"So make your record, believe you�re still a superstar. But know that almost nobody cares...Then you�ve got the fact that no one expects the album to be good. Because most records just aren�t. So even if it is good, you have a hard time spreading the message, because people aren�t paying attention. So, make music if you want to. But know that it�s no longer an easy way to fame or riches. Follow your heart, build a following, play live. And grow patiently. Fame, ubiquity? That�s for somebody else."

There was a time when I wanted "fame and riches" and hoped they'd come from some musical project that I could do or be involved in. I was young when I felt that way. I think that's somewhat typical of young folks, certainly in America these days - you dream of stardom because you feel if you're recognized by everyone, that you'll fit in, you'll be loved, you'll matter - your life has a purpose. I'm not so young anymore, and now fame and the trappings thereof aren't something I'm looking for. But would I like to find an audience for the work I'm doing? You betcha. I've written before that I am trying to create work that I can share with people. I don't just create stuff to please myself, though that is always the first goal. In fact, you won't get to hear something I've done if I don't like it first. I don't need magazine covers or limousines, but I would like to find an audience for the work. And as Lefsetz says, that gets harder and harder.

Today someone from Holland bought the entire Wonky Records catalog. That made me a happy guy this morning. That's all I can do, reach one person at a time.

Darin is mixing our new album like a crazed fiend right now. The fact that the mixing of this project happened to coincide with him being on his extended sabbatical from day-jobbery is working in our favor; he's able to spend an incredible amount of time on the project as a result. Tonight, I expect to be driving home with a disc containing candidates for six final mixes of the 12 total tracks. So, nearly halfway there, whoa-OH! LIVING ON A PR-... uh.

Sorry.

I'm also seeing progress on the album art front, hopefully it won't be too long before we can share some of that with you, as well. I'm going all out on the package for this one.

Why? Because it could be the last package I do for a long time. Maybe the last ever! Lefsetz certainly thinks so. We shall see.

There's probably going to be a short disc of B-sides and some other odds-n-ends coming out of all this as well. It won't be packaged with Life Like Luster to make a "special edition", but I think we'll do a thing where if you pre-order LLL before the release date, you get the B-sides disc free. After that we'll charge a coupla bucks for it.

We were getting all excited a couple of weeks ago when I was thinking of shooting a live DVD later this year, but then I watched some live footage we have of us, and was struck by how not-very-good I was in it, and now I've cooled to the idea. Darin still really wants us to do it. We may yet. But I have to wait and see what happens in 2007 after the album is finally out.

I AM very excited to work on some music videos for LLL, though. We did some test footage at the rehearsal space a couple of weeks ago, and while it's unlikely we'll use much (or any?) of it, it was an informative experience.

I hope to have a part 3 of the online documentary up soon.

I can't believe that it will be March already next week.

I went and watched Ghost Rider at the Cinerama last night. The ticket was free, thanks to some holiday AMC gift cards. When I was younger I was the custodian of my Dad's comic collection, and Ghost Rider was a favorite title. Such a bizarre character, ridiculous, really. But at the time, I was a young budding Catholic (and eventual altar boy) and any story that had SATAN as the bad guy freaked my ass out. Now that I don't believe in that pointy-tailed rapscalion anymore, both Ghost Rider and any other SATAN-themed entertainment (like say, The Exorcist) all feels a little laughable. So I knew that Ghost Rider wasn't going to be good.

But you know, for the first hour, I almost thought they'd pulled off a B-movie classic. Seeing GR in full hellfire-regalia, riding his Hellbike right up the side of a skyscraper, and giving the finger to pursuing cops as he drove away on the surface of a river (stuff he never did in the comic) was all sort of campy fun. Nic Cage actually had an interesting take on playing Johnny Blaze, and I was enjoying myself.

For the first hour. And then - it all completely falls apart in the second. It's like the writers literally stopped trying, like they wrote a bunch of script pages, threw them up in the air, picked them up, and shot them in that order. Whatever "rules" the first hour set up are completely ignored and refuted in hour 2.

And lovely, lovely, lovely Eva Mendes is horrible in the movie. She looked fantastic, her skin fairly GLOWED, but my. Goodness.

That was some bad acting. The young girl who played her character as a teen-ager was way better. That would kinda suck, being upstaged by the actor playing you at a younger age, with far less screen time. Poor Eva. Has she ever been good in anything? I can't remember ever seeing her in other stuff, even though I've heard of her before. I guess I should just be grateful that her character never met a button-down shirt that she could manage to keep buttoned above her glorious cleavage.

But $50 million plus earned over the weekend says that GR2 will almost certainly be coming along. Hell, they made three Blade movies, and I never even heard of that character.

Anyway, speaking of the titanic struggle between good and evil... Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan continue their debate on religion (Andrew for, Sam against). Yep, it's still going, and it's so much fun to read. They got the big brains and they know how to use 'em.

I don't care about the Oscars anymore, though I will say that there are plenty of flicks nominated that I liked a lot. I didn't see Dreamgirls because I will never see Dreamgirls, because I hate movie musicals. Blech. I forced myself to go watch Chicago a couple of years back because I knew it was going to win the Best Picture award, and at that time I felt I should be seeing the winners, despite my deep dislike of the musical genre. I hated Chicago, and swore then that I wouldn't make that mistake again. So, sorry, Dreamgirls.

I'm sure I'll make a mention of the odd new movie now and again around here. I've recently seen David Lynch's Inland Empire and that Jennifer Garner chick-flick Catch And Release. Shockingly, I much preferred the Garner movie, and I say that as a dyed-in-the-wool Lynch fan. IE just bored the piss out of me after a while, though I will say there are lots of worthy individual moments. The movie is nearly three hours of opaque weirdness that has no through-line whatsoever. I could have handled a 2-hour version. But I guess I'm one of those curmudgeons who need a plot with my servings of avant-garde.

The Garner flick on the other hand is nearly a completely-forgettable date movie, but I'm on the "Bristow High" right now, having just blasted through the five seasons of Alias on DVD, and CAR also features an affable turn from Kevin Smith playing essentially, himself. I really like Smith "as a guy" and find his movies uneven and good-hearted. Seems like he'd be a fun dude to shoot the breeze with. He's also got a great blog going. So I went to see the movie to bask in Jen Garner's hotness and have a laugh at Kevin Smith, and I wasn't disappointed on those fronts. It's not a great movie.

But it's more fun to watch than Inland Empire is.

My dad and stepmom are in town this weekend. Looking forward to seeing them, albeit briefly.

Darin has officially begun the final mixes of Life Like Luster. I'm driving down there tonight to give a listen to what he's got so far.

To quote that nameless Star Wars pilot:
Almost... THEEERRRRRE.

So for the first time in memory, I did NOT watch last night's Superbowl. My normal Bowl-watching compadres are currently honeymooning in Hawaii, and I decided to not work any of my other possible "Bowl-watching contacts" to secure a seat in front of some large TV device to see the Big Game. The two teams in the contest were not ones that appealed to me, and frankly, the NFL has kinda lost me as a consumer over the last few years, along with most other pro sports.

I wish you could download the games from iTunes the way you can with prime-time TV programming. iTunes vids come completely commercial-free, and it's just fantastic. Would you not pay a little premium to get an "action-only" version of the Superbowl, dodging all the advertising? I would. Even with teams I don't care about. Not being constantly bombarded by advertising is the biggest benefit to not paying for cable TV, or not listening to commercial radio. Sure, there's ads all over the Web now, and they're certainly getting more annoying, but in general they aren't accompanied by a REALLY LOUD AND INSISTENT SOUNDTRACK. In the building where I currently work, the elevators have little monitors hooked up that show little CNN-like screens of factoids, stock market tidbits, entertainment gossip, local weather. Today when I was riding downstairs to walk somewhere for a bite to eat, there was an AD for a place to go watch the Superbowl ads.

Today, even advertising is... advertised. This is just... retarded. You know it, I know it.

I hear Prince was awesome, though. It's gotta be on YouTube by now, so maybe I'll check out his performance later. It's funny when someone like Prince shows up and blows people's frickin' minds by, you know, being a GREAT MUSICIAN AND ENTERTAINER, and everyone is SO SURPRISED.

Hel-LOOOOO! That's what being a famous performer USED TO REQUIRE: GENUINE, UNDENIABLE TALENT! Prince has always had it. Jessica Simpson will never have it.

And people are shocked, SHOCKED?

Is no one but me paying attention?

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Here's something weird I did on Saturday: I went to an acting class.

Weird, huh? Yeah, I thought so, too. It's nothing too crazy, a once-a-week "Beginning Acting" class that runs all of five weeks over on the UW campus. There were like 13 of us students total. There was a time in high school that I seriously thought I was going to pursue acting as a career, but then I heard my friends crude songs that they'd written and saw their bands play, and music took over my focus.

Maybe it's because we're finally wrapping up the latest music project, but lately I've been feeling a really strong need to be "artistic" in other ways that don't involve music. Not that I don't want to write songs anymore or anything, I can't imagine a reality where I stopped making music. I've just... I don't know what it is. I'm just feeling a calling in other directions these days, and like most such "callings", it feels pretty unspecific right now. People who've known me since I was young know that for my first fifteen years or so I used to draw and paint constantly. I got a guitar and that stuff just stopped.

Well, now I want to paint again, too.

Then Friday night I watched this fantastic DVD and got all crazy inspired for video/film ideas. I spent a lot of last week working on that "Part 2" of the HZ video doc (thanks for all the positive feedback on that, BTW), so those juices were already flowing. So the other thing I did this weekend was make a bunch of video tests for ideas I have for a couple of "music videos" we're going to put together for the Half Zaftig album. I set my digital camera on a tripod and pointed it out my window, and took like 40 shots of the Seattle skyline last night as the sun went down, then dumped those into the video software sequentially to make a "time-lapse" shot of the city. You'll see it in Part 3 of the doc, obviously underway (and it won't take 10 months for me to post it). And the other video tests, which will never see the proper light of day (you'd think I was out of my mind if you saw them) at least proved to be worthy ideas, so we'll experiment with those. And on Saturday night I went to the Columbia City theater here in town (like 2 blocks from the Beta's house!) to help Darin shoot video of a performance of a friend's band, and that was a lot of fun (though I really have to remember to bring ear plugs to these video shoots). Darin lets me be "the roving guy at the front of the stage" with one of his really nice cameras, so I'm all about getting closeups of the players, trying to highlight the guitar solas, drum faces, etc. Then Darin takes all the footage home and cuts it together. I'm gonna go with him on another shoot again in a coupla weeks, it's always fun, and in addition it's great experience working a super-great camera. I look forward to seeing how these shoots turn out. As I have now well learned, the editing is the hardest part - and also the most rewarding. I love, love, love the editing. It reminds me a lot of making a record. Taking all the little bits you have and trying to combine them in a way that "tells a story." That theater we shot in Saturday night was AWESOME - you'd never know how cool a room it is from the street. I'm gonna contact management there about seeing if we can rent the room on an off-day and use it as a shooting location for a Half Zaftig video. Great big proscenium stage with red velvet curtains, huge high ceiling (we could even do a CRANE shot! BOING!!!!). Darin says the place looks awesome on video.

Oh, and on eBay yesterday I scored a Super 8 camera and projector. THAT'S gonna add some interesting variables to the forthcoming video projects!

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So where am I going with all this stuff? Can't tell ya yet, I don't know. I'm just following the ideas as they come to me, and seeing where they lead. I had FUN at that acting class, even if it was just a teeny-little-nothing-really. I got SO EXCITED working on my little ideas for a video, and the ideas kept coming, faster and faster. Certainly these aren't the things that normally occur to me, but you have to flow with what Nature rolls ya. I told my Dad last October that I felt like "a chapter was coming to a close in my life" without really knowing what I meant by saying it. I still don't know, but what I do understand is that the next one will be just as dominated by the pursuit of creative works as the last one was. I just can't say what those works will be right now.

Warning to family members who may have young children about: there is some PG-13 language in this installment.