Review of Alexandros Kapelis's Piano Recital

Other Reviews:
"Karma Cafe" (movie)
"Talk to Me" (movie)
"Eavesdropper" (play)
"A Mighty Heart" (movie)




The beautiful and nearly acoustically perfect Herbst Theater in San Francisco was the venue for the Bay Area piano recital debut of Alexandros Kapelis.

He is on a world tour sponsored by the Greek government presenting classical music inspired by Greek mythology. Upcoming performances are with the New York Philharmonic, Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater and recitals in Chicago and Montreal, and then on to Europe.

His artistry is mature, passionate and skillful, but he also betrays a delightful playfulness such as his interpretation of "For a Little White Seashell" by M. Hadzikakis. He proved he has mastered Debussy, Rameau, Kostantinidis and Clementi as well, and finished the recital with a virtuoso performance of "Etudes-Tableaux" by Rachmaninoff, which is not an easy task.

Bravo, Alexandros!

Other Reviews:
"Karma Cafe" (movie)
"Talk to Me" (movie)
"Eavesdropper" (play)
"A Mighty Heart" (movie)

Which Species Will Be Homoperfectus

We Homosapiens evolved to have the ability to manipulate our environment and change it to suit us. The life forms of earth are intertwined and interdependent in a biosphere that is fueled by sunlight and feeds on itself except for a few very primitive forms of life that can find nutrients in inorganic sources like soil and rock. If Gaia as the entity of life on Earth is a valid allegory for the Earth's biosphere, then it may be reasonable to explain our emergence as Gaia's attempt to cope with future life threatening disasters such as asteroids. Never was there another species able to anticipate a giant rock from the sky, and actually contemplate what might be done to avert its damage.

Now, we have turned our minds to the very nature of what we are right down to the very genetic code that gives rise to every aspect of our forms. Even before we get to cloning humans, we are already at work affecting the evolution of our descendents. We are dramatically shortening the process of species evolution within ourselves and we may be surprised how quickly our descendents become another species beyond Homosapiens. Although this is inevitable, it's not too late to ponder and plan what is best. There is wisdom in our current DNA. It has been winnowed through natural selection over eons and a multitude of bad mutations did not survive attrition. As we tinker with our species we dare not lose the original Homosapiens gene pool.

Homoperfectus is the presumed descendent from Homosapiens, but which species will be Homoperfectus? As different individuals and groups make decisions about what their offspring will be, people will make choices for a multitude of reasons, some of it scientific, humane and rational, but there's bound to be those whose culture or religious mind sets lead to human traits you or I might find wierd or objectionable. As we steer the descent of the our genetic line, it is inevitable that differences in objectives will begin to appear, and in time the Earth will be populated simultaneously by multiple species who branched off from homosapiens.

Some species may be developed for climate comfort. Since higher forms of animals can live practically anywhere on Earth, we may have human species adaptations such catlike pelts, or a functioning appendix for digesting simple vegetation, larger lungs for living at high altitudes, and I am not the first to suggest gills for breathing underwater. However, actual species that descend from us, may not be so dramatically different, yet different enough to be considered different species.

Philosophically you have to ask what is it about us that makes us human? We are "The Naked Ape". If you haven't read the Desmond Morris book, I highly recommend it. If our descendants are neither naked nor apes, could other traits still make them human? On the other hand, maybe human means the sum of what we are exactly as we are now?

What role will religion and culture play in shaping new human species? Might not some cultures seek to turn off the brain receptors that respond to euphoric drugs, which probably means they will also lose their natural body chemistry which wards off pain and depression. Other cultures might actually do the "Brave New World" thing of creating a worker species with little aspiration in life beyond doing their job and pleasing their masters. Other cultures might remove the pleasures of sexuality. Now there's an ugly thought, and there's enough Puritan mental illness remnant in our culture that that is a possibility.

My choice for homoperfectus is that species which looks pretty much the way we do, but beauty is more common place and physical defects nonexistent. Their bodies will be naturally athletic with a powerful immune system, and they will have a more complex neural system with enhanced senses. Homoperfectus will be talented and affable, clever and compassionate. Most likely sex will be better too. Isn't that what you would choose? Most of all, Homoperfectus will inherit that human spirit which drives us to constantly reach beyond survival to meaningful existence.

As we develop the role of our lead character Felix in "Drones, Clones and Pheromones" we keep reconsidering how much he should be like us and how much is enhanced. Felix has genes implanted in his DNA from both other animals and plants to restore traits that Homosapiens lost along the way from our ancestors. Our eyesight for instance is tri-color with our retinal cones dyed to filter bands of red, green and blue colors. Our ancestors had four, with the blue being divided into two bands that extended into ultraviolet. Birds still have this 4 color eyesight. More recent ancestors lost the two blue to ultraviolet senses, then even more recently we regained a single blue with no ultraviolet sensitivity. That is where we are now. It would not be a big stretch to restore ultraviolet sight in our Homoperfectus species. This could have significant survival value, and would lend visual artists a huge new pallete of colors. We can only sense about 500 pheromones, but with the restoral of the vomeronasal organ of lesser mammals, we could again recognize 1,500. The grand prize perhaps of the Homoperfectus species will be turning off the aging process once they reach maturity. Guess what? We already know how!

Director's Statement

As the producer of Wild Strawberry Films, futuristic "The Supremacy Project"I've had tons of inquiries about our film "Drones, Clones and Pheromones", the first film of the trilogy , much of it trying to ferret out what is my motive and my objectives in producing this film. First, and foremost, it's a story I find so compelling, that I cannot think of doing anything else until this gets finished. In fact, I've set about making the movie I want to see more than any other imaginable film.

"The Supremacy Project" is the story of the demise of homosapiens civilization brought on by ourselves as we collapse into partisanship politics, extreme nationalism, and xenophobia in a sick and sickening biosphere, but with the promise that our bioscience will bring forth our descendents, our superiors, homoperfectus. "Drones, Clones, and Pheromones" is the story of the first child of the new species with extraordinary mental abilities, athleticism, and biophysical and biochemical enhancements that give him mastery and power that may save us, if he can find his own humanity and ethos.

So, in the interest of sharing my passion with you, I'm publishing here the Director's Statement page of our business plan.

DIRECTOR'S COMMENTS:

“We are fast approaching the time when we take evolution into our hands, and change forever, not only our world, but ourselves. It is inevitable that one day there will be human clones among us whether we like it or not. The sequencing of the human genome, plus the biotechnology of gene splicing, plus the cloning of human beings, equals the greatest revolution in human affairs ever. How we treat these newcomers has everything to do with how they will ultimately treat us. Homosapien history is ending, and the saga of homoperfectus is about to begin.”

“Like sending one’s child to the best school, what parent could say no to choosing their children to be smarter, more talented, more healthy or athletic , and of course more beautiful than we? Unlike other films that have dealt with cloning, we are telling the story from the point of view of the clones themselves.”


Motion pictures“ have become the most powerful and fascinating kind of story telling ever invented by mankind. Listening to someone tell us a story, draws us into their mind. Reading a novel causes their voices to be heard in our own minds. Watching TV draws us only into packaged entertainment in a box. But watching a movie on a large screen surrounded by an audience in a theater, takes us into another world where we experience another life as if it were real.”

This film tells a well-researched, excellent story with a humane point of view.”

The prospect of cloning humans“ has plunged us into new realms of ethical and moral debate of parental responsibilities, kinship, and inheritance. The big question is how it will challenge our sense personal identity. How would we see ourselves if we knew our genetic makeup was not unique, in fact identical to many other people, and that someone decided we should exist and what we shall be? “

“I can honestly say that this story is so compelling that I cannot let go until it is on the movie screens of the world. I find new and wonderful things every time I look at the world created by this story, as when one looks closer and closer at a curve in fractal geometry and discovers there is infinite detail...always more to see no matter how closely one looks at it.”

New Bobby Chase Video

If you've visited here before, you know I'm a friend, fan and supporter of Southern Methodist University senior wide receiver and prime NFL candidate Bobby Chase. I've posted a video of Bobby teaching young kids some of his patented skills shot before the April Spring Game of 2006. I've also found a terrific web page you should visit if you like lots of photos of Bobby.


When you know someone this nice, and they're talented as can be, you've got to wish them the very best, and I do!

Fundamental Conundrum of Indie Film Making

Ok, so you got a great story to tell, and it's been turned into a great script properly copyrighted with the Library of Congress and registered with the Writer's Guild of America. You got talented people ready to jump in and help you make it. You've hired an entertainment lawyer, hired a business plan writer, formed a limited liability corporation, and set in motion every device you can think of to get people interested in your project. You've carefully thought through the dream cast, devised novel production strategies, worked out a realistic budget, and spend every moment of every day in a quest to have every detail as close to ready as you can possible make it. And then you come up against the same wall, every independent film maker must confront, which is persuading investors to trust you with their money while knowing that all you created, all of your plans, and all you have done still amounts to an extremely high risk investment. Unless your film is a niche market like horror or zombies, then the only tool you have to improve your chances a making money with your film is to show international distributors that you have someone in your cast they can sell to their audiences, that is to say a bankable actor's name. If you are one of those unfortunate people without a generous rich uncle or not an heir to the Getty, Rockefeller, Hilton, or Hormel fortune, then this brings you to the fundamental conundrum of independent film producing. The investors want to see who in the cast is bankable, and the actors want to see that you have the money in place to pay them their salary.

The unlocking of this puzzle is the entry through the pearly gates of filmmakers' heaven. Although, there have been scams around film funding, most people who have bothered to get all of the above pieces in place, are not scam artists, but simply artists or business people with strong resolves to make their films. There has been interest lately to connect filmmakers with more traditional investment institutions or clubs but with few exceptions, these traditional sources of entrepreneurial funds finds the film investment out of their bounds of risk taking. When an indie is funded, more often than not, it's because the filmmakers got a name talent interested enough in the film to put their name on it. Actors' agents work on commissions, and so like to have their clients assured of getting paid as much as possible. Actors out of necessity create an isolation bubble that closes off direct contact even though it costs them not being exposed to films they might actually like to do. But it does happen, either because the filmmakers have achieved some sort of notoriety or else a personal friend common to both the filmmaker and the actor introduces them to each other.

Occasionally, a story is so compelling for it's social importance that a philanthropist will fund it. Our "Drones, Clones and Pheromones" segment of "The Supremacy Project" is an early warning of the cultural implosion being brought on by amazing research into the fundamentals of life and reproduction. Humanity is already pulling evolution out of the domain of the natural selection of random mutations, and taking it in our hands to devise what future life form will be. Nothing before has been so profound a change, and equally profound is the magnitude of both benefits and disasters. Knowledge and technology have long ago outstripped our ability to anticipate their consequences socially, legally and ethically. Our lead character is best described as homoperfectus, the new species that descends from man and inherits the Earth from homosapiens. The love he shares with a regular human, may be the first cross species romance, since the extinction of the Neanderthals. It makes me wonder whether James Hormel or George Soros or Steve Jobs or Larry Page and Sergey Brin founders of Google would see the immense human value in a film that provoked thought about these and other issues facing humankind.

Returning to casting: There are cameo roles that can be shot in one day. I'd love to have Elizabeth Taylor play an Auntie to our homoperfectus boy Felix, sharing her wisdom with him from a wheel chair while potting orchids. I'd love to have Leonard Nimoy play the Ancient One who intrudes on Felix to both give him guidance, and find out for sure what he really is. I'd love to have San Francisco's mayor Gavin Newsom, play the liberal US Senator trying to bring fairness to Congressional treatment of human clones. There are a number of other roles, for whom I would seek to cast actors such as Mark Wahlberg, Amber Tamblyn and her father Russ, Catherine-Zeta Jones or Brad Pitts. The only actor I've seen yet who comes close to playing Felix is Justin Long, seen in the "I'm a Mac" TV ads, or the movies "Accepted", "Dodgeball", and "Jeepers Creepers". This listing is a mere sample of a much longer list.

There then is the question,
"Who do we know, who knows any of them?"

You Are a US Government Lab Rat

We Americans have never been in such monstrous danger before. Q: Alarming? A:Yes. Q:I am being an alarmist? A:Not nearly enough.

War and Terrorism - Before 911, in the early days of the Bush presidency, it's now well documented that Cheney and his cronies were seeking a reason to invade Iraq. Before 911, the Bush administration failed to heed the clearly titled document provided him by the Clinton administration that Bin Laden was planning to use commercial aircraft as guided missles into American buildings. Before Bush was president the Congress ignored the same warning in the Senate report by Senator Daschle because the Republicans were too busy scurrying around looking at stains on a blue dress. After 911, the Bush presidency already had in hand a homeland security bill many hundreds of pages long, so within two weeks of the attack, Congress was ready to vote away the freedoms we Americans had come to take for granted. After 911, the Bush administration created hysteria that the next big threat to us was Iraq by mounting a campaign of outright filthy lies and squelching any dissenting voices such as the CIA agents who claimed they'd been ordered to alter their intelligence reports to fit the Bush agenda. After the invasion, we established a civil war in Iraq whether by blundering incompetence or by sinister design. Now we have thousands of Americans dead, tens of thousands of Iraqi's, and the wounded number in the hundreds of thousands. For the first time in our history, we waged war against a country that had not attacked or even threatened us. For the first time in our history we are the prime terrorists creating a wave of 2 million refugees from Iraq. It's our fault, whether we aided it, or merely accepted it. This is easily America's most shameful actions by our most shameless dynasty. Are we safer now from terrorists? Hell no! We've made it far worse for ourselves and the rest of world by creating a breeding ground of anger and hate in the Middle East. Perhaps the worst part of all this that we'll never be free of it now. That part of the world is home to strife stretching back thousands of years, and these are people who are never defeated. When they lose, they always come back for revenge. Now Bush has included the US in that perpetual state of war. Even Cheney admitted that was so.

Global warning - Yes, it's real. The only controversy is generated by factions in our government and within the corporate world who place immediate greed ahead of the long term welfare of our descendents. You'd think they didn't have families of their own with grandchildren who will have to suffer the consequences of their insane short sightedness. Every major industrialized country is taking this very seriously and putting into place mechanisms to stem the flow of tons of carbon into our atmosphere, with one notable exception, the US. This seems all the more outrageous when one considers the fact that we receive 5,000 times more energy from the sun than we currently need. The beauty of solar energy and it's derivatives such as wind power is that the Earth is no warmer after we use the energy than it would be if we didn't. Imagine if the State of California put out to bid a contract to cover every roof in the state and every sound wall along the freewayswith solar electrical panels, we'd see the price the panels plunge as companies fought for the low bid and used their ingenuity to make it work. Imagine if other states did the same. What about the oil companies? Who says the only use for oil is burning it? We're talking about a resource of immensely complex hydrocarbons that are useful for a mind boggling array of uses as material, rather than fuel. What about the coal companies? Who says we must burn it? Imagine turning all that raw carbon into carbon fibers, bucky balls and fullerenes to create an inexhaustible source of building materials.

Bio Tests on Citizens - You would lie awake at night in a cold sweat if you looked at our government experiments on its citizens in the past, and then realize that history isn't over. You can bet your shorts, they're still at it. We now know about the experiments at Tuskugee University deceiving black men infected with syphyllis that they were receiving treatment, when in fact they were not, so that the progress of the disease could be observed unchecked over a long period of time. During the cold war, our CIA gave LSD to unsuspecting people to learn how to use it to manipulate, brainwash, and derive information from their investigation targets. Some of those led directly to innocent people going mad and committing suicide. In a way, Timothy Leary saved a generation by getting young people to experiment with it, and to know it, so it could not be used against them. The FDA has been approving alterations to our food supplies in one of the most massive experiments ever made upon a population, using such techniques as bovine growth hormone in milk, genetic alterations to basic foodstuffs such as our grains, and approving a plethora of mind altering drugs to pacify everyone's emotions and turn them into drones willing to accept the ripping asunder of American traditions, and shredding the constitution. The latest leak on government messing with our minds is a synthetic pheromone known on the street as F-9, terribly addictive through its direct effect upon our most intimate emotions of sexuality.

So go to bed tonight and try not to have nightmares, since as our fat headed political commentators like to say, you're living in the best country on Earth. Remember the Beatle's song, "...and I will sing a lullaby, Boy!, you're going to carry that weight a long time."

The Power of the Kiss

Touch is our most primal sense, a part of our body contacts something else, often someone else, and we experience texture, temperature, moisture and pressure resulting in feelings of pleasure or pain and many other feelings in between. Practically every living thing shares the sense of touch to some form or degree. Although the sense of touch permeates the body, most of our awareness of it is in our skin. What part of our skin is doing the touching, and what it touches creates a huge range of emotional responses. Keeping in mind these physiological axioms, kissing deserves special contemplation, especially if we stipulate setting aside the simple tokens of respect or affection, and confine our considerations to the intimate kiss of one person's lips with another's.

Our sense of sight, hearing, smell, and balance center our awareness of our mind's inside our heads. Our lips are the one part of our head that can reach out in order to touch, and so join with these other senses. When our lips touch the lips of another person, a sensory mirror occurs in which both people experience the other's awareness. We also are deep inside the other person's comfort zone, where we can see, hear and smell every little detail about them and inhale their pheromones in their full intensity, and they in turn every little detail about us. If both people surrender to the experience, their two minds flow into each other and it becomes a single experience shared by both. This is the essential experience of a romantic kiss.

When a woman and a man kiss, the dynamic of it is the union of opposites. Whatever one lacks, the other brings.

When both are the same gender, the dynamic of it is the joining of forces. What each has is added to the same in the other.




Men who prefer women usually have difficulty surrendering to the experience of kissing another man, and strongly react negatively to merely seeing other men kissing each other. On the other hand, women who prefer men, can more easily surrender to the experience of kissing another woman, and can react positively to seeing men kissing each other.

Why is this so? It's too simplistic to toss judgements around like it's a male pride thing, or women are naturally more sensual, or it's natural or unnatural, or blessed or if you're totally brain dead stupid condemned by some god.

On this night of the Oscars, when a fully out lesbian is welcomed and appreciated as the awards host, when a woman composer can accept her Oscar acknowledging the love and support of her wife, I must ask how much longer the strangling yoke of Puritanism will stonewall our enjoying being what we are? If Hollywood people are politically influential it's because we put ourselves into the shoes of others, and see what it would be like to be them. The acceptance of all people as valid humanity must be permitted to grow in our cultural soil. As a movie maker, I am committed to ending the obligatory treatment of gay characters as always tragic, terrible or trivial. Let's get over it, grow up, and get on with making meaningful lives for ourselves.