"Coldsure" Shock

As I pulled on a pair of fleece socks over my SmartWool socks this morning, I found myself marveling at the fact that only a week ago I was happily pulling a new Hawaiian sundress over my head.  I think it's time to admit I've been in somewhat of a culture/weather shock since coming home, and it's only been softened by the fact that I don't really have to get up and go out anywhere in the mornings, or even all day if I don't want to.  I've been sleeping in till 11:30 or 12 since Wednesday.  (Which is 6:30 or 7 in Hawaii, about when I was waking up there).  Having the radio show and my birthday celebrations and friends inviting me out for coffee has been good at getting me out of the house at all.  

People may be mislead by the fact that I'm happily spamming Facebook pictures with comments into thinking that I'm all fine and dandy, but I'd also be just as happy to curl up in bed with the Stephanie Meyer books I just picked up from the library and not come out till spring.  Except that they wouldn't last me that long and they're due back at the beginning of February anyway.  I haven't started them yet because I know there's a pile of stuff I should be doing and I know that once I start it'll be exceedingly hard for me to put them down.  

When I read, I read hard, fast and intensely.  My friends and family would always try to shake me out of my book comas as a kid.  Quite brave of them to face my snarls at being ripped out of my fantasy worlds.  They could bounce all over the couch I was lying on and I'd totally ignore them, but trying to get me to actually stop was a bad idea.

I'm not that bad anymore, but I've still been known to stay up so late near the end of a story that my eyes water and the book is practically falling out of my hand just to find out how it finishes.  Only problem with that is I tend to forget what actually happened the next morning and end up having to re-read the last 50 pages or so to find out.

Went to see Catie Curtis last night at CSPS.  They are still struggling after the June floods, it was cold enough that everyone pretty much had to wear their coats and hats inside, and one of their toilets doesn't quite work properly yet, but it was a testament to survival that the show went on.  Meg Hutchinson opened for her, really amazing.  I'd found her several months ago on MySpace and kind of forgotten about it, so it was awesome to see her face on the posters and even more awesome to hear her music.  Praise be to YouTube, I was able to find the song she opened with that doesn't seem to be on any of her records yet (tiny ad at the beginning): 

Travel In by Meg Hutchinson.

This is not the best quality video of the song, but the song Fools off Catie's new album was the one of hers that gave me chills:

Well worth the drive up to Cedar Rapids and the cold in the room.  Thank goodness I was wearing warm socks! :)

The Internet is Not Your Enemy!

(Huge post I just went off on in my MySpace blog. So much has been stewing around in my head lately that I feel like I might need another blog that just deals with the music biz/social networking aspect of things, but for now it's going here too.)

I've been running into a lot of artists in the past year who bemoan that they "have to do all this darn internet stuff!" They're having people tell them from all sides that they HAVE do this or that thing online to be successful. And learning how to use all the new sites, plus keeping up with them, seems like a major pain-in-the-arse timesuck, not to mention the totally valid cry: "How will I have time to be creative?! I can't even keep up with the stuff I'm already doing right now! I just want to play guitar!" (or whatever it is they do, write songs, practice piano, etc.)

It's totally true. Maintaining a current profile and even superficial relationships on even just the few most popular social networking sites CAN easily eat up all your time. And there are new sites being created every day, most with good intentions to help artists, and some not-so-good intentioned ones. With so many rabbit holes to fall down, hours later you can end up somewhere barely related to where you started out, and nothing checked off your to-do list. (guilty as charged!)

Here's the thing though - according pewinternet.org 75% of Americans use the internet. I don't know how accurate that is exactly, but really, that's huge, and it has to be pretty close. So yes, if you want to be a performing artist as a living in today's world, you HAVE to have an online presence. (You can be a music maker in plenty of other capacities besides as a living, obviously. But it's good to be clear on which it is you want.)

So, you have to have an online presence, but you get to choose what that means for you. There's no one way to do it. Fans just want some sort of relationship with an artist, if it's not personal interactions, they want to feel like they matter as part of the team. Of course there are bands on big labels that have people running their social sites, but indies like Ani DiFranco and Dar Williams have had their interns blog about them - it's totally transparent, fans know they aren't chatting with the artist, but they still get an insider perspective. Imogen Heap makes 10 minute video blogs every couple weeks or so, updating fans on the progress of her latest album.

Online tools should be an extension and support to offline life, not a hindrance. I mean, how cool is it that you could give an online concert to someone in Portland, Maine and Portland, Oregon at the same time, from your cozy nest in the middle of a tiny town in Iowa, no schlepping of gear or filling of gas tanks required? Sometimes it helps to remember that there are other people on the end of those internet connections, who WANT to be connected to you. But it helps to be smart about it and find the right communities. If your music is best heard in a coffee shop environment, you probably aren't going to have much success playing at a punk rock venue right?

Here's something I left as a comment over at Gayla Drake Paul's blog, when she was saying how she started a Facebook page and keeping up with it PLUS MySpace was making her crazy. I brought it over here because I think it relates to the thoughts I was writing about above, which have been stewing around in my head for a while now, because she's not the only one who has been having a hard time keeping up with all the online stuff:

"Yeah, you don't have to do any of those games and such on Facebook, they're pretty much just silly and you can hit the ignore button on them, really. Unless there's a few you like.

The thing that's neat about Facebook is it can be sort of like going to a virtual coffee shop, connecting with people, having conversations, overhearing conversations and joining in, sharing things. It's more two-way than MySpace (which is maybe something you'd rather not have!). But it's perfectly ok to set up your own ground rules like "I don't do games on Facebook". I mean, in the offline world, if you don't play football, it's not like people expect you to play football. But sometimes you have to let people know in the online world what you do and don't do, cuz it's not as obvious to them. You're the hostess of your online party, you can tell people what kind of party it is. :)

I was reading these articles the other day by a pretty smart guy named George Howard about how "random acts of improvement" generally do more harm than good, and going into these networking tools without a game plan can lead to sense of "oh, I tried that and it doesn't do any good." or even "I made a Facebook page and I didn't sell any albums, maybe my music just isn't any good/people don't get me." etc, etc. Not that you SHOULDN'T have a Facebook or MySpace page, but that your other pages should be part of a bigger strategy.

Anyway, I think they are worth a read (you may have to copy and paste the two halves of that first one and stick 'em together. And just swap out the word "entrepreneurs" for "musicians" when you're reading it, the same principles apply.)

http://www.artistshousemusic.org/articles/the+importance+of+setting+goals+and+tracking+progress+for+entrepreneurs

http://tunecore.typepad.com/tunecorner/2008/12/conclusion.html "

The internet has TONS of powerful tools that can help you further any sort of career, musical or otherwise. But there really IS way more information being put out than you can possibly keep up with! There's something like more than ten hours of content was uploaded every minute to YouTube alone! We have to start learning how to put filters in place for ourselves. I heard the analogy applied to Twitter that it's best to treat it like a cocktail party, and I think it applies to plenty of other online sites as well - don't expect to follow every conversation in the room. Drift to the ones that engage you naturally, have a good time, make connections that you may strengthen or deepen later in a setting more appropriate to doing so.

OK, so this has been really long, and I have a lot of other thoughts on the subject, but I think the main point is: YOU ARE IN CHARGE OF YOUR ONLINE LIFE! You choose how to use the internet, don't let it use you.

This is something I need to work on for myself this year. One of my friends said she's going to try setting a timer for certain tasks, and then just walk away for the day when the timer goes off. I thought that was a pretty cool idea. Anyone else have time-management ideas?

Fired Up and Freaked Out

Thought I was going to get to Cafe Paradiso too late today, but of course it happened exactly as it should have!

Hung out most of the morning online, T called and was super glad to catch up with her finally, one of the people on my list to call for a while now! Always good to catch up. Then I got dressed and went to Cafe P and ran into E and T who said that Ellis and Terri (oh, that's funny, they both have the same initials!) were coming over shortly and I could sit with them. J was there waiting for J (doh!) and got to catch up with him for a bit - he'd just had Thanksgiving with his fam in Disneyworld. Awesome. Then Terri and Ellis showed up and it was fun to just be part of the conversation with them.

I feel pretty at ease with them, I think they both do a good job of asking questions, they are genuinely interested in what you think about things or what your experiences are. It's not necessarily that I'd expect them to keep in touch with me all the time or something, but that in the times that I DO ever hang out with them, they are going to be really present and interested in that moment, which is pretty cool.

Sometimes when I hang out with the musicians who just performed I feel so much in awe that I'm kind of dumbstruck and just end up saying next to nothing. And when I think about it - from a skill level I normally would be dumbstruck by someone like Ellis, and I am a little, but it's so so much less than with most others. Nice.

Heard that Terri REALLY likes caramel, and Steve was trying to figure out how we could get some to her, but they were running low on theirs at the cafe. I dashed home before the workshop and got some I had from one time that I'd made a little extra. Unfortunately it had a few little crystalized bits, but it still tasted good, so I just told her that it wasn't at it's idea state but she could get the idea. Hope she likes it. :-S eeps. It really is tasty, and I made a bunch more tonight, but I didn't have any to give them before they left.

Workshop was really good. I thought I wasn't really ready for their stuff at Song School, and I'm not totally, but some of the stuff like goal setting is really useful for RIGHT NOW, so yay.

HL was at the workshop too and she was asking if I'd eaten yet and I said she was welcome to come to my house because I had all this food that I wasn't likely to cook unless it was for someone else. On our way out S was driving by, they had to go look at a keyboard for the band, so they did that and then came over, which was great because it gave me a chance to give the kitchen a once over. It had been super disaster from Thanksgiving, and I'd been hoping to have my brother and his GF over sometime this week to get my rear in gear, but now I'll just be able start from a good place already! It was also really good because I needed to make the caramel, so I was able to get everything cleaned up for that and get it going right after they left. Made a stir fry with my hacked ginger soy type sauce and rice noodles and we ate it all up. Felt good to feed some friends and get to talk and hang out and review some of what we'd learned in the workshop.

Actually played some songs tonight after they left, that felt good too. Had been hit by a big wave of loneliness and acute awareness that G was NOT home and VERY far away and had the thought that maybe playing some would make me feel better and it did! Yay! Now I just need to get more specific on some of those goals!

Well, look at that, I made it through NaBloPoMo! Something for every day. Honestly it was more like I wrote something very early, in the first hours of every day, but I back-dated most of them so it would be to the day I experienced before going to bed. But either way it turns out that I wrote something every single day. That feels really good. Feels like it sped by too! Not sure how much I'll keep it up for the next months. I have a new class starting in January for Lyric Writing and part of that will be writing something everyday for class, so I'm not sure how much time I'll have for blogging here. But I hope it'll be more frequent than lately (as in before November) because this had been very productive in terms of taking time to think things out FOR ME. So easy to get caught up in doing things for other people, or just going through life on auto pilot. It's good to stop and reflect more often.

Bam. Whoa.

Went to the Ellis concert tonight. Had my heart blown open. Felt kind of shaky and raw afterward. I remember having two big realizations and they've left my mind by now, but maybe if I keep writing a little they will come back.

One of them might have been about how worried and protective I get of "my" musicians. Hoping that everyone is liking them, understanding, getting it, enjoying the show. Which is totally ridiculous! I can't control how other people feel and react! So I kind of watched myself freak out and worry about it, and it was kind of amusing.

I think another might have been something about how Ellis seems so cool and collected and has everything together, but juxtaposed with how creative and spontaneous and how she's really searching and trying to figure things out in life. And somehow by admitting to a big group of people that she DOESN'T have it all figured out somehow means that she DOES. I'm not sure how to have that make sense. Except it somehow does...

She often writes about the times she is scared or confused or doesn't know what's going on in life, but somehow it's uplifting and expansive. She said something about yoga, how usually in class it's like stretching "ow, ow, ow." and then after she leaves there's more room, and that she wonders if life is like that in the hard moments, like being stretched, and then if she'll get to leave the yoga room soon, and feel opened up.

And I got scared, during and after, because I thought - oh, I need to open up, I need to show more of my insides if I want to be effective in reflecting back to people who they are. I was talking to H.L. afterward and she said she could see that I was raw, but it was good, where we were supposed to be, more open. It's terrifying to be that vulnerable! But the kind of terrifying that makes me feel more alive, and like something big and important is happening.

I hung around after the show, listening to conversations, doing my best to have a few myself. I wonder what it is, that I'm so much more forward online? I guess it feels safer behind the screen. Whatever reaction a person has to my output online is not something I have to deal with in the moment. I get to wait until they react, if they do at all, and then I have time to think about my response to that, because writing is a much more deliberate thing.

Doing the radio show has helped a lot I think, being in the moment, talking to strangers. It's still a little different than being in the same room with someone, one on one, looking in their eyes. It's much harder to just be present with them, and be willing to not know what to say at any one moment and still stay with it. I'm not sure if I just think slower than most people or what?

Rock Paper Scissors opened the show. They're working on a CD and suddenly they've been writing all sorts of new songs. Their entire set was originals! Gemma said they have 9. Awesome. I always liked the few originals they had when they did them in shows, but now the balance can flip to mostly original and a few covers. Nice. Cuz the songs are still informed by some of the old fashionedy stuff they do, so they have a vintage flavor to them, but new. Love that.

Oughta get to bed. Need to get more done tomorrow than I did today, yeesh. Looking forward to the workshop with Ellis and Terry tomorrow about more of the business side of things.

Momentary Panic

My brother is a prolific YouTuber. He went out to San Francisco for the YouTube live event. Just 3 days, he took Friday off work and the event was on Saturday and we went to pick him up in Des Moines today.

G had to get a hardtop suitcase to carry a desktop computer to the trade show in Dubai, so we stopped at the Samsonite outlet in Williamsburg. There was a buy one get one half off, so we got a new big suitcase for us to replace the falling apart one I brought to Colombia. I also got a new laptop bag, a padded silver one that I'm SO wanting to take out to a cafe somewhere so I can feel terribly romantic and professional. Maybe tomorrow. :D

Anyway, G also needs a black suit jacket, and we were trying to figure out if we should just make T wait longer and stop at one of the nice stores at the outlet mall or continue on and go to the mall in Des Moines. We opted for the latter since we were pretty behind schedule and didn't want to make T wait too too long.

I called my cousin who lives in DM (and only about 5 minutes from the airport) to see if she might be able to pick him up so he could wait at her place instead of in the airport. She was out but said if she went home before we got there she would swing by and see if she could see him waiting outside.

T's flight was supposed to land at 2:15. I tried calling him at about 2:20. Straight to voicemail. Same deal several times after that. It's just a temp, pay as you go phone he only uses for traveling. We figured he probably wasn't freaking out that no one was there quite yet and would remember to turn on his phone as soon as he wondered where mom was. Called my mom to let her know what was going on in case he called her (she was originally going to pick him up).

My cousin drove by the airport around 3:30 and didn't see him, and he still wasn't answering his phone. I called the airline to see if his flight had landed and it had. G and I got there a little after 4 I think and T was nowhere to be seen. Des Moines is a tiny airport, you can walk the whole area that you're allowed to walk (baggage claim, ticketing and foodcourt/gift shop) without a ticket in about 5 minutes.

This is where the panic sets in. My mom had called him once while he was in SF, but he didn't answer. I knew he'd made it to SF because he'd sent out a Twitter saying so but hadn't heard anything after that. The airline people can only tell me that he hadn't changed his reservation but his original flight arrived on time. I don't know if they actually KNOW if he boarded and just can't tell me or if they don't even know. There didn't appear to be any operators working the white phone paging system because it just rang and rang and rang. I started crying. My mom called me back to say that she'd talked to his hotel and he had indeed checked in on Friday and checked out that morning, and she was trying to look up his flight number and call the airline to see if she could track him down another way.

G points out that there is another flight coming from Dallas (T's connecting city) at 4:30, which by now is only minutes away. I continue to freak out. T finally, finally calls, he is indeed on the 4:30 flight and it has just touched down. His flight from San Fran was delayed due to weather in Dallas or something, and when he got to Dallas his phone didn't work. He didn't check any luggage, so when he gets off the plane we can go straight to the car.

On the way to the car, he tells us that he had had a headache, and ended up watching the event on his laptop from his hotel room. He'd left his sunglasses at home, so apparently walking around all day without them gave him a headache. (He does have really sensitive eyes.)

It turns out he couldn't find the place it was being held, even though his hotel was supposed to be a 7 minute walk away from it. Apparently the map was misleading. By the time he figured out he was lost and went back to his hotel and got help with the directions, and made it back to the event, THEY WOULD NOT LET HIM IN. Even though he had an e-ticket. Which was apparently fairly meaningless, because it was first come, first serve, and he was late enough that they said they were at capacity. I thought the point of tickets was to RESERVE YOUR SPACE at an event?!

So now I'm pissed. Here's a guy, YouTube is a MAJOR part of his life, he has over 400 videos and watches plenty more than that. He can tell us all about these people by their screen names, many of which are a combination of numbers and letters like xx23pandaxxx. It's his community. I don't know how many people actually watch his stuff or if it's a one-way connection, but he took a whole day off work, spent money on a ticket and a hotel, and made at least two videos that clearly demonstrated how excited he was to be going. One was him simply dancing around in pure joy, and the other an improvised rap. His stuff is nowhere as polished and professional as his idols, but you have to give him the devotion and passion points. And he gets to this party/concert event that is being billed as a community building event/celebration, and ends up watching the thing on his laptop in his hotel room. It must have felt like a betrayal on some level I'm sure. Thank goodness the hotel at least had internet. It would have sucked even more to not get to see it at all.

Here's the thing, my brother has a mild learning disability. In school they called it ADD, I think some later time they called it a form of asbergers. It's not a big deal and he's fine living on his own, but it's little things like my mom did want to make sure he had family nearby, so T lives in his own apartment in the basement, he's probably never going to drive a car, and he sometimes seems to ignore people when they talk to him. I think it's also why he wears sunglasses a lot, because normal life/light is too overwhelming for him sometimes.

But some people aren't going to know all that. Some people are just going to think he's weird, or stupid or stoned. And they're going to be mean and make fun of him. I've seen it in some of the comments people leave on his videos. And the big sister protective vibe kicks in big time. But all I can do is give those comments a thumbs down, and that's probably more than I can do in most of real life. I've gotten a lot better at not taking it personally and making it my responsibility to protect him all the time, but the whole thing still breaks my heart sometimes. He's such a good sweet person, generally happy and mild mannered and creative. And the YouTube thing has given him a chance to reach out and connect. I just hope he doesn't get too discouraged by stuff like this.

Maybe I'm the one more bummed out than him, he's already got a bunch of plans to tell the organizers how they could do a better job next time, and he's already got some ideas about how he can be proactive from his side (finding out how to get to the venue is the night before the event, trying to meet up with some people he can go with from the same hotel, etc.)

Anyway, he's home safe, and learned a bunch of things.

And now that's off my chest I can remember that I wanted to mention this morning I stopped by the cafe because Anais had run out of CD's at the concert and was supposed to bring one by this morning, but it turned out she'd really run out, so she said she could mail me one. I brought my box of jewelry that I'd made for the Farmer's Market and let both of them pick something out. Rachel immediately grabbed the green chunky bracelet that was on top, and looked through a couple other things but said, "well I think I might have already found it", and I said "I had a feeling you might like that one" and she said "who me, green?" hehe. At that particular moment, she was wearing green glasses, a green hat and had long green fingerless gloves. Then Anais said she had to choose carefully because she tends to just wear one jewelry item at a time until she loses or breaks it, and picked out the big wooden etched medallion on a sheer green ribbon necklace. It matched really well with what she was wearing. She asked if I was saving it for anyone special and I said I would be happy to for her to have it. The fangirl in me really wanted to take a picture of them wearing the stuff, but I didn't want to be too, well, obviously fangirly. heh. Would much rather be a friend.

Then they had to go, for a quick dash to The At Home Store for yarn, and then back to Chicago for one more show of their mini tour. (We were a quarter of it.) Sharon was out in the lobby playing her guitar so I sat down and talked to her for a bit. She asked me what I had and I showed her the box of stuff. She particularly liked one set of earrings and said she'd buy them from me later, but I told her she could have them as an early Christmas present, because I was probably going to give her something and it was probably going to be from that box so she might as well have one she liked. I told her about my experience FEELING the guitar, and she agreed that it's pretty easy when you get into the business side of it to forget about why you started at all. And then G called cuz he was ready to go to Des Moines. So a good little quick plug-in with my music peeps for the morning, glad I made it over while they were all still there.