This site, like everything else, is perpetually UNDER CONSTRUCTION.

I spent my earliest years in a tiny town in Vermont. You strolled on Main Street and for better or for worse, you knew everyone in town.

For most of us today, Main Street is a distant mirage, existing only in those 1930s Andy Hardy movies. We now live encapsulated lives with two or three friends, two or three people that we work with, and family scattered all over the country.
The Internet offers us a virtual Main Street. We get a chance here to once again stroll as our forebears did. We can hang out a shingle: "Here I am. Here's what I do. Anyone want to shoot the breeze?" If so, open MSN Messenger. My handle is heilbrun@sbcglobal.net. If I happen to be on line, we can type notes to each other. If you have a mike and speakers, we can talk. If you have a webcam, we can see a couple of jerks.

Now, three years after having written the above musings, I have moved from Megalopolis to Grass Valley, a small town in the foothills of the Sierras of northern California. And not only is there a "Main Street," but a wonderful survival of the sort of convivial community whose passing I was just lamenting. Andy Hardy Redux"

Have a look.

Grass Valley.

Since this page is a virtual place, you are surely aware that the words and images you are seeing are merely a confabulation of ONs and OFFs and are ephemeral; they have no lasting substance. Though it is less obvious, this is also true of the reality that we conventionally think of as non-virtual, as concrete. Despite appearances, like a florescent light our electrons are only "on" fifty percent of the time. The rapid appearance of successive frames give the illusion of continuity. Furthermore, the atoms which comprise us are largely empty space.

That which we think of as real, objects in space, are in fact largely insubstantial, while that which we think of as ephemeral, events in time, are real. They exist in the eternal present.

 To phrase this a bit differently, reality is best thought of as process, not things. Seen in this way, it reveals that a great deal of human folly and frustration results from a fundamental misconception, the valuing of stuff rather than process.

Basically, I'm more of a conceptual than visual sort of guy, so below I'll be posting things to read that I am interested in at the moment rather than dazzling HTML pyrotechnics.

During the 1970s I was in a band in London that played for the Zivko Firfov Macedonian Folk Dance Group. Ultimately, I felt that I needed to go to Macedonia to actually learn how to play this stuff. My pal Linsey and I bought a VW camper and after a series of misadventures ended up in the Village of Dracevo. We rented a wood shed behind the house of Lazo Nikolovski, a fine,  crusty old gajda player, and lived there for a number of months practising with him daily and hanging out with the local Macedonian, Roma (Gypsy), and Shiptar (Albanian) musicians.

A generation and several different worlds later I have stumbled on Linsey's web page.

I've re-issued a CD of the monumentally successful LP we released in 1971. Get in touch with me for a copy: adam@heilbrun.net - $15.