Old Friends...

Are the best kind. Had an amazing few days with Dave and Justin, my old friends, catching up listening to each others' mixes and putting the year in perspective. Dave had a rough 2001 which he's only just begun to emerge from in the last month or so. Justin, like myself, moved to a more and is envisioning setting down roots in Chicago. Me, I've bought a place to live, am contemplating life after Central Booking and chasing a dream of the perfect career that doesn't feel like one. Dave said once this weekend if you're chasing a dream, you'll never work a day in your life. The analogy I came up with is that dreaming is, in large part, about having faith, about climbing a ladder with the city stretched out below you and jumping, knowing you'll catch a gust of wind and fly. And even if you don't, your old friends will be there to catch you when you come down.

The Broadband Promised Land:

We interupt a hearty session of watching movie trailers and downloading songs to say...I'm now DSL'd! After dealing with the yaboos at Earthlink, switching to Windows XP and moving, I was on phone lines for many moons. Thanks to the good people at Sonic.net, I've joined the broadband age.

Now we roar.

Did ya miss me?

Hey I know I haven't been around much lately. Mix Weekend just concluded this afternoon and thus we return to the real world of deadlines and responsibilities. I'll wrap it all up tomorrow...

Click Clack, Yeah!

Mad props across the water to Click Clack Moo!, the best children's book I've read in a long time. Get this for a premise: A group of cows procures a typewriter and starts sending the farmer requests for improved barn conditions. Like electric blankets. It's downright hysterical and the pictures are great, like a slightly demented Amelia Bedelia.

And they're off...

My buddy Justin arrives tonight. Mix Weekend has begun!

CC: it@awesome.org

I'm really excited that Creative Commons is finally up and running. CC is the brainchild of 3 web visionaries, (including a hero of mine, Lawrence Lessig) who asked "instead of everything created becoming instantly copyright protected, what if there was an open marketplace where creators could determine how or how little the rest of us could use their creations? What is their was a web application that sorted and catagorized these creations for you?

Behold Creative Commons!

Behold Kevin with nothing to give to Creative Commons!

Ah, who cares? Behold it again!

Smart Guy:

Jon and I are interviewing Rick Moody in less than 2 hours. I'm currently listening to his interview on "Fresh Air" and quite honestly, I'm terrified. Moody sounds rediculously smart, literary to the extreme and takes being a writer very very seriously. He may have the same voice as Michael Chabon but has quite a different agenda than Chabon's pop-culture loving, storytelling-over-literary pedigree vibe.

This is pretty much an about face from oh, EVERY other author I've interviewed thus far, mostly laid back, chit chatty volk of the pen. I don't have Hawthorne passages to quote, I don't know how I'll avoid annoying comparisions to Updike and Cheever. He'll probably just think I'm some dumb kid with a dumb web site who's wasting his time. I'll just be thrilled when this afternoon is over.

Update: The interview went fine. Rick Moody is very pleasant. And Jon did a great job. Hooray.

Thank you, I won't...

On the way home, the guy sitting across the train from me had a black baseball cap on emblazoned with the words "Fuck Everybody." We both got out at the same stop and I went 2 blocks out of my way to avoid making eye contact.

Lamoid Here...

So Suzan and I had a fabulous Saturday in Oakland, hanging with our friend Laura, whom we haven't seen in the months since she moved out of the neighborhood, visiting the Oakland Rose Garden (which is stunning even for the non-floral) and seeing Monsoon Wedding, which is even more stunning and then, in a truly awful display of cheesiness, eating Indian food for dinner. It was after 11 by the time we got to bed and I thought I could still get up at 6 to run Bay to Breakers, do the race and get home in time to finish Rick Moody's new book, The Black Veil before I interview him tomorrow.

Ha! The book is barely done, I feel sleep deprived all over so I called buddy Jish whom I was supposed to meet at the starting line with other buddy Kristin and aprised him of the situation. He was understanding.

I must have needed it because I slept until 9 and have been motoring away on Moody since. It's going to be a long, wet day of reading.

Mixing into now...

Every spring since 1994, two of my closest friends from college and I get together. We each bring a tape/CD of music that meant something to us that year, organized in a way that tells our story. We go somewhere beautiful, play each others music and talk. Talk bout where we are and where we've found ourselves a year later.

Dave and Justin are arriving in San Francisco next week for "Mix Weekend." I have all the songs lined up for my presentation but haven't organized them yet. Usually I wait for a sign, something to tell me when the moment is right.

It just told me. I'm going to do my mix now.

*mmmmmwah*

So my KiPY ratio is .875, 14 lasses kissed in 16 years of dating eligibility. About average, right? Please say yes (via Booboolina).

Ya know, together together.

There's a hilarious article at AlterNet that offers up the legal definition of "dating" but gets us no closer to telling the difference between "dating", "seeing each other", "involved", or "in a relationship." I have my own ideas. Do you?

A New Class:

I was intrigued by an article found on Metafilter that spectulated that America's cities owe much of their good and bad fortune to a new societal segment known as the Creative Class, educated upper-middle class young folks whom the post-dot com economy is eager to recruit. The author Richard Florida (who has a book out on the subject) posits that cities like Austin, Chicago and my very own San Francisco are thriving thanks to policies focused on social diversity, high quality of life and respect for the frenetic nature of urban space while cities like Memphis, Las Vegas, and Miami are slipping thanks to their reliance on office parks, strip malls and miles of freeways.

It's a lovely theory and one I get behind with all my spirit. And yet I hope Mr. Florida addresses the difficulties of running a thriving, diverse city, much less living in one. I'd rank affordable housing at the top which is mentioned exactly nowhere in this piece.

The book's called The Rise of the Creative Class: and How Its Transforming Work and I'm going to see if I can get ahold of it. I'm in to pop social phenomenon stuff like this, particularly when I dig the conclusion. Meantime, where do you live and how does it rank on the Creative Class scale?

Get in the Doorway!

So last night I'm on the phone with my friend Dinah and suddenly I find myself thinking "Why is my desk lamp walking?." "Why does it feel like this whole building is on a cheap pair of rollerskates?"

My first earthquake. Now, I ain't from this part of the world. Back home we got tornados, blizzards, and Kid Rock. But the earth moving means the world is coming to an end. So naturally it scared the piss out of me.

Anyway, Dinah's quick fingers soon discovered the quake's epicenter was somewhere near Gilroy and was about a 5.2 on the Richter Scale. Many earthquake web sites were jammed up so where did we go to find out the latest? Metafilter of course whose new motto should be "The world blogged in real time."

Come again?

I couldn't agree more. The web is one shiny dangling thing that we bat incessantly like hyperactive kittens. I can't get within six feet of the thing, without sending emails, IMing, playing bouncy ball games like an imbecile, usually all at once. I have a feeling that if I could type with my toes, I would.

I have a problem. I'd like to not go through life contantly distracted by this thing. I'd like to a present participant in my own life. So I'm trying, a little at a time, not to do eight things at once. First step: When I'm on the phone, I do nothing but talk on the phone.

Poof...

Somehow I managed to miss the KFOG Kaboom for the second year in a row. This enormous fireworks show is done, free of charge, by San Francisco's favorite radio station. KFOG (104.5 FM in the SF bay area) somehow has the clout to get the whole city out for its celebration and yet remains admirably independent of ownership from the radio cabaletry of Clear Channel and Infiniti Broadcasting. Bravo.

And what was I doing? Eating Thai takeout and watching Dr. Zhivago. Oy.

Another Project Idea:

Okay, who is collecting all of these stories that have been written about blogging lately? Are we not at a crucial time in the history of the medium friends? Should we not be preserving this attention, these documents, for future generations?

I say YES! So I'm keeping a bookmark list of every story I see about the weblogging phenom. If you spot any, please leave them in the comments section of this post. I'm sure one day someone will have a more sophisticated method of cataloging, someone more tech savvy than I. Until then, I'm going to do my little part.

Hope you'll help out.

Move Me:

Julie has done a beautiful voice blog about moving and its emotional discontents. I'm going to tell her how much I relate.

Pop Goes My World:

So this here blog is #33 on Daypop's Top 40 Links for today. Anybody know what that means? Or how it happened?

I Listen, You Listen...

Thanks to the sharp eyes of my friend James and the creative crackle of Sooz in Boston, I'm having a Jim Dandy of a Time contributing to Listen Up!, a collaborative weblog about music. Think of it as Kazaa with a human face and no ads.

Purty Neat.

What's a Trollope?

An article in the Guardian UK laments the sinking intelligence of bookstore employees. While I happen to agree and have my own stories ("No, E. Annie Proulx's last name is not pronounced "Pro-Locks"), pieces of this sort usually wear their snottiness on their sleeve, as if to say "Look at all these morons who don't know as much as I do."

Judge for yourself.

Biblio-Luv:

Central Booking was just chosen as a featured site in the Librarians Index to the Internet. Can I tell you how much I LOVE Librarians?

This may become a project...

Or it may not. We're doing something over in the Central Booking forums where you post a link to your Amazon wish list, pick an item and explain why it's there. And maybe a nice person out there in Web-a-ville will get it for you. So I thought I'd give it a try over here too for those of you less forum-inclined.

My Amazon Wish List

Second item down is Let it Blurt, a biography of rock critic Lester Bangs whom I became interested in after seeing Almost Famous.

Now you go...

Fresh Fiction:

If you're in to quality contemporary fiction as I am, look no further than books published by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. I was lucky to hear three of their authors read tonight and converse briefly with their editor, Sean MacDonald whom I'm honored to have as a supporter of my own project. While no publisher is perfect, my experience tells me that pretty much any book bearing their half-tree logo will be a strongly written, well-told tale and entirely worth your time.

In Solidarity:

I was fortunate enough to attend a Pro-Israel Rally at San Francisco State University yesterday. While this deserves a much longer post and I can say right now that behavior on both sides of this issue has been disgusting, I'm livid that my so called "progessive" brothers and sisters have engaged in the kind of naked anti-semitism I reserved for miltia-brand lunatics and Jerry Falwell. If your simple-minded Palestinian=Brown=Good, Israeli=White=Bad is what passes for your sense of liberalism, I recommend you get informed in the way you claim so many of us are not.

Tell me when ya get here:

Does anyone else find Pollstar a disorganized mess? I know it's useful when you want to know if a specific artist is coming to your town but that's nothing you can't do through the artists own mailing list. Say you want to know who will be playing in your town in the month of May? A jumble red links like a blood splatter across your monitor. Too small, badly organized, lots of information, little use.

There's got to be a few web geeks out there who could create a service a la Moreover that harvests concert information from the web sites of bands, labels, and concert venues that could then be transmited via email. A music lover could select a list of artists, where they live and the service could update them accordingly.

New Home:

So I moved everything over here, to this shiny new blog lovingly designed by Ms. Mena Trott. It's going to take me a while to get everything up and running but moving and displacement seems to be the way of things for me this spring. For now, I got comments and everything. Why not leave one and tell me what ya think?

Roast of Long Ago:

There's a video floating around of the SXSW 2001 Internet Roast produced and conceived by my friend Heather Gold. I'm the last storyteller, about six minutes in.

Uncool and Proud:

It was only a matter of time before the music I grew up with came back into vogue: loud, silly pop you can't get out of your head, sung by ugly white boys from Michigan. May I present, dear readers, Andrew W K.

Bad Dreams:

Apparently, Dreamhost has shut down all of the web properites of Mr. John Halcyon Styn, a fine chap and a friend. Mr. Styn, the Webby Award-winning creator of Cockybastard.com, Prehensile.com and several others (none of which I can link to of course because they've been shut down) has had his service yanked because someone reported him to SpamCop, a service fine in theory but, as this case amply demonstrates, lousy in execution. It's now easier than ever to accuse someone of spamming and have their kill-a-mosquito-with-a-bazooka hosting service turn them off.

Since most of us can't afford to or don't know how to run servers on our own, we are utterly dependent on these folk to keep our projects in public view. If this is the knee-jerk way they dishonor that contract, then I propose we take our business elsewhere.

And in the meantime, I suggest we email Dreamhost and vouch for Mr. Styn's character. I have been on his mailing list for over a year now and have never once received anything I didn't ask for.

Update: All things Styn are back up online. Glad we didn't have to start throwing eggs.

Here, take it!

My college buddy Eli pointed me to this hilarious letter that Groucho Marx wrote to Jack & Harry Warner when they threatened to sue him over a film titled A Night in Casablanca. Apparently, the Warner Brothers thought audiences might confuse it with that other film which had the word "Casablanca" in the title.