Scenes From Fatherhood

He got an unfair huge slice of the talent pie, but you couldn’t hate him because he’s such a great guy.

Cory Cullinan is a multi-faceted artist who extends his reach through teaching, composing, and speaking on the issues that move him most. He uses his voice to spread awareness as a teacher, author and speaker.

We analysed more than 80,000 Kickstarter projects and found surprising success factors for raising capital. We observed one artist-entrepreneur’s campaign to reveal the secrets behind the statistics. To reveal the secret life of crowdfunding, we also report on a three year, in-depth study of one entrepreneur’s journey to create and produce an opera for children. Cory Cullinan, aka “Doctor Noize,” used Kickstarter to raise $50,000 for Phineas McBoof Crashes the Symphony. Crowdfunding works when the project and syndicate identities align; when the backers say (to quote Doctor Noize): “We’re with the band.” Ultimately, successful reward-based crowdfunding of novel creative projects requires authenticity, inspiring a syndicate, and constantly re-creating the campaign in real time.

He traces the roots of the current moment back to Silicon Valley. He grew up there. He knew Steve Jobs through his brother. The father of one of his friends founded Adobe. He went to Stanford with future tech leaders.“They were trying to make the world a better place,” he said. “But what has happened?”The result, he argues, is a culture drowning in digital connectivity but starved of real connection. “We’re less social, more tribal,” he said. “We’ve saddled the nexat generation with devices that unintentionally make us all worse. And we must solve this.

We’re very happy to have some time today with acclaimed chart-busting musician, commissioned composer, author, award-winning teacher, speaker, studio owner and — WHEW! — humorist extraordinaire Cory Cullinan; greetings and salutations Cory and welcome to Vents Magazine!

It means a lot to me that I get to connect someone who has played a meaningful role in my life to young musicians, faculty and audiences out here. So they can hear from someone who’s really made a dent in their musical world. He really is a legend.

In our modern internet-attention-span culture, we need the arts more than ever to buildour kids’ minds, souls and confidence to prepare them for creative solutions with positive energy.As this Thesis Portfolio will show, the Recording Arts can help build those traits — often inremarkably fast and intensely memorable experiences — in elementary age children, yet arehardly utilized at that age group at all.

We sponsored workshops and training seminars to better engage the increasing minority population at our school. Under Cory’s guidance being involved in student government was perceived as the “cool” thing to do. School Spirit became the norm at Los Altos High School.

I have been in the education business as a teacher and administrator for over 35 years. Twenty plus years ago I had the incredible, memorable experience of working at Los Altos High School in Los Altos, California with a unique, talented group of students as the Assistant Principal of Student Activities. One of my assigned roles in that position was meeting daily with the elected student government officers to facilitate the planning of their various activities and to provide them with the opportunity to learn and exercise various leadership skills. Cory Cullinanwas the Student Body President at that time. At the age of seventeen he was poised, clear thinking, intelligent, and gregarious with a keen sense of insight and humor. Our meetings were fun (sometimes almost hysterical) yet we accomplished a great deal under Cory’s leadership.We established a pattern of week long Homecoming Activities the current student government uses as a template to this day.

When times are hard, I look for the happy stories. I hope this story makes you happy too.