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.