Before and After shots

My sister forwards me quite a few emails. Some of which I actually read. This morning I fired up the email to see that she had forwarded to me one of those celebrity bashing type emails, that show pictures that were designed to be publicity shots, and right next to those, you had pictures that look like they were extracted from the front page of the National Enquirer. Bad..... really bad photo's that help us mere mortals feel a little better about the view in our bathroom mirrors.

There are many factors. Make up is surely one of them, but what about photo shop. Lighting is also huge. Many of the "Good" photo's were taken when the stars were a little closer to their prime, and the "Bad" ones taken after a serious decline in stardom, and probably a serious decline in personal care as well.

This is the very reason we have to be so careful about how we process EVERYTHING WE SEE AND HEAR IN THE MEDIA! It is all POSSIBLY not the truth. With pictures it's photoshop, with music there is auto tune, with politics and moral reasoning there are hidden agenda's. All that you see and hear and feel in the media can be manipulated to make you feel a certain way.

Recently, my heart has been steered toward the attractive realness of the live recording. The feeling that I get while listening is just a residual from the actual performance, but at least I know it was %100  real. Warts and all. Good or bad, you know you are hearing the real thing with no studio trickery. I've also removed auto tune from my arsenal of studio offerings. When people ask me to tune something up, I usually just give them a blank stare like I am not exactly sure what they are talking about. If someone decides not to use my humble little studio because I don't have auto tune...... so be it.

Billboards, magazines, music, tv, newspapers, internet, commercials....... EVERYTHING that we use to get information into our brains, has been designed, possibly artificially, by someone else to  put you in a certain frame of mind. Sometimes it may seem harmless enough, but on a larger scale it's part of the cancer that is eating us up. Devouring our ability to make solid decisions about who we are and what we think. It gets harder and harder to know the truth about anything. 

For older people it may not seem like such a bad deal, we have a completely different frame of reference than a newborn baby has today. We lived in a world before cable television, internet and microwave ovens. We at least have some grounding in reality. For someone just old enough to grasp reality, we are trying our best to confuse them with fantasy video games, unrealistic lifestyles and beauty, fabricated music, etc. It is all artificial sweetener, like nutri-sweet...... which I hate.

I would love to see us all take time in our lives to experience the real thing more often. Go see a play or a musical. Go hear some live music or stand up comedy. But people are just too busy and tired from all the artificial living.

You know how you felt the last time you saw an amazing movie? When was the last time you experienced that at a live show?

christopher alan yates

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