This is one of those times.

I personally am pretty enamored with the Guitar Hero franchise, and contrary to popular belief, real musicianship will work against you when you try to learn Guitar Hero — it’s really a different way of perceiving sheet music principles (eg., rhythm) since not every single note is represented.

I can go on and on about that but the point is, the Guitar Hero culture is widespread and I love the inadvertent creativity that has been coming out of it.  I’m sure you’ve seen the college humor Rock Band freeway clip, but this one below is in a class all on its own.

“If water were beans, our bodies would be 70% beans.”

-Al (a friend of mine)

I’m feeling like I am made up of beans lately because I would really like to spill them.  I need to spill the beans.  But I can’t.  Not just yet.  Because if I were to do that, it would require complete honesty, but in respect to the parties involved, I’d like it to boil over before the respective beans be spilled.

Keeping things under wraps is frustrating.  My mind is reeling from recent days.

And all I can offer publicly is cryptic messages.  And there’s only so many creative ways to parse the phrase, “spill the beans”.  Well, here’s some broken English in the erstwhile:

Beans must be a spilled way!  But cannot do let just yet!  Pain from beans fill!  Beans at critical!

Will Nico give secret to bean spill have to get blogged? Interweb, it is a damn for Nico.  Like, in pressure to get so beaned with having spill tends to create tension in one’s bean area.  Too much to bean with a spill.  Can’t do!  Not yet!

I’m just an airwave rolling around
I storm and crash without a sound
There’s all these islands out at sea
I can’t reach

I’m just an airplane diving down
I storm and crash without a sound
engines exploding silently out at sea
where waves caress unstable egos
where melody is completely swallowed
where songwriters chain their songs
to their ankles and
sink to the beat
’til it stops and
bursts under pressure
let it
burst and bloom
hit song
let it burst and bloom

-Cursive

In my last post, a sarcastic Anon pointed out that it looked like I discriminated against males in the hiring process.  Maybe I didn’t make it clear that the industry in which I participate at the bar is overrun by males, and if we had an HR, and I were to hire yet another guy as a booking agent at the bar, we’d probably have a lawsuit on our hands.

That is, if we were in any way professional. Truth is, it’s not like anybody at this bar has ever filled out a W2 to work there.  It’s a family run business.  You just kind of… end up there.  There’s no salary, benefits, contracts, or negotiations.  It’s miles away from professional.

As a disclaimer, we have interviewed and will continue to interview males; it wasn’t my intention to just interview females. The previous post was intended to elicit some chuckles as it was clear I wanted a female to take over my job because, for the record, my biases about their capabilities have been true so far.  But this isn’t to say males aren’t qualified.  I mean, I currently have the job, don’t I?

To the meat of the post: Out of curiosity about what kind of content in the blogosphere offends and in what environments they do that, I wanted to find out what percent of blogs out there are professional, corporate, diaries, spam, themed, or otherwise.  I found some pretty interesting things:

The Research

• 30% of blogs may be spam.
• 80% of blogs contain offensive content (as in NSFW, not “it pisses you off”)
  
• 90% of blogs are abandoned (This was a popular stat, right?)
  
• Other neat stats, like over half of bloggers use it as a means of creative expression, found in this study from 2006

The Development

Aside from the idea that the Pew study makes me think of this lolcat, it seems the market for being “serious” instead of the folksy tone I’m so used to reading these days, is actually very limited.  If you do a little perusing, solemnity actually condemns most blogs to one of three situations: heated-to-the-point-of-overcooked political debate, records of studies and findings, or straight up obscurity.  In fact, most blogs that I find that tackle serious issues on a regular basis flare up in hyperbole at least as a metaphoric device.  Even blogs that are ostensibly about just “the facts” are peppered with personality.

This must mean that in the zeitgeist of blogging, to take yourself and others too seriously is simply to become offended or offensive.  Or as good as dead.

Well, duh, you say, you can’t be a good blogger if you take yourself too seriously.

Right, but that’s such a subjective line to cross and it moves back and forth depending on what angle you’re looking at it.  So who am I - or anyone for that matter - to say what is offensive or stupid, and what isn’t?

The Point

Caveat lector, as I sometimes say–or, “reader beware”, for those of you who don’t believe I might actually try to use Latin in conversation–might as well get upgraded these days to Caveat escritor: “writer beware”.

But if we’re writing just for the sake of writing, like so many of my favorite bloggers are, beware of what?

Right!

In order to get the ball rolling, I posted an ad for my job on CraigsList.  Initially I rejected this idea simply because it cost money to post a job description.  But this is a necessary step in trying to loosen some of my ties to the music business thereby freeing me up to focus on the music part.

But wow, I had no idea how regularly people peruse that site.  Within the first 72 hours, my email has been straight up INUNDATED with a DELUGE of people who want my job.

And all these applications are the cholestrol clogging up my Series of Tubes!

For now, that’s a good thing!  Though I’ve often characterized the job as thankless and repetitive, going through the motions of working here has let me meet some great people with novel ideas.  It has given me the pride of putting on many a show that had the genuine intent of helping a band do what they love - to play.  That’s it.  The point of the venue is to play a show.  Profit? Pfft.  Create a scene? Yeah, right.  Explore the dark corners of sonic experimentation for the furthering of music theory? …who the eff do you think you are?

…to finally be the “cool” crowd? Let’s see how cool you are as soon as we get your ass stupidly drunk with our mighty tasty drink specials. Not so clever now, are you, hipster?

Nope.  Our veteran musicians know that when you play at our venue, you play because you want to play.  And how many venues in Los Angeles can honestly say that?

Ranting on the LA scene aside, some of my candidates are better than others - but I think our bar owner’s hiring strategy might have influenced my interview queue.  See, this may sound TOTALLY SEXIST, but I’m interviewing the females first.  But I have good reasons, I swear!  It’s because:

• I’ve worked with women in this underground/booking industry before, and they are less likely to have musicians and managers try to pull a “fast one” on them.  If the client party is male, they interact with a female booker in a way that tries to impress them.  If the client party is female, they interact with a female booker in a way that tries to avoid a cat fight.  Moreover, a woman will not take crap from prima donnas, and our venue could use some oomph behind our (completely sincere!) altruistic ideals.  Or at least this is what I’m hoping.
• A female has taken my position temporarily before, and the hidden secret bitch superpower she possessed turned out to be an INCREDIBLE asset to getting shit done.  See, if I put my foot down, bands throw a hissy fit.  If a lady puts her foot down, bands cast their gaze downwards and say “yes, ma’am.”
• There needs to be more women in this industry.  Seriously.  Damn sausage fest up in here. (fun note!  www.sausagefest.com exists, and is incidentally Totally Safe For Work; that is, unless you’re not down with carnivora.)
• Surveys and studies show that women may very well be better at multitasking and organizing than men are.  Well, hell, no wonder our booking was in near shambles when I was running it.
• I am not basing this on looks because I would rather she get the job done than spend it inadvertently flirting, as some employees might have done in the past.

So I’m going to put this out there on the interwebs to help me prep for interviewing people:

If you were applying for my job at the bar (booking bands and doing live sound) what would you want to know about it?

*What does one do in a rut?  Steer?  I’ll leave it up to your imagination.

*sigh*

There goes $60+.

Dammit.

One of the worst things you can do as a booking agent for a music venue is to cancel a show.

[sarcasm] And you know what’s fuhrkin awesome? [/sarcasm] I have to do just that.  Why?  Because somehow, I wasn’t paying attention, and let two resident artists — or “recurring artists” for those of you who don’t speak venue — book (ie. reserve) the same night.  What does that mean?  It means either one show gets moved and the other gets priority, or one show gets to play while the other gets straight up canceled.

No matter what happens, I am an asshole.

What makes me more like an asshole is that line from Dante in Clerks: “I’m not even supposed to be here!”

But hell, that’s true.  I’m a musician.  I’m made to hate the music business.  Sure, some musicians are great at it, but I didn’t ask for this job.  This job fell into my lap because nobody else wanted to do it and I supposedly represented this booking company in a good light.  But oh, how I loathe this job, and I hate it even more when shit just goes wrong.  I would like nothing more than to sit around singing melodies and strumming a guitar.  And I never get to do that because this job’s basic tenet is that I’m supposed to help others do just that.

Every Saturday night, I’m jealous that it’s them on stage and not me. When you play on stage, strangers come up to you, tap you on the shoulder, ask you questions about what you listen to, when and where you’re playing next, saying “good job!” in all of their empty-praise glory just to see what you’re like as a person.  And sometimes you’ll get the sincere ones who keep the conversation going, and then they actually do follow you to your next gig, and it snowballs and these people learn to sing along to lyrics that you wrote in your bedroom or your garage or on a napkin in the parking lot of a Denny’s.  Then when you run into them at parties, they make it a point to ask when your next show is so that they can show off to their friends they know a musician.  And then those friends come to your shows.

It’s not the attention that matters - it’s that you created something people get to share with each other.  A memorable melody, a night out they can recall to their friends with “Hey, remember that show when…”, a way to make their lives that much more intimate with this thing called music.

And everyone likes music.  Even deaf people like music.  No, I’m serious.  Phil, back me up here.

I used to be that music-maker, but not anymore.  This damn bar job is so f’ing thankless.  When I walk through the crowd at the venue it’s like watching cockroaches scatter in the lamplight.  Oh, they think, don’t get in the way of the sound guy, he’s doing something important so that the show goes on.  Nobody congratulates me on a job well done.  I hate having to be nice to musicians all the time even when I think they’re complete douche-cacca. And I hate being nice to the prick musicians in front of other musicians because when I’m genuinely nice to the awesome artists I do like (which is actually the vast majority of them) they think I’m being insincere.

I can’t win.

And waaaah waaaah waaah, Nico, why don’t you do something about it?

Oh, I’ve tried to find a replacement.  And now I’m trying it again.  So let’s see what you’ve got for me, Craigslist.  Get me the fack outta this rut!

But it was Vegas.  And Vegas can do a number on you if you let it.  So I definitely came back sore and with some brain damage.  I do vaguely recall having enough of a good time for people to say, “Goddam, I love this country.”

Ugh.  as;eljb awoou  h waeljuwe42 asbj;g ;jdafb.  [[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[.

One more night of sleep should help me shake this off.  And a shit ton of coffee.

Oh yeah, hey:

Vote today.

Because, goddam, don’t you love this country?

Y. Damn right you do.  So vote, goddamit.

N. You don’t?  Then do something about it and vote, you whiner!

It’s true that I’m going to this location because as opposed to certain trips for business, this one is all extracurricular.

My friends are getting married in Vegas!  Well, it’s about time, since they’ve been engaged for I think the past two years — which is a moderately short engagement in my opinion — and were together long before that, so now in their typical think-outside-the-box fashion, their wedding in Vegas mandates that everyone be dressed as an animated character.

So I’m going as Eeyore:

Holy crap from ass, this costume is hot to wear.

It’s also damn near impossible to click a mouse button when you don’t have an index finger.  Man, I can see why he was so depressed.

Happy Halloween, everyone! (And “Thanks for noticing me!”)

It’s like when you talk to your friends about their respective relationships, and they only tell you anecdotes about the what pisses them off because those are the socially acceptable vent-worthy things to talk about.  It’s not like you want to hear about the positive anecdotes at the risk of it being vomit-inducing cute or including the prospect of getting waaaaay too much information to remain comfortable.

So firstly, props to the positive bloggers out there.  You all know who you are, and time and time again I have characterized you as rays of goddamn sunshine.  That’s what you are, and that’s why I read you so often.

But on the letting-off-steam note, I’ve found that some are more skilled at venting creatively than most.  My case examples are Deutlich, Ex-Everything, and Adie.  If I had a bladder problem, your blogs would exploit it.  I mean, I sincerely hope your days are going swell, but when you hit a shit-storm, you can sure rip the universe a new one, and this often results in me wetting myself under stifled laughter.  And when you can make a man unintentionally urinate, you know you’ve got him.

…er…

Anyway, I’d like to try my hand at venting simply because I’ve never attempted, and to introduce the unprecedented-because-this-is-out-of-character-for-Nico post:

The Nicopolitan Shit List (caveat lector)

• Guys Who Don’t Call Back After Promising To Call - Not guys who don’t call me back, guys who don’t call girls back.  Seriously, how hard is this?  If you say you’re gonna call just call because otherwise you’re screwing it up for the rest of us.  And why is it that it’s you guys who get to rep our gender?  Bullshit.  And even if you’re a douchebag, isn’t being obligated to call a girl something to brag about in front of your brahs?  Give the ladies what they want.  A facking call.  Stop perpetuating the stereotype.
• Shit Talk About Los Angeles - Y’see, when you say “LA”, you should be thinking “Hollywood”, and when you say “Hollywood”, you should be thinking “Burbank”.  When we say LA, we mean Compton, Inglewood, Echo Park, Silverlake, NoHo, Glendale, Eagle Rock, Koreatown — so stop thinking we’re superficial blondes with fashion accessory dogs and a trust fund.  And yes, most of us do work in the entertainment industry, but that’s how we pay our rent and our student loans.  We’re on the frontlines of the industry, not in front of the camera.  We’re not celebrities.  We’re the people who hold boom microphones, edit film by looping a 3 second clip for hours before we move onto the next 3 seconds, and sit in years worth of traffic just so you can unwind from your day on your god damned couch in front of your idiot box.  We don’t think we’re better than you, we just think it’s bullshit that you think you’re better than what you think is us.  By the way, you’re welcome, you ungrateful potatoes.
• Inconsiderate (read: not necessarily aggressive) Drivers - Would it kill you to use your turn signals?  Because it might kill you to not.
• Hesitant Drivers - ARE YOU CHANGING LANES OR ARE YOU NOT CHANGING LANES!? THIS IS THE FREEWAY, NOT THE DRIVE-WHEN-YOU-FEEL-COMFORTABLE-WAY.
• People Who Claim To Be Sarcastic - You are so using this word correctly. In all honesty, you’re just a smartass.  Which is great!  No, seriously.  A smartass is highly prefered over a dumbass.  But it would be great if you knew the difference between smartass and sarcasm.  I’m jus’ sayin’.
• People Who Treat Customer Service Like Shit Over Whatever - Okay, so the customer is always right, but just because you’re right doesn’t mean you have to be an asshole about it.  I feel like people who raise a hissy fit because they don’t get something they want exactly the way they want it are the same people who create drama out of stupid minutia, and are just grown up versions of children who got toys for screaming bloody murder in a Toys Я Us.  You’re the kind of person who loves to tell people, “I told you so”, aren’t you?  Might I recommend considering laxatives to get that stick out of your ass?
• People Who Say They’re Random - You’re not random.  You’re actually very acceptable as far as social conventions go.  Random is the crackhead who comes to my bar to stare blankly at me no more than a foot away while I smoke a cigarette, and then lectures me about things like Ecuador, pigeon droppings, or the color yellow, who I never know plans to ask for change, stab me, or tell me a joke.  That is random.  You are just energetic and/or easily distracted.  Don’t get me wrong, I love you self-proclaimed randoms to death, but I really wish there was a better word for how you’re trying to describe yourself.  Oh, wait: idiosyncratic.
• People Who Say “Smoking Will Kill You” - Holy shit!  No way!  Really!?  I had no idea!  If you couldn’t sense the sarcasm there, let me just say that I’m not doing this to be cool or because I think I’m invincible.  Look, I am self-destructive.  Leave me be or get swallowed by the blast radius.
• Women Who Use Feminism As An Excuse To Be A Man-Hater - If you get to dismiss me at a bar with just a scoff, talk shit about me because I’m a guy, assume you know exactly what is going on in my head because “all men are the same”, belittle my intelligence because I’m nothing more than a disembodied penis, and use any poor example of my gender to exemplify me as a person, then I get to do the same to you.  Why?  Because feminism is about EQUALITY, not a unidirectional power-reversal.  It would behoove you to get to know Virginia Woolf and Kathleen Hanna.  Do your homework before you pick up your next -ism.
• Homeless People Who Treat Me Like A Vending Machine - I will give you a cigarette if you stick around for a second, I could pay for a sandwich with a credit card if you just waited for a minute, I will even listen to your complete lie of a sob story just for the sake of conversation.  You treat me like a person, I treat you like a person.  That’s how it works.  But if you’re walking away and mumbling as soon as you see me shrug, you can go fuck yourself.
• YouTube Trolls - Ugh.  You people make the English language look so fucking stupid and bigoted.  And moreover, you don’t even give back to the world by creating content, so you just litter on what’s already there.  You are the reason we don’t have as much content on the internet as we should.  You may claim that you don’t create content because you supposedly “have a life”, but then again, you are commenting on YouTube…
• Bed Time - I hated you as a child and I still hate you now.  You’re always showing up early and you’re all like, “Weaow, man, it’s three o’clock, man, nyuh nyuh,” and I’m like “Shit, dude!  This Javascript is still broken and you decide to show up now? I’m gonna feel like crap tomorrow morning, aren’t I?” and you’re all, “Yeah, man, das how Bed Time works, man, so like, brush y’teeth, and git’n bed, bleh bleh myeh.”  Screw you, bed time.  What the hell is with your speech impediment, anyway?