Life Gets Busy and Busy is Good

Emotions are so fleeting. Yesterday morning I was bursting with pride and languidly planning to write a long essay about my success hand-writing a third trombone chart for my upcoming performance of El Cantante with Edgardo Cambon's band Candela. I still had that warm feeling of having accomplished something that I'd avoided for weeks, despite the fact that my husband was banging away, demolishing a closet in my son's room. He's been suffering along with all the carpenters we know -- no work. Instead, he's turning his energies into our house, as he has so often in the past. By the end of the day, plaster dust, screaming boys, a trip to Home Depot and a door-to-door home alarm salesman from Utah had sapped the last of my creative reserves.

Today, a failed bid for an extension on an article deadline means I'm scribbling as fast as I can to get it done by tonight. This morning, two requests for articles from former clients came in, plus details for another piece due this week. My songwriting partner Vince calls me to ask when we're going to finish this song we want to debut at a fundraising concert he will host next month. And the band leader I work with for the San Jose funk band messages me to ask if I'll be at rehearsal tonight -- in San Jose. I've skipped too many of those so I say yes.

It's good to be busy, because busy means money. Can I keep all these plates in the air?

My New Hero

Chrissie Wellington, International Triathlete, Ironman World Champion!

She hired a coach and turned pro last year, blowing everyone away when she won her first Ironman from "out of nowhere". Her coach doesn't let her run more than two hours. I guess her training is all about intensity, not overuse. Typical triathlete story: A car accident derailed her marathon training, so she went back to her childhood sport of swimming, then borrowed a bike and an ill-fitting wetsuit and went to town. Her coach isn't into heart monitors, aero helmets and fancy technology -- but three of his athletes were on the podium at Kona. Of course, the most important factor he was looking for when she hired him was whether she had the will. Looks like she does.

Cool blog, too!

Summer Sailstice Festival Next Saturday!

Here's where I'll be performing next weekend:

You are Invited to San Francisco Bay's Top Sailing Festival June 21!

The longest day of the year... the launch of summer... the summer solstice. Power your holiday with sun and wind to support a healthy lifestyle, a healthy Bay, a healthy planet!

Air travel, automobile and recreational vehicle use, and cruise ships produce anywhere from 0.4 to 2.2 tons of carbon dioxide per family, and consume large amounts of fuel. Whether you're a sailor or non-sailor, cruiser or racer, windsurfer or kiteboarder, strike back at $4 gas and qualify for over 300 prizes with the Bay's best on-the-water party: the 8th annual Summer Sailstice SF Festival at Treasure Island, June 21, 2008.

FREE ADMISSION! Summer Sailstice brings together everyone who loves wind, water and sail! Sail in, motor in, or just come down for a full weekend of sailing, cruising, racing, windsurfing and onshore entertainment.

If you don't have a boat, don't worry--you can get FREE sailboat rides, watch sailboat racing and enjoy live music at the festival village. Or see if you can hook up with a ride on the Latitude 38 crew list.

For boaters--on top of all the other fun--there is a free anchorage with complimentary water taxi and dinghy dock availability to enjoy one of the most idyllic spots on the Bay. Racers unable to anchor or stay overnight can raft up stern-to at the Treasure Isle Marina guest dock as space permits.



Click these links for more information:

• A Festival overview
• Detailed schedule of events
• Directions to the Festival
• Background on the musicians
• Background on Summer Sailstice
• Sailing/treasure hunt/pirate pictures from past years at: FlikrSailstice

Musical Line-up:

Blind Willies (www.blindwillies.net) - Alexei Wajchman and Annie Staninec are an acoustic duo that has just released their second album, "Everybody's Looking for a Meal." Both are San Francisco natives and graduates of the SF School of the Arts. Annie's fiddle playing is amazing and she has played with many bluegrass bands across the States and is also a remarkable gypsy violinist. Alexei is a great songwriter, pulling from what really drives his spirit, and he received strong praise after the release of their first album.

Skip Henderson and The Starboard Watch (http://www.myspace.com/skiphendersonandstarboardwatch) good friends and great musicians. They celebrate maritime life and history, and live it at the same time. Sea chanteys that you are bound to join in on because they become part of you after you've heard them a few times, and you just want to go and find a line to heave. Great vocals and a wide variety of instruments that pull you in to sing along with them.

Pixie Kitchen - A three-piece group led by Todd Tholke, an accomplished banjo, guitar, and mandolin player. Their specialty is early Americana , folk and sea chanteys. This acoustic group plays regularly at clubs around the Bay area, as well as local street fairs and music festivals. They recently produced two CDs. They’re a good-time playing foot stompin’ and hand-clappin’ songs, with a combination of Bluegrass, and Irish jigs.

Carne Cruda (www.carnecruda.com) with Alexa Weber Morales (www.alexawebermorales.com) - We pulled some strings here. When you hear a unique collaboration between musicians, you are thrilled with their love of music and exploration - so we asked these two great musical sounds if they would perform together. Not to miss. Alexa is a local treasure who brings us a beautiful voice and energy, and draws her inspiration from music around the globe with a focus on Latin jazz. Carne Cruda brings us a big band Latin groove with slices of funk, surf, salsa, and knock-out horns, melding their unique sound that you won’t forget.

Kalbass (www.kalbasskreyol.com) - Ah, as the day winds down, what do you want to do? Dance, dance, dance. This Haitian band is going to pull out all the stops and infect you with the spirit of les Caraïbes. A kalbass is a gourd used to carry water from the source to home, and Kalbass acts as a similar vessel bringing the spirit of Haiti to share with the Bay area. You will experience a magical blend of many rhythms including Kompa, rara, salsa, soca, zouk and meringue. The rhythm and the dancers will have you moving and enjoying the longest day of the year as if it will never end.

Orquesta Costa Brava - La Impaciencia (Live)

This is one of the songs I'm learning coro to for my gig on June 21 at Cocomo's with Edgardo Cambon and Candela...

Cat and Girl

My new philosophy comic. Here's a useful episode: The Numbers Racket

What I Wanted You to Say

That's amazing and so are you
I'm so proud and you're zooming
Look what you've done when there's so much to do
You planted beauty and it's blooming

Behind your twitching face
In your desperate brain
Neurons were firing but it was the wrong train
Banalities to block my threat
I've gotten here and now I see
You aren't and that isn't
What I wanted you to say

Let's solve this problem together
I know just what to do
I'm dialing the fixer right now as we speak
We'll bail you out real soon

I share your vision and offer expertise
Better yet I will follow your lead
Let's build something garish and great
Be Julia to my Hearst, be my castle mate

I know exactly where you should go
It's a place where novels unfold
Here is the light and the space and the dough
No starting from scratch, we're gold

Behind your twitching face
In your desperate brain
Neurons were firing but it was the wrong train
Your promises like crumpled checks
I've gotten here and now I see
You aren't and that isn't
What I wanted you to say

(c) 2008 Alexandra Weber Morales

ProPublica: Renewing the Promise of Investigative Journalism

Just came across this web publication, ProPublica, founded by Paul Steiger and Steve Engelberg (pictured) to counteract the loss of investigative journalism in traditional news media. I checked out some of their staff bios and they're impressive -- far better credentials than mine, I'll say that much. Here's their letter to readers posted June 10th:

Five months ago, ProPublica was an idea, a rudimentary Web site and a nearly empty office in Lower Manhattan. Today, we take our first concrete step in building an investigative publishing platform that will produce original stories focusing on betrayal of the public trust and abuse of power.

Our goal is to do stories that would otherwise escape notice and to follow up on work done by others that demands change or is being overlooked.

This is the beginning of what we see as an experiment and we invite your comments and suggestions on stories, or on how we can make our organization more useful to readers.

We have nearly completed our hiring (more than 20 out of perhaps 27 news staff) and reporters are at work on some promising avenues of inquiry. You will see those results in the months ahead.

In the meantime, we offer what we hope will be a thorough, thought-provoking look at investigative stories that are breaking elsewhere.

• Each business day, under the heading “Breaking on the Web,” we’ll aggregate (assemble, digest and link to) all the investigative journalism we can find being produced in the U.S. in English. Whether you’re a reporter, editor, or just an interested reader, we welcome your help in compiling the stories. Please send suggestions to suggestions@propublica.org.
• In some cases, we’ll analyze, comment and follow up on these stories. Eric Umansky and Paul Kiel will lead this effort on our staff, assisted by our reporting and research team.
• We’re also starting a feature we’re calling “Scandal Watch”. It will track the top five investigations (other than our own) at any given moment, selected by our editors and ranked by intensity of coverage.

What Not to Say: Keith Jarrett at Umbria Jazz Fest

From the Customer Service Department

ME: I just got a gig on x date. Can you do it?
MUSICIAN: Yeah, sounds good.
ME: Have you played there before?
MUSICIAN: You're asking me if I've played there before?
ME: Yes.
MUSICIAN: Of course I have.
ME: Great. You're kind of the reason I got this gig.
MUSICIAN: Ah, is that the case? Then I guess I should be paid extra!
ME: [laughing]
MUSICIAN: [silence]
ME: Cool, well, ahem... for this gig I thought I'd go with [two other musicians] so we don't overpower the place.
MUSICIAN: What? No, I'm not into that.
ME: I've played some other places with this setup and it's really nice.
MUSICIAN: With your music? No, that won't work.
ME: Well, it can. But if you're not into it... I just was trying to not be too loud. You have played there before, right?
MUSICIAN: Yes. And we never had a problem. See, why are you letting the place dictate how you do your music?
ME: I actually pitched it to them that way.
MUSICIAN: But still, you're always bending over backward to let someone else tell you how to play your music.
ME: Did I tell you about this gig I had recently? Now there, I did let them dictate, and it was a crappy gig, but not because of the musicians. The owner was micromanaging the set list, and then this crazy guy came in off the street and grabbed my mic from me and screamed in my ear. Has anything like that ever happened to you?
MUSICIAN: No. That's what I'm talking about. You don't command respect.
ME: How can I prevent a crazy guy from coming in off the street?
MUSICIAN: Well, that would never happen to me.
ME: And not just because you're a big tall man?
MUSICIAN: No, because I command respect. And before the guy came and screamed in your ear, you let the owner walk all over you.
ME: Well, I agree with you on that point. I'm not going to play there again.
MUSICIAN: It's not about where you play, it's about not changing your sound every time someone says you're too loud, or too soft, or whatever.
ME: So how is it different when a club owner asks me to accommodate some aspect of his club vs. when a musician such as yourself asks me to change my plan as a band leader?
MUSICIAN: I'm just saying that with your music that configuration doesn't work for me.
ME: Alright, thanks for being candid. Bye.

Fado Lives On: Katia Guerreiro

Wow, she sounds fantastic! Carrying on the legacy of Amalia Rodrigues... Check her out!

Signs of the Old Media Apocalypse?

I suspect that the New York Times is now being written by the people who brought us The Devil Wears Prada (a terrible book that I scanned after having fun reading The Da Vinci Code and decided to try another best-seller). What's wrong with this all-too-common, Manhattan-focused trend story about rich people? Try innuendo, utter absence of facts and a knowing tone that just drives me batty. I don't know how to describe it, but it's the same tone that all these elitist hacks use. Perhaps I've been guilty of it -- it's always tempting to dress up weak reporting with insular editorializing.

This reminds me of another awful article in the Sunday Magazine, this time focusing on a blogger's decline as she worked the online celebrity sliming game. In the usual cautionary arc, she found herself the focus of the same scrutiny she'd leveled at her prey. She called herself an "oversharer," which made me worry -- do I do that? Because while there may be the occasional detail of dirty laundry here or there, I really try to not put out TMI, for my own sake and that of my family. While the author claimed to be cured, I found myself doubting that based on the pictures of her that accompanied the article.

I think we can draw a line between bloggers who do so for business/promotional reasons, as I do, and those who truly keep online diaries describing their affairs and infections and/or traffic in sensationalism for its own sake. Though I may be the only person drawing that line, given that the most innocuous blog post seems to draw fetishists like moths.

Interestingly, Marc Andreessen blogs that he's tired of reporters getting his quotes wrong, so he's going to stop public speaking and increase his blogging -- after all, reporters spend more time scraping quotes off blogs these days than they do interviewing people live or on the phone. He also clearly doesn't like the New York Times, as he's initiated a New York Times death watch and written a scathing analysis of the Gray Lady's board. I don't agree with him that the NYT will die, but he's spent more time thinking about the business side of it than I have, writing some excruciatingly bleh stuff about dual-class stock structures. (Aside: This inability to care about crap like that is probably why I will never be rich.)

Arguably, however, as an entrepreneur with many old and new Web ventures under his belt (the latest, Ning, is a social networking platform), he's a sworn enemy of old media. Just to point out that he too has bias.

Spirit of Brazil Podcast

What a gorgeous podcast show by David Heyman: The Spirit of Brazil. I'm listening right now, and loving it!

The Scariest Thing I've Ever Read

Well, if all the million horror stories about record labels haven't already scared you, this one, despite being generic, will: The Problem With Music by Steve Albini