ULAN BATOR...

In Going Bovine, by Libba Bray, the protagonist, a high-school kid diagnosed with fatal Mad Cow Disease (hence the title), escapes from the hospital on a quest to find—within two weeks—the one doctor who can cure him (he has to save the world at the same time). The kid fails—turns out there is no cure and never was one—and he dies. His complaint to the angel who sent him on the quest: “But I wanted to live!” And the angel tells him, look, you traveled all over the place; you made a new best friend; you changed a bunch of people’s lives and may even have saved one; you stole from a drug dealer; you were hunted by the police; you played bass with one of the best jazz musicians on the planet; you saved the world; and you lost your virginity to the chick you had the hots for in school—haven’t you lived?

I want to go to Ulan Bator. (Not “I think I want to go”; one piece of advice I got years ago from Stan Sheldon when he was Mayor of Garibaldi and I the city administrator was, “Never say ‘I think.’ You’re the expert. You don’t ‘think.’ You know.” Why Ulan Bator? It’s remote, I’ve never been there, and it’s somewhere I have no preconceived notions about. I’ve never really been outside this country (Tijuana and the Virgin Islands don’t exactly count)—and like the video (the new one) says, if you’re going to do it, you might as well go all the way.

Thing is, I want to go there as a musician, and be playing a concert. There is some work involved in that: I know no one in Mongolia, and have no fans there that I know of. I’d have a better shot in Latvia, where according to Google there are 29 people reading the blog (though I have no idea who they are or why they’re doing it). I have a little experience breaking into new markets—all small, of course, and the people did mostly speak English—and they were markets where people didn’t previously listen to country music. I wonder if that’d be enough to start with? I’ll have to try. (And I can try to develop a fan base in Latvia while I’m at it.)

The “Twenty-Four Seven” video is done and uploaded. (I probably should say a DRAFT is done and uploaded; and it is in fact the third draft.) The new video software—something called “Prism”—has some limitations, but it works enough like Windows Movie Maker and its Macintosh equivalent so the learning curve wasn’t too bad. In the same vein, Photoshop Limited Edition does pretty much the same stuff that Photo Deluxe used to do.

Link is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBxyb7NoUW0 The photos themselves were all taken in Tillamook County, between Tillamook and Mohler (where The Cow Nobody Wanted is, in front of the Grange); the two communities are about 25 miles apart. I don’t know if I could have done better or not. The experimental part—besides using all that different software—was combining video (of the Rap) with “French style” slide show (of the song). And next? We could intersperse video with still photography. Or we could do one that was all video, but interspersed clips. (That latter might be easier—and I think it’s how the pros do it.)

The video of “Blue Krishna,” when it’s finished, will be all interspersed video clips, but it’ll be fan-generated—the result of the old digital camera being forwarded around to different people. I want to do one myself, too. I’d like to film me playing the “base” track on the guitar, then extract the audio track, add lead and maybe other instruments and film little clips of them, and put that together. I wonder which song would be good for that?

Lazarus’ new keyboard has arrived. Work to do…

Joe