UPDATES...

FIVE DAYS till the Rocktoberfest, and there’s lots to do. The Rap is written (though not practiced), and notices sent out; won’t get to practice until at least Thursday night—just two days before the gig (and it might even be Friday instead). Before then, I must play, play, play. Need strong fingers.

Answered a couple of ads on Craigslist (I still check Craigslist), one from a self-described songwriter in Tillamook (I’d like to meet him), and one from a film student in Portland interested in making a music video (I gave him some suggestions—and told him yes, of course he could practice on my stuff). I don’t know if I’ll hear back from either one—people who advertise on Craigslist don’t seem to respond very well.

Music at the “Rapture Room” was nice. About four out-of-towners there, I think, and I hope it impressed ‘em when the whole room sang along with “Pole Dancing for Jesus” and “Armadillo on the Interstate.” I think that’s how writers used to get started, back in the days when you didn’t have to be related to somebody famous to get noticed by The Industry. People liked your songs—ideally, bigger and bigger groups of people. Other people performed the songs (I understand that’s happened a couple of times with “Armadillo”). Eventually, a local DJ got the song on the radio, because they were sure people would listen to their show if they did that. (That’s happened to me at least once. And I hope the DJ was right.)

All that stuff still happens—it just never gets past the “local DJ” point, in part because everything past that point is controlled by the club that doesn’t want any new members. (One Nashville insider told me my attitude was “curmudgeonly.” However, he also didn’t dispute what I was saying.) There is still the Internet—though the Internet, because it is anarchic, is primarily useful as a promotional medium, not a money-making one. Making money off music, as Madonna once said, is a matter of “butts in seats.” And I still don’t have a lot of those.

Transferred Sedona’s pieces of the “Blue Krishna” video to the laptop (yes, it worked), and passed the camera to Kathryn to work with. At this point, the laptop won’t run Windows Movie Maker, though—it says it doesn’t have a sound card (I think it does, and with the new/old operating system, it just doesn’t know it). The laptop also won’t do Internet—though I don’t really care about that, and have a wireless card I can plug in if I want to fix that. “Lazarus” (what else would one call a computer that was brought back from the dead?) does have 1.8 gigabytes of RAM, which is nice, and can burn both CDs and DVDs; it would be good for video work, if I can get the sound working. At this point, if I have to transfer the film footage to “Alice” to work with, I can—but “Alice” still has only 2 gigabytes of free space on her hard drive, even with all my archiving.

Photographs are what fills up the hard drive, because of my insistence on having the highest resolution possible—and “Alice” just got loaded with 65 photographs for the “Twenty-Four Seven” video. And I’m nowhere near done. A lot of those were duplicates, as I tried to find the best camera angles, and I won’t use all of the photos I shot, anyway. (I’ll delete the unused ones later, though I hate to.) Among the hardest shots to find: the horses (or rather signs advertising horses), the “moment of truth” (I wanted to use church readerboards, but I’d like to find entertaining ones), and the “24/7” (there’s only one restaurant in Tillamook that’s open all night, and they apparently don’t advertise it).

It’s possible “Justin” the new computer’s no-workee problem may be just a failed on/off switch (“It is a Dell, after all,” I was told). It still may cost a couple of hundred dollars to find out. Elsewhere, I have the Linda Adams interview to do—I think I’ll discuss the inspirational aspects of roadkill.

And I got Scott Garriott’s album in the mail. Yay!

Joe