Brrr, cold. As I plied my way downtown wearing a sweater and jacket, I got sidetracked by the annual BTSRP festival. That’s the “Block the Street and Raise Prices” event of downtown Hollywood. Same tired displays, same expensive food, same third-rate entertainment which have one thing in common – they are all from out of town. I’m still trying to figure out what relevance these affairs have any more.
My mission for the day was to get over to the library and find out what I could about catalog publishing. I got some interesting stats, mainly along the line that they are still one of the best advertising vehicles, and that people tend to place larger orders through a catalog. The book was recent, and indicates that it is possible, by farming the publication over to Asia, to produce excellent issues for as little as fifty cents each.
That means there is more of a cost incurred in mailing the things than printing them up. A word of caution is that the business amounts to mail-order, and is heavily government regulated. I could not discover if that applied to on-line catalogs, but the point is that I would still have to “mail” whatever was purchased. Unless, as planned, the purpose of the catalog was to draw customers into the store.
I checked my email to find there is a letter from the G, somewhat apologizing for his comments about my empathy for others. Hey, I’ve always maintained a thick barrier between people suffering and people getting what they deserve, two different animals in my book. He said that Cort’s, the coffee place, is shutting down his open mic. What did I tell you six months ago? The new owners are running the place into the ground. I swear they opened that shop because nobody would hire them.
Immediately, I contacted Brian, and we’ve agreed to meet up there around 8:30 this evening. Thus, you may get a later entry. The plan is that we are going to try “Act Naturally” even if we wreck the tune and our chances of any employment thereby. I let the G know I’ll show up, but used the opportunity to inform him that if he wants steadier gigs, he might want to team up with somebody who has them. This means changing what he plays. Who knows, losing yet another gig might bring him to that conclusion.
This is not saying he is not a musician, for he is. The problem is that he is still playing the same note-for-note heavy rock and blue guitar compositions that every other soloist in town has already flogged to death. All of it has grown old. The age of five piece bands is over. My plan is to play the less guitar-based tunes, but still from that era.
Later. I was there, but the keyboard player and drummer he was expecting did not show. The G has a hard time with the concept that music is something you have to pay people for, even those that do it as a hobby. Danny, the all-originals guy was there but he plays a strange semi-jazz format I cannot follow. I’ve got a half-hour video of him, the G and me playing some great progressions. Beyond that, the evening was dead with very few customers.
In the unusual department, there was one man who sang real songs, accompanying himself on a “baritone” ukulele that was not tuned. That’s correct. Although he appeared to fret consistent patterns, he did not understand that the instrument could be tuned. He seemed astonished when this was pointed out to him. He may not have been a bad singer, but you couldn’t tell.
Brian came down with the wife and kid but declined to sing anything at the last moment. He knows he’s got a lot of work to do to get comfortable with our music on stage, but he has come a long way in the past few months. But I can tell he has not been putting in the time. We scheduled another practice for this upcoming Wednesday. There was a decent looking woman there but she left just before we took a break, so no hit.
My guess is this makes the twentieth time in a row that people did not show up as promised. For clarity, I don’t mean the promises of the musicians, but that the G said it would be a full band. I was the only one, the other few people there were regulars. I used my little DXG to capture some video but without adequate lighting, it is not the greatest unit.
To put things in perspective, here is a photo of the books that I read through quickly at the library today. I think there are sixteen in this picture. Of course, some bozo will say that I did not really read them all. Care to have a dollar a point challenge on that? You read the same books for the same amount of time, and we ask each other questions about the content. Whenever you are ready.I noticed my radiator was low on water. Dang! It was too dark and cold to fix anything, so I made it home on steam. Fords have a very annoying feature where the engine temperature measures the coolant, not the engine. So, if you are out of coolant, the engine can bake while your gauge reads cold. You thought only MS hired magnificent idiots. I’ll check the hoses in the light tomorrow, but does it not seem odd that over the last hundred years that automobile hoses have been exceptionally resistant to any improvements?
Of course, the Challenger disaster shows that even in the space age, some people persist in making fluid hoses out of material that can crack in the first place. These are the same people who put shoe-polishing machines in the executive washrooms and update public databases.
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