All I Really Need To Know I Learned From Robert Fripp

A couple of days ago, I happened upon a marvelous little site that I cannot believe I did not discover earlier: The Discipline Mobile Globile Official Website a.k.a. http://www.dgmlive.com/.

As a good chunk of my more frequent readers know, I am an unabashed King Crimson/Robert Fripp nut. Fell in love with the "band" (More like various project groups put together by Fripp...my most favorite of those groups being the 1980-84 lineup featuring Fripp, Adrian Belew, Tony Levin, and Bill Bruford. All being favorite individual musicians of mine.) around 1998, when I bought In The Court of the Crimson King during one of my infamous (in my family, anyway) CD shopping sprees. My fandom has only grown more ever since, to the point where if I *had* to name one, just one favorite band/artist, I'd more than likely say King Crimson (or, if I wanted to get real technical (and on the asker's nerves), Robert Fripp).

Anyway, DGM's site is the official one for King Crimson/Robert Fripp. I had known about the site previously, but only about their being the home of the notorious King Crimson Collector's Club. I say 'notorious' 'cause as much as I love KC, the KCCC wanted you to pay a gawdawful fee of some kind to be able to have access to whenever they decided to release a concert from the vaults and onto CD. And in all honesty, I probably would have paid the fee if my KC fandom wasn't so era-oriented...specifically the aforementioned 1980-84, 1973-75 (Larks' Tongues In Aspic and Red), and 2002-04 (Happy With What You Have To Be Happy With and The Power To Believe). Not that the other KC eras are chopped liver, but I find myself listening to those three periods of the band's career more-so than any other. Hopefully, that will change whenever I get my hands on the other early 70's albums, the ProjeKCts, and The ConstruKCtion of Light. Maybe Thrak too...though, I think the only release I want from the 90's era is the Deja-VROOOOM concert DVD.

Among my discoveries on the DGM site was that my decision to not fall for the KCCC membership has paid off handsomely. All of the KCCC releases are individually available through the site's store...whoo-hoo!! Which means that I get to choose the concerts I want to hear from my favorite eras...another whoo-hoo!! And not just from the KCCC releases, but also the MP3s/FLAC files too.

Other discoveries I've made include:

- The DGM site has LiveJournal feeds...for Robert Fripp's diary, new MP3/FLAC releases, "Hot Tickles", and general news.

- The said store can get mighty addictive. Not just for Crimson/Fripp nuts like moi, but also progressive/experimental rock fans in general.

- On certain pages, one will notice a quotable or "aphorism"...more than likely said or penned by Robert Fripp, given that DGM is practically his outfit. If you click on the "Discipline Knot" graphic to the left of the quote, you can run through the whole lot of them. Well, at the risk of *really* proving what a geek I tend to be, I liked the quotes so much that I spent a couple of hours going through and compiling them in a Word file on my PC. And then, I printed up a couple of copies...one to have at my computer, and another to keep in the nightstand by the bed, so whenever I feel stressed out and/or just mad about something, I can take the booklet closest to me and read/scan through it to cool down.

A good chunk of the quotes are aimed towards musician/performer types, but just like the following quote by Paul Coffey applies to hockey...

"Hockey's a funny game. You have to prove yourself every shift, every game. It's not up to anybody else. You have to take pride in yourself."

...most of those quotes, including Coffey's, can apply to life in general too when you think about it.

A few of my favorite collected Frippisms...

"Accept nothing less than what is right."

"It is not asked of us that we never fall over. It is asked of us that we always get up."

"May we wish for others what we wish for ourselves."

"Nothing worthwhile is achieved suddenly."

"The more failures, the more successes."

"The problem with knowing what we want is we just might get it."

"There are no mistakes, save one: the failure to learn from a mistake."

Oh, almost forgot to mention that you can get a free account set up at the DGM site...which allows you to search Fripp and "The Vicar"'s diaries and have access to reviewing the various works featured and available throughout the site. Should there be a way for members to communicate in a real forum/message board (the current "Forum" is really a guestbook) and search for one another, my name there is "Absent_Lover", taken from my absolute more favorite KC concert album thus far.

Current Music: "Discipline" by King Crimson (Live - Absent Lovers: Live In Montreal 1984 Version)