I try to be optimistic as much as I can, but it’s seasons like that that really try my patience and sanity.

Granted, I’m not as under the deluge as our IT guy, but it has been more than my day job that is inching me closer towards taking a battle ax to the neck of the nearest living thing.

It’s a good thing some of my coworkers are funny and unintentionally lighten the mood.

Here:

Accountant: Starting this Friday or even on Monday depending when the “Smoke Pot” arrives, please use this bud = cigarette collector instead of throwing the buds onto the ground. Even I will ask myself to do this. Thanks.
Me: Awesome. I will make ample use of this.
Lauren: I hope you make ample use of the Smoke Pot, Nico. For putting all your buds in.

Dude, I’ve been staying late at the office every night this week. It’s been good work, and I haven’t been slacking, but man this is killer. I haven’t had a single moment to get any freelance work done.

I really need a drink after this. Really.

Or, “blogging around midnight.”

I rarely do this because I am usually out cold by this time, but because I’ve spend the entire day in a cycle of sleeping, waking up to expel mucous, taking medicine, and drinking fluids, I cannot get back to sleep as of now until the medication starts working once more. And I’m all out of mucous at the moment so my activity options are limited. Somewhat.

That’s right, mucous. Think about it. It’s gross. And I’m telling you about it anyway. This is the internet, people, mucous should be the least of what bothers you.

Mucous aside, I’ve relapsed in the sickness I had last week which started out as a sore throat, but after playing the show on Saturday, I seem to have torn up my throat (singing backup… which, to my surprise, involved more screaming than actual singing) and made it susceptible to bacteria because of that. Also, it seems that there’s a cold bug floating around exopolis, and this might have carried over to me in an airborne fashion since I seem to be on their smokers’ same cigarette break schedule.

I have to run to work tomorrow and pick up my computer because I simply can’t be out for this long at a time. However, in the interest of keeping my coworkers healthy, I am going to try to get in and out of the office before whatever I’ve got can be transmitted to anyone else. I will not be playing the role of the Outbreak Monkey.

And rehearsing for that show on Saturday which made me sick has severely pushed back my dev work. Now that my Sundays are available again I really need to get back to work on freelance, which, fortunately, right now are non-stipend so there’s no due date. But just simply not getting them done is in poor taste.

I want to list them here in case people can lend a hand or some advice since I’m a better collaborator than a leader (this happens to be true musically, also). So, in the order of which they are supposed to be done, I have set work to these:

-Miribella Jewlery
Friend of mine who can actually make some pretty stunning pieces, so I know who to ask for advice if I’m ever going to get a girl a piece of jewelry. Task: Create an elegant and very simple interface without looking too Web 1.0.

-Culturazzi
Metroblogging, but using as a starting point the world that has no reliable public transportation. Task: Create a portal from a blog without installing blog software on a hosted site. Shit. I just realized how hard this might be…

-2nd St. Jazz
The best venue to work for; totally not professional and that’s the way we’d like to keep it. Task: Site re-skin, network musicians, agents, managers, and 3rd party booking companies on a local MySQL database to then be spit back out that info on the internet, coordinate all of our in-house booking agents to update one master calendar instead of having our club dates scattered throughout the internet. This, I can already feel, is going to take a while.

And I just took a gander at how many emails I have to answer for work as a booking agent: 103 new emails.

I already feel sick again.

Oh, but the medicine is kicking in right about now.

I just played a reunion show this weekend, and it’s the first time I’ve played a show in over 8 months. When I was regularly on the show circuit, I never felt the effects of a show as much as I’m feeling right now. My entire upper torso is sore. My feet ache. My bandages are not making typing any easier.

I guess this is the cost of trying to put on a good show. People tell me that I beat the living crap out of my guitar, but they forget that my guitar beats the living crap out of me.

Good feedback, though. People gave me the impression that they had a good time. Unless they’re just saying that to my face because they’re my friends, which can more than likely be the case.

This is a short post, because I want to post Vince’s video:

“What is post-rock?”

A lot of you already know the answer to this and know that it is kind of unsatisfactory to group bands this way, but I think Wikipedia has an okay explanation of it:

Post-rock is a music genre characterized by non-traditional use of rock instruments and high musical density. Although firmly rooted in the indie scene, post-rock’s style bears little resemblance musically to that of indie rock. However, as post-rock music is often recorded on independent labels, indie and post-rock often share the same level of obscurity.

That said, it is today in which I find myself and my head thrust headlong into the cymbal wash of Saturday night’s music at the bar. All of the bands were fantastic and as much as post-rock tends to be on the outskirts of music’s condescending avant-garde, there was not a drip of snobbery to be found that night. I was even amazed at how I found very little talking during the bands’ pauses between songs (with the exception of our intern, who never shuts up).

I believe my brother put it best: “Shut up! You’re invading my post-rock appreciation time!”

Oh, the bands?

Signal Hill (LA, CA)
North (Tucson, AZ)
Caspian (Boston, MA)
Beware of Safety (LA, CA)

And incidentally, they all have cool shirts to go along with it.

That plug aside, it is with an enamored heart that I sincerely emplore you find your way into one of their crescendos. You might think that sounds gay, but that would make you a homophobe, you judgmental bigot.

But seriously, Saturday was one of the best nights I’ve had at work. It was a bunch of musicians who are there to present music that isn’t designed to get your attention with those cheap and juvenile theatrics likened to “rocking out with your cock out.” And yet, they did rock out, and even more so than a lot of the groups that come through our bar with a chip on their shoulder and something to prove.

The bands even relied on only two local bands. Ordinarily, our bar only lets one band from out of town play so that we can afford to pay them gas money, but we trusted the local bands on this one and we made the right choice. Two bands supporting two other out of town bands, and they outdrew–no, simply dwarfed some of the booking and talent companies that we’ve let have an entire night. And these post-rock bands did it with pure word-of-mouth, and with just four bands to promote. 3rd party booking companies have brought in 7 bands on some nights and they didn’t even compare to the draw we got for this night. I even offered gas money to one of the local bands because we were able to give them a cut:

Me: Do you guys need gas money? Your audience has made it so that you can have some.
Rishi: Nah, we live down the street.
Me: Well, what about for good measure?
Rishi: No way! That’s for the venue!

And it was busy, but by far not our busiest at the bar. However, what really made the difference was that we had a well-behaved crowd–you know, that perfect median between fall-over obnoxious drunk and “I-stand-still-so-I-don’t-look-uncool”. Everyone was respectful, very much into the music being played, and because it looked like everyone knew each other pretty well, nobody did that lame “I’ll leave after I see that one band I was going to see” move that I see every damn week. Consistent and good crowd the entire night. All the musicians knew each others songs (even to the point of being able to quote each other within their own songs like the jazz days of yore), and for the first time in a long time, the audience actually engaged with the staff. I met some really funny kids that night, and to my surprise I wasn’t talking to just the musicians, which is usually the case if you’re an employee at a venue.

And this is where the little faith I have in the underground is restored. When a rag-tag group of kids goes DIY, puts on a great show, proves to out-of-town bands that LA is not wholly the music graveyard that everyone thinks it is, gets nearly all of their friends to come, gets those friends to stick around for bands they know nothing about, draws enough to completely blow established talent agencies and band managers out of the water making those seem like obsolete and antiquated roles. These bands stayed true to the underground ethic–the ideal has finally risen to the challenge of reality. And that night proved that, yes, we can have good music without all that business.

You know what it sounds like to learn to fall in love again?

Yeah. Post-rock.

Yes, ‘post-prandial stupor.’

Wiki: In medicine and specifically endocrinology, postprandial dip is a term used to refer to mild hypoglycemia occurring after ingestion of a heavy meal.

The dip is caused by a drop in blood glucose resulting from the body’s own normal insulin secretion, which in turn is a respone to the glucose load represented by the meal. It is often asymptomatic, but in some individuals it can produce drowsiness, leading to a postprandial nap.

While postprandial dip is usually physiological after a generous meal, a very sharp or sustained drop in blood glucose may be associated with a disorder of glucose metabolism.

I just came back from a hefty employee lunch (happy birthday, Anna!) and I’m paying for it now. Not in the literal sense, the company paid for it… I’m just regretting eating that much. If only there were an emoticon for the low, pathetic, gurgle of a dying rat, that’d be me. Putting things into a database isn’t easy when you’re like this. I can imagine gurgle rats doing better.

So, to distract myself I did some research to see what the blogosphere thought of me and to make sure I’m caught up with my contacts. It’s a good thing to do when the blogosphere is actually an arena in which you work. And this inspired the long overdue chapter 2 of the confessions of an internet marketeer: Spam. This will come soon, because I think I’ve gathered enough information to make some intelligent guesses about how it happens, who benefits, and how it’s not going to be your average blog bitch-and-moan about how we hate spam. Dude, of course you hate spam. I get mistaken as spam and even I abhor spam. That’s like saying, “Man, I just really need water sometimes. You know, when I get thirsty. Or I guess most liquids will do.” My point, in case sarcasm doesn’t across, is that saying you hate spam is just kind of inane.

Wait, I’ve got a blog. Of course sarcasm translates.

Anyway, we’ve all seen posts on how to deal with it, how to heuristically predict what is and isn’t spam, and how to prevent it — but what I want to uncover is who is benefiting from this business model and what technology is being used (bots, anyone?). I mean, if you’re the one pulling this thing off, there’s got to be some reason for it, right?

But yeah. Spam, and its ingredients, coming soon. When I can breathe again.