don't play in the new material and we're like come on man let's go we got great softs on this record but they're saying you got to wait you got to wait you got to wait it's driving me crazy it's definitely worth the wait let's put it that way so tell me about your live plans we talked about the new record what do you plan on doing in terms of the performances live or are you doing this George Lynch docking thing is that continuing that's done yeah we did it for a year Don Dock and George in this reunion but that it kind of got out of control he was supposed to just come on stage and play two songs and then he put Lynch mob back together and they're opening for us so now he's opening for us and he's playing two songs at the end of the show so now he has been launched from playing bars back into playing for thousands of people were docking so that helped him out because I don't think his career was doing great we talk he lives in New Mexico now to live in Towson in the Santa Fe and I and he texted me a two months ago and said I've done six records this year six you did six records in one year and it takes me years to make one and he said hey man it's just about the money now about to make the money do a cheap video it's a little it's a little little hard to keep up when someone's putting out four or four to six records a year I see a lot of guys doing that and nothing against anybody God bless you do what you want to do but as a fan when someone I like is you know I can't keep up with how many records and how many projects and how many bands you kind of just lose interest in all of it because there isn't any one thing to focus on you're just kind of like I'm over here and here there's another thing oh and he's on someone else's record on there's another supergroup supergroup yep it's I agree you know I saw his videos he's got Doug Pinnick on one record yeah Michael Sweet on another record Oni on a record I'm like Jesus Christ you know so and I would lose interest too but he said it's not about perpetuating his career or his legend as a guitar hero it's just about money but now you don't get a million dollars per record or a hundred two hundred thousand so it's like well if I do six records and they give me 20 grand a record that I made a couple hundred grand that's that's his thinking I think and Jeff Pillson only lives you know like two blocks from George in his LA house and Jeff has a studio so he goes over to Jeff's great at recording a pro tool he came an expert so he just goes over and writes riffs and just cranks him out he's not a songwriter so he just sends the songs to all these people and they write the lyrics and he puts out these records I can't do that you know nobody's gonna write my lyrics and nobody's gonna arrange my song you know that's not satisfying to me I think the anticipation is gone right and I think that's what you're kind of getting to like if you wait even you couldn't even wait to bring out your record you just want to show your music to the world and that's anticipation for you right that part of the music industry is gone it's finished it's just it's a world of give me give me give me now it is when people are putting out six records a year I mean you don't have time to anticipate anything and you know you know on YouTube now seems to be the vehicle you put out a cheap video and people click on it oh new dark and song renew this band of this band and they watch it for a minute and they just go on to the next video yeah you know no no you know the world's child I people have no attention span anymore that's right yeah that's right that's when we did the video for heaven comes down and my record company no offense to them but they gave me like a tiny little budget and I said I want to make a great video it's my last record my hands paralyzed I can't play guitar anymore I ship my piano to my daughter it's over and I said but it's got to be a great video that people are interested in and the money they gave me I said so you want me to film this video on iPhones okay you know I did I said you know when I pick an iPhone yeah man we do it all the time I'm not doing that people make movies people make movies on iPhones now you can do amazing the new ones with the three cameras you could make like here's my studio right here you know but I know you're getting to you're not gonna do it on I got that movie V made that he said that iPhones are so good now they're better than what we use to make V well the years ago this phone has more power than the computers they used to put the first man on the moon right right they also say and you know back in the 80s we're using film that's right it was different it's different developed and we had to edit it and you know no special effects now you have AI you can you look at the new Queens right video it's all AI it's crazy animation it's amazing but I said nope I'm gonna do something different it'd be very simple for us just rent a stage go on stage lip sing make a video three cameras done nope not gonna do it I just happen to be lucky enough that the venue meow wolf which is an art installation is in Santa Fe and I negotiated we could film there under when they're closed on Tuesday so we filmed say fugitive and it's a very cool interesting video it is which I think you made a point she's it's over a half a million hits you know so we've been out six weeks and our new video came out gypsy and I said okay we did that and we only got we only got away with that video because I had people they're famous directors editors directors of photography there were fans of dark and they said don we'll fly to Santa Fe and we'll do it for free we just want to we just want to make a great video Tom strict fat and drug always 5k cameras does football now these are movie cameras that's why it looks so amazing so we did gypsy I say let's take a left turn we had a girl draw that by hand on her iPad she lives in Poland I said let's do something different so gypsies very cool but I was talking to John Levin was very good friends with Tommy who manages extreme and he said you know extreme plans on doing a video for every song in the record so they can keep the album alive for a year and I said we should do that let's make 10 videos be it animation AI film go pros whatever so we plan on doing that I'm already working on the next song is it me or is it you working on that video right now Don as the last question is this your last docking album I don't know you're alluding to before so this is your absolutely your last Don record docking record that you're gonna I feel guilty because I said that after broken bones but yeah it's that's it we're done you know we've made our statement in the rock and roll history you know we'll continue to tour I mean my problem now is when we tour is we'd had so many hits and they only want you to play 90 minutes what songs do we kick out of the set and add to the new record be it gypsy or fugitive or over the mountain what do we kick out into the fire breaking the chains the hunter alone again it's not lucky just got lucky it's not love what do we get rid of you know we only got 90 minutes it's a really hard it's tough and then there's a whole lot of great music from the late 90s 2000s it doesn't get played as well you know you could do a four-hour show in theory we could like man you know Metallica plays two and a half hours but I said what do we keep what do we get rid of but for us you know to be fulfilled as musicians we just we don't want to be foreigner we don't just want to play all the hits it's boring so on our show now we do too high to fly which was undisfunctional because that's a vehicle for john to play his solo in the middle of the song and people look at us and they know what's they don't know the some people know the song some people don't it's my homage to Jim Morrison but I said let's just say we want let's all sit down and and say what do we want to play what makes us happy to play and if the fans go I don't know this song or I don't know this song sorry yeah I came to a very revelation two years ago when I got paralyzed that I spent my whole life my whole career to keep the fans happy to be on the road for a year and a half no life I had a son and a daughter and I didn't even watch them grow up I'd come home and they sprouted a foot and I said you know I don't have any obligation to the fans to keep going on I do it because we love to play but I would like to play songs that are near and dear to my heart so that's what we're gonna do we're right now on a 10-day break and I said everybody write a set list of all the songs you'd like to play Chris, BJ, John tell me what you guys would like to play live and we'll play it but we're gonna have to ditch maybe in my dreams into the fire you know we we got I mean we're still playing break in the chains and that song was written over 40 years ago the shocking thing is when I see the fan I see people in their early 20s 30s 40s 50s 60s and we play break in the chains everybody knows the words even a 22 year old I'm like you weren't you weren't born when I wrote that song but we still play break in the chains even though it wasn't a big hit uh you know it wasn't but they but they found the song like a treasure you know when they got older and I talked to these people and they say well you know my parents got married they got a job they bought a house and they weren't going to rock concerts anymore and smoking pot so they took all their records and CDs and gave it to their kids and their kids got it turned on the dock and but they were only 12 or 13 they couldn't come see us and by the time they were old enough to come see us we broke up so now they're like finally I get to see docking live and now I'm 24 five you know that's pretty cool I think it's pretty cool you know what it's very admirable what you're doing you know and and all the power to you the album's coming out October 27th on silver lining music heaven comes down another classic docking album I will say absolutely and you know what if it's the last one what a hell of a way to go out there you go yeah but if you but if you change your mind that's cool as well we won't hold it against you how's that we won't hold it against you yeah I said that I'm maybe I'm speaking too soon I was at the airport with John we landed in Dallas before I later I said John you want to do another record and he says I don't know if I have it in me and I said well let's just work on heaven comes down we'll talk in a year about John goes I have eight songs I've written and I still have four or five songs that are finished so much for that you know what's gonna happen you know like never say never Murphy's law is gonna happen you're gonna this is gonna come out and be a hit and then you're gonna have to do another record yep I'm gonna be apologizing to both of you saying I'm sorry I said this is our last record and now we have another one I apologize that one's gonna be the last record it's okay it's all right that'll be there it's like the Rolling Stones are in their 80s now and they're still making records you know and they keep saying kiss he says you know we're not making any more records because they don't have to they had so many hits but they're still touring and every year it's our final tour it's our farewell tour we're over but they keep going out but I don't I don't honestly me think I'll be doing that I think I've devoted my life to my fans and people like you and I've given 40 years and now I just turned 70 and at the end of June and I think it's time that I've left LA now and I'm now in New Mexico in this beautiful chateau with a mountain I own the whole damn mountain because I didn't want anybody building behind me and I'm just want to enjoy my life and you know what gives me happiness is now walking my three shepherds every day up the trails and hiking and what I do late at night is uh I have Alexa and I'll have a memory of a song when I was 14 and I'll go Alexa play incense and peppermints from the music machine you know when I was you know 10 and they'll she'll play it play me some Beatles play me some stones play sympathy for the devils kind of like I'm reminiscing about everything I grew up with and that's kind of my happy space at night what a great way to end the interview thank you so much Don I hope to interview again you again on your next album or your next tour but if not it's all good buddy it's all good it's all good well just tell your fans you've heard the record we've been very very on the DL on this record yeah I mean they wouldn't let us play any songs live you've heard the record it's a great record and that it is that all right have yourself a wonderful day thanks a lot


Next question is from Houdak on Health. What's the deal regarding arching the back during the bench press? I personally can't arch my back that much, but I see some people with serious arches when benching. Is it a big benefit? There's two things here. One, there's the natural arch that's good for good form. And then the powerlifting arch. And then there's the powerlifting arch that is utilized to maximize leverage for the bench press. Okay, so let's start with the natural arch. A natural arch on the bench means if you lay down flat on a bench with your feet flat on the floor, your low back should not touch the bench. You should have this little bit of arch in your back, and you can exaggerate it a little bit. And what this does is it allows you to pull the shoulder blades back and down, protect the shoulders, utilize better leverage, better mechanics, reduce your risk of injury. So that's a better way to bench press. You don't want your back totally flat. You want your butt on the bench, but you don't want your lower back flat on the bench that throws the shoulders forward, tends to bring the shoulder blades out and round them forward and can cause problems. Now with powerlifters, the rules in powerlifting say that the upper back and the hips or the glutes need to touch the bench. So what powerlifters do is they exaggerate the arch so much to reduce the range of motion. So with a super big arch, you don't need to bring the bar back down as much on a bench, and you can lift more weight. You don't need to do that kind of an arch. In fact, the average lifter doesn't know how to do that properly. If they overarch, they could cause problems. You're really just emulating a decline bench press. I mean, that's all they're doing. If you looked at the angle that a powerlifter is doing on a flat bench, you look at the angle that they create with that arch that they create. It's just like they shorten the range of motion up.  But they're really just creating that same angle as you would on a decline, which anyone who's done a decline bench knows that a decline bench is a lot easier than a flat bench. So it makes a lot of sense for a powerlifter who's trying to increase their weight that they're lifting to create as much leverage as possible. It's just less length.  If you want to simplify it to that point. But yeah, they do that literally as a technique for them to be able to lift heavy weight, but also not have to press it so far up. Now that being said, there is something to learn from powerlifters. I feel like I got much better at bench pressing when I started to lift like a powerlifter, though instead of a bodybuilder, right? So, you know, I came from the kind of bodybuilding mentality first, which was the flare the elbows out only come down to 90 degrees. And I got so much more out of my bench press when I stopped lifting like a bodybuilder and I started trying to lift like a powerlifter. I was able to increase my bench press. I never felt the pain in my shoulders. I used to get pain in my shoulders a lot when I had bench pressed when I was lifting like a bodybuilder because technique is so important for a powerlifter. Their mechanics on the bench press are really good. And when you're trying, it's less about the arch and it's more about exaggerating the retracting and depressing of the shoulders, right? So think about the upper back, even though you can't see what's really going on with someone's shirt on and they're on the bench. All we see is this massive arch. So everybody looks at the arch in the back and goes like, Oh my God, that looks like it's so dangerous. That's so bad. What you don't realize, the main thing that's causing that arch is that person is really retracting the shoulders back and depressing them and that's causing this excessive arch and the retraction, the depression of the shoulders is what's so important in a bench press to protect the shoulders, to get the most out of your bench, to be able to take it to full range of motion. So there's a lot to learn about bench press technique from a powerlifter from that standpoint. Anchoring your shoulders in place, it's very stable to do that and also that just slight arch even really helps to then provide leg drive too. So now I can focus on getting that kind of tension to go all the way distributed from the top of my body down through my feet which adds even more availability to increase my force production. Not to mention that so many people think that it's so dangerous because they see almost any other exercise that we talk about like if you had an excessive arch and a deadlift or a squat Oh yeah, bad. Oh my god, or an overhead press. Oh my god, bad, bad, bad, bad, so bad. But you got to understand where you're resisting the weight and where the gravitational forces are really at. It's nowhere near the lower back. No, it's on the shoulders. Yeah, the weight is pushing down on your shoulders. It's not pushing down your spine. Yeah, so there's really not that much risk injury-wise and the reason why I bring that up because as a young trainer I didn't know better and I used to see people that were trying to be power lifters or lifting like that and clients would ask me, they'd be like, what are they doing?  They're cheating. Well, yeah, exactly, they're cheating just to get the weight up and that's dangerous. They're going to hurt themselves. Yeah, they're going to hurt themselves. I didn't fully understand what was going on and so I would tell clients, you don't ever want to bench press that way and that's bad or that's dangerous or whatever and the truth is there's not a lot of risk in the low back like that but you're not thinking about the art so now if you're a listener and you hear me saying like that's not bad don't go into the bench press trying to arch the low back. It's all about the retraction and depression of the upper back, the shoulders that you're peeling back. That's what creates that. I would say stick the chest out and pull the shoulders back rather than think about the arch. Right.


What is going on guys welcome back to the channel and I appreciate you being here today I'm going to give you guys a quick guide on how you can get your crimson headshot kills for the masterwork version done in Easily under 20 minutes But before we get into that guys if this video helps you out hitting that like button truly helps me out and I do Appreciate that support. Okay, so the crimson is quite a decent weapon as it is standard right now But the masterwork version is way way better basically allowing a weapon to have max range So it's definitely worth the grind in getting the masterwork version 100% So the process begins by you obtaining the catalyst for the crimson This is done by simply killing enemies within the PvE side of the game And no you don't have to be using the crimson to do this either You can use any weapon and the crimson catalyst will still drop So once you have the crimson catalyst dropped apply it to the crimson and away you go The next step is to get precision kills with this weapon and guys this takes so damn long isn't even funny But with my help today, I will guide you on to how you can get this done from start to finish in under 30 minutes Really easy the plan setting out for me in getting this was to find a place where enemies constantly spawn Without me running back and forward and guys I have found the perfect place load up the Leviathan raid Unnormal once you've done this make your way to that very very top Ignore all enemies on your way Once appear run past these enemies also and follow the path to the place right here Now I've called this place the Colosseum since day one not realizing that's not its name But hey, that's what we are calling it So once in the Colosseum jump onto this pad right here upon doing this You will spawn a constant wave of endless enemies and I mean they are endless people and they swarm you This was the place I was looking for now What makes this challenge even easier with the exotic perk on the crimson every headshot kill reloads the mag Meaning you never really have to reload your weapon You can just keep on going plus headshot kills have a chance of regen in your health too So it's the best of both worlds This is the place where I've got the entire crimson masterwork challenge of physician kills done in little under 25 minutes And it's as simple as that guys it really is now the crimson like I said earlier once a masterwork exotic It almost has max range and it changes the weapon drastically. It makes a weapon so good It's unbelievable. I tried out last night in PvP and I fell in love with it It's a weapon I can't wait to play with more and on that note guys. We have come to the end of the video I truly hope this helped you out if it did hit that like button on this video helps me out Thanks as always for stopping by people and hopefully I will see you on that next one


Carlo and you have a moment like that and an opportunity like that. How much do you embrace it? It's big time. I mean, I love those moments. Then I had one earlier in the game that I didn't, um, it didn't capitalize on. So, uh, it's not too often you get two opportunities in the same game, but, uh, you definitely better get the second one. If you don't get the first is this a home stand for you to remember? Oh yeah. It's a great home stand. Um, we got, we got all the series here as well. So, um, yeah, take that into the off day and down the Tampa. Go to Tom Merriam and continuing on the home stand. What's the difference in the way the team feels now as opposed to when it began 10 days ago? Um, I mean, these are great games to feed off of battles back and forth. And, uh, after a long day yesterday, um, and to for today to come down to the wire as well, uh, just, just any way you can, any way you can squeeze out a win, uh, and build that momentum down, uh, into, into Tampa. Go next to Brendan Cuddy. Please unmute.  Were you, had you still been feeling good at the plate as good as you had, um, earlier this week? Oh yeah. I still, I still feel good at the plate. I say, um, I, I missed a couple of pitches to hit the past couple of days and expanding a little bit. Um, but that happens. Uh, I feel good. And yeah. How did it feel for you guys to watch Labor get one? That's awesome.  You could tell in his reaction. So, uh, it's good. He got that first one out the way and now they should, they should flow.


St. Lucia is gearing up to welcome its first international cruise ship in July since the halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The ministries of health and wellness and tourism and by extension the Government of St. Lucia are actively engaged in discussions with cruise industry officials on the safe return of the cruise sector to St. Lucia. Chief Medical Officer Dr. Sharon Belmar George explained that a model similar to that used in the tourism sector is being considered. And the model we are looking at is quite similar to that used by the tourism sector where it will be a bubble, quite different to what is regularly seen with the cruise sector being able to freely roam, so they would be allowed to to go to approved sites and attractions. In relation to point seraphine as far as the discussion has been is that point seraphine being the ship's birth there that they would be a part of the sites and attraction, the difference would be is that on the days when the cruise ships come in, locals would not be allowed to access the shops on that day. So this is a discussion that is happening and the Ministry of Tourism is liaising in the various sectors to ensure that all of the necessary protocols are put in place. Chief Medical Officer Dr. Sharon Belmar George