BY Robert Mascatello

Like many people, I have been creating things along the way in my life's journey. As a youngster, I remember experimenting with the Wurlitzer piano that was in our front room in the house in Brooklyn. And I can still hear the sound of a toy (but functional) electric keyboard that I played downstairs in the basement. I can recall some school art projects like painting water colors of  Viking ships and building a mosaic plate to take home to my mother. I was not a huge fan of English Literature, but I do remember enjoying creative writing. And I enjoyed learning and reading about science - all of these things contributing to the imagination that would grow with each passing year.

My older brothers and my mother played guitar, so I was fortunate to have this influence in my life. I began playing guitar at age 13, and purchased my first guitar - a Gibson SG, with money I earned working summers with the New York City Park Department. I got pretty good with the guitar, and played with a band in high school. In college, I played all the time, and started writing songs. And with the songs came lyrics.  I guess you can say music was the first leg of WAMS that I started taking seriously.

I majored in Biology at Boston University and was fortunate to have taken a class taught by Dr. Lynn Margulis, the pioneer in Evolutionary Biology and Symbiosis - that went on to marry the cosmologist Carl Sagan. Eventually I earned a Bachelor's Degree from SUNY Binghamton in Biology and Computer Modeling. My undergraduate thesis involved building a functional simulation of protein synthesis (more on this later).

As an adult I began to look for connections between the different components of WAMS. I wrote songs with science fiction lyrics, such as "Rainbows and Cloud" and "Valdroma (more on these later). And I wrote science fiction short stories in the 1980's - one called "Brain Farm" which featured MARCs -  where the Mobile Armed Robotic Command utilized cybernetic brains that were grown by the government. And in the 1990's I penned "Secrets of a Wormhole Civilization".

I started painting in college, and yes there were science fiction themes and abstract expressionism - although at the time I had not really studied Art History - and certainly did not know about Kandinsky. As an adult I actually started using an easel and began to think about color and composition, and eventually developed an original style of abstract painting - which I refer to as "Splashy Patterns" or splatterns (more on this later).

Eventually, I became more cognizant of the interconnection of Writing, Art, Music and Science. One particular project, called "Why?" comes to mind. "Why?" began as a poem, that became lyrics to a song, that was delivered by a 22nd century poet in "Secrets of a Wormhole Civilization".

That is all I have for this first blog entry - and I will close with a quote that recently came to mind:

"The pen is mightier that the sword, but the brush can be mightier than the pen.."