If you’re seeing this in a browser, I would also like to direct your attention to the little box in my sidebar that requests sharing music.

Music sharing–in the literal sense and not the elusive incarnation that the music industry can’t seem to figure out how to harness–just got a lot more social, which is the direction I have so desperately wanted it to move for such a long time. I am particularly interested in how SoundCloud offers listeners a chance to be a part of it and lets them COMMENT on the SONG ITSELF. Just mouse over my track above and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Where before it was kind of a pain to try to get people to listen to each others’ music, I think this SoundCloud contraption can really help to change the game. They’re not a game-changer in and of themselves, but they will definitely help move it along if enough musicians catch on.

But at this point I can’t help but feel there is one perplexing thing about me blogging this just now. The company has existed since 2007 so why hadn’t anyone told me about this earlier? Or even linked me to the SoundCloud blog which is chock full of links to useful web-based music tools? Or that SoundCloud hooks up into my other favorite social networking sites pretty easily?

In any case, it’s encouraging to see that collaboration among musicians has been getting the attention of people who are building tools to facilitate music-making. Being able to give each other listens and peer advice from all over the planet is more important than we give it credit. Sure, we’ve had YouTube musicians (which, let’s face it, are 92.4% comprised of acoustic guitars), music software message board communities, and MySpace for a long time, but I like seeing web-based tools go up in the name of music community as the primary interest and not just the after-thought. Drawing attention directly to the music makes the site feel like it has a point and a purpose instead of being just a digital web playground where artists and labels and management and venues litter flyers all over the place.

Neglecting the obvious social networks for music or musical sectors of existing social networks, I think that moving forward I’m definitely going to be using SoundCloud for musicianship and ReverbNation for promoting.

Pretty excited about this. Perhaps excited enough to be motivated to finally getting around to writing some new music.

Now, the next task is to find the right listeners.

Sometimes,
you might feel that you are not ready to take on the world.

Stretch, breathe, crack your knuckles,
and concentrate.

The world has less on you than it thinks
because
it’s a cocky asshole.

Oh,
and bob and weave.

-nicopolitan

Anchors

So, I’ve already covered how blogging in an active community sense will land you in a city you’ve never been, will drop an excess of 25 (give or take) BFFs into your life, and will make you perpetually a drinker.  But what was really nice an unexpected until about a couple of days or so before I got here was to discover that one of my best friends from college was willing to make a 3 hour road trip to this city just to be able to hang out.  After all, it’s so rare that I’m in this part of the world that an opportunity to connect in meat-space with old friends.

And even that much planning was spur-of-the-moment.

Essentially, the conversation over email was:

Maren: Hey!  What have you been up to lately?
Nico: I’m going to Chicago!
Maren: No way!  When?
Nico: June x to June y
Maren: Cool!  That’s really close to where Shaun and I live!  We’ll meet you there!
Nico: What?  Really?  Awesome!

I believe that may be paraphrased but there’s little more to it than that.  And as a result, my college friends got to witness firsthand how close people get to each other from simply owning blogs.

And it is always great to see people from the past if you’d spent a significant amount of time with them.  It makes sure that they don’t get swallowed by the past, and always stay in the present.

This, of course, means my next mission is to visit Fred in the land of the Rising Sun like Stuart did not long ago.  I’ll think about that when my bank account recovers from this series of trips.

And I fully intend to, and have no idea when, but I’d honestly like to see Halifax, D. C., Johannesburg, Florida, Nashville, among many, many others.

My point is, this generation is able and probably more willing than that of others’ to drop anchors in many parts of the world, and more quickly and efficiently than given credit.  And it’s not even for any practical reasons. It’s just a side effect of living life publicly on the internet.

We are world class networkers.

Which makes me wonder why our modern aristocracy doesn’t take up blogging more often. At least they’d have the money to visit the friends they might make.

Incidentally

I will admit that I almost pooped myself a little in reaction to see how excited phampants would get that, without me really being a part of his intricate and very-different-from-the-blogosphere video editing community that exists on YouTube, I had inadvertently seen one of his videos. Many high-fives ensued upon this discovery.

There’s a logical progression for this. As you probably might know, we all have friends who pass us links to videos. Out of force of habit, I tend to click on every-goddam-link that comes to me even if it means I’m getting rickroll’d. Why? Because I’m an information junkie. I can handle lots of video links, articles, and music.

If you’re in your 20s, there’s a good chance you’re an information junkie, too.

And if you get along with other information junkies, you know that one video leads to another. And one brief quip about Easter will inevitably lead to Wiki’ing the pagan holiday Ēostre, Googling for the craziest decorated eggs you can find, and of course, YouTube searching the term “Peeps”, because we all know about how we’d like to see peeps in a microwave but we’d rather someone else did the work for us and so kindly uploaded that video to the internet.

Okay I got a little of track there.

The point of this was more along the themes of “we live in the future” as I say almost on a daily basis. It was Katie Cat that identified that phampants’s excitement is probably natural, if you think about it.  As a photographer and graphic designer, she would be just as stoked if someone she didn’t know, who had flown across the country in the name of the internet, had also said, “Oh, wait, I’ve seen that work at [x].”

And it’s probably the same for my bloggy-musician friends as well.

And this is the importance of incidence to bloggers.

Alright, I’ll start from the top:

I am under the impression that there are two kinds of blogs.  There are the blogs created to be journals or news feeds or editorial, to detail things of themed ideas (eg., the gaming industry, celebrities, human rights, blogs about blogging, etc.). And then, there are what I am heretofore calling the escribitionists.

As you might expect from this form of journaling, there’s a strengthened sense of self-awareness that comes from blogging.  It’s not like we’re rattling on about our lives oblivious to the idea that we might be a little self-indulgent.  Popular techniques to diffuse this perceived self-indulgence include but are not limited to self-deprecation or hyperbolic megalomania (you know, because it’s funny).

So because of this self-awareness, there’s a strong need to diffuse it. Having long been trying to be an escribitionst myself, I get the feeling that escribitionists’ interests span much further than simply blogging.  Just a hunch.

If I had known all along that peoples’ interests span much further than what they appear to write about, and my company is constantly looking for new ways to organize and classify blogger research, then why had I not considered building a semantic tool for tagging blogs?  Or better yet, just open up an account on a semantic bookmarking site from a company that already exists?  Which are free?  And private? And integrate with my web browser?

Oh, fuck me, this shit is easier than I thought.  I guess I just realized I have suddenly created some work for myself.

Anyway, here comes the point:

The way to connect to with the blogger that is an escribitionist is fairly simple — we give you resources to get in touch with us all over the damn place.  But, if you really want to connect with us as people and loyal resources, it certainly helps if can provide that incidence.  There may be some caveats as far as what lines you should and should not cross so as not to be creepy.  But on the whole escribitionists, especially in a group, are more powerful voices than they first appear.  And once you get that trust, you get to participate in our economy mentioned in my last post.

This isn’t a trend.  This is basic addition.

It’s interesting that even though I hadn’t caught up reading all of the 20SB Meetup Attendees’ blogs before I got here, I knew from previous various networking events that bloggers are the type of people to never let me down.  That is, in getting some well anticipated pizza, being surprised at how much people knew about each other without having actually yet met in person, being fully mindful of recent news (here, here, here, and of course here), and the whole-drinking-while-doing-everything aspect; it’s weird to feel like you “belong” in a place you’ve never stepped foot; and instantaneously, no less. You’d think that one would have to work really hard to make these kinds of connections.  Maybe the work is being done for us now.

We live in the future, after all.

Proof of this is in the fact that in the early evening last night I basically wandered alone around downtown Chicago last night, really goddam fairly drunk the entire time, reassured that when the sun was good and gone that I’d have new friends by the time I passed out needed to get to bed. And I was totally right.  These people whose phone numbers I did not have, whom I had never met in person, whose voices I could not discern (except maybe that of Courtney’s), welcomed me with open arms.

But how does that factor into my sub-headline?

During my last cigarette of last night, dshan and I talked about what you’d expect from people who are really into blogging: social media.  Twitter notified us all that Michael Jackson / Ed McMahon / Farrah Fawcett had passed on from this mortal coil before any of us saw any headlines on the television. Facebook status comments make it feel like you’re never too far away from friends’ and acquaintances’ clever quips.  But what’s interesting about all of this is it has led to a reputation based economy, whereby proper citations and attributions are really what count in this realm, and simple participation is how you get involved in the game.  (But how to translate that to actual currency?  That’s probably the next purple cow.  I am probably not the best source for figuring that out.)

But it occurs to me today, in brief retrospect and while putting away some web work I planned on doing during this trip, that the reputation-based economy is also as D put it last night: it’s based on trust. Which actually is directly proportional to how real-world finances work (and he should know).

So that means that linking to, replying or RT @, playing in the forums with, commenting on, and subscribing to another person’s net identity; this is how our generation generates trust.

We do live in the future.  And in this future, we are apparently participating in a currency exchange where character counts for a lot.

And what can you gain from participating in this economy?

Well, the opportunity to network with some really genuinely good people is a nice start, isn’t it?

That’s a rant for another time…

But I still need to leave LA.  Not just because I would love to see Chicago, or because I am stoked to hit up NYC again, but because life has been getting stagnant.  No new music to report.  Dearth of blog posts.  No new exciting freelance projects.  Work is a regular-kind-of-busy for agency life.

Maybe my desire to leave the city is melodramatic.

I think what has been really getting me down is that I’m really fucking itchy.


Ladies and Gentlemen, I have a flea problem.

And it is making me murderously insane.

I have an idea who is responsible.  There is this fluffy grey cat that likes to hang out on my porch in late afternoons.  He’s got one bad eye that looks like it came from a scratch in a cat-on-cat fight.  There’s no collar on him, so I don’t think he has an owner.

Come to think of it, the cat kind of looks like a wandering, vagrant badass.  If he were able to talk, I imagine he’d rasp as fiercely as a crazy war veteran. “I’ve seen some things, man, and some stuff.  I wouldn’t recommend it!”

In any case that’s my closest culprit, especially since the infestation seems to have stemmed from the porch itself.  I can’t smoke cigarettes out there without 4-5 of these little motherfuckers hitching a ride on my Nico pants.  It also seems they’ve been tracked into the house because I’ve set up a flea trap in my kitchen and I’ve caught 5, and even as I constantly flea bomb my living room and bedroom, I still wake up with new bites.

All of the DIY strategies have been exhausted, have yielded slain fleas, but no matter how many times I repeat the process, I’ve still got a flea population. I’ve finally made my landlady privy to the situation and she’s going to hire a professional. And she should be concerned since she lives in the same building.

There. This is the reason for my silence. It’s very difficult to have my usual positive disposition when I want to tear my fucking flesh off of my body.

Chicago and New York, I’m hoping you will get my mind off this.

Popular ways to post about a birthday are to re-cap life lessons or events that I’m probably going to want to remember in years to come.

Ok, fine, a list. What did this Gemini do at age 25?

• Fell in love with New York City (okay, Brooklyn)
• Survived layoffs.  Twice.  I am one lucky (or skilled?) sonofabitch
• Moved agencies, and subsequently, figured out a career
• Finally created an exit plan to stop working at the bar
• Went to a friend’s wedding dressed as Eeyore and immediately following, had my sobriety beaten to a pulp by that which is the city of Las Vegas
• Became, yet again, a musician in a local band; got that band to realize we are some of the best friends we’ll ever have
• Learned not to dance like no one is watching, but to dance like people are watching, and to not give a rat’s ass what they think; because if they are too busy judging me then, clearly, I am already having more fun than they are
• Became acutely attuned to recognizing that there are some ladies to whom I may sometimes be attracted who are really bad ideas to date; learned to take action accordingly
• Lived, honest-to-God, with an ex-porn star (OMAGAD I haven’t told that story yet!  I will in the next post)
• Networked, networked, networked

I’d say that’s pretty eventful.

Here’s to 26.

And here goes nothing.

But Sunday is rehearsal day, and I’m bringing something new to rehearsal.

My Dad bought a guitar he never plays, so he’s letting me use it provided I swap it with the guitar I’ve been using for the past 5 years.

I’ve been playing one of these:

I have loved the Telecaster to death.  I named it Pandora when I first got it because I snagged it right before my college band was actually getting a lot of attention thanks to the legwork of our lead singer’s work in the local music biz.  He pounded the pavement and got us at least 3 shows a month.  He booked us a tour.  He was a generally good leader.  (He’s in this fucking magnificent band now).

And just like any musician who believes their musical instruments possess a kind of “soul”, this guitar definitely influenced my playing style.  I won’t try to describe it because even though I’m a blogger, that’s a little too self-indulgent.  Not like I think I’m hot shit, it’s just that every musician can kind of describe what they’re doing pretty easily.

BUT NOW I’ve swapped it with the guitar my Dad barely touched.  It’s one of these:

Yes, that is a Gibson SG ‘61 re-issue. And yes, it will get a name, but it needs to see the stage before that happens.

And yes, I am ready to bring the fucking rock, motherfuckers.

Though I usually don’t end posts this way because well wishes are Angelaboration’s gig, I really feel like I should wish this really, really good feeling upon anyone reading this:

May you wake the fucking dead by rocking the goddam daylight out of whatever you can burn in your blast radius.

Report back to me after the weekend.

\m/

:P

Nico: But I had such a good day! I have to tell people about it.

Muse: At 3 in the morning?

Nico: I just got off work at the bar.  I always get back at 3 AM on Saturday nights.

Muse: Aren’t you tired?

Nico: No, I took a nap earlier.

Muse: But you’re on your feet all night when you work at the bar.

Nico: I didn’t notice, really.

Muse: Was it a good show?

Nico: Yeah, the music was good. But that’s what made it a good day.

Muse: So what made it a good day?

Nico: A few things. First, I woke up unreasonably early. I wasn’t sore from dancing or hungover from drinking or fuzzy from getting baked the night before. All I did Friday night was hole up in my room, do a little bit of work, cleanup my computers, wrote a little bit of music and then I went to bed. I went to bed early. Early for my standards, rather. And then I woke up at 8:00 AM. The time I would usually be up for work.

Muse: I guess that’s what happens when you treat a weekend night like a weeknight. Does that surprise you?

Nico: Friday nights I’m usually making an effort to go out. It was nice because the night was for me. I spent it alone.

Muse: Wait, don’t you live alone?

Nico: Yeah, but even then, I take work home and when I’m not working on that, I’m working on some extracurricular freelance thing. Even when I’m alone, my time is spent on other people.

Muse: I thought you liked freelancing.

Nico: I do, when I actually have time for it.

Muse: Why weren’t you working on other people’s projects on Friday?

Nico: Because it was Friday. That’s the one night of the week I do anything for myself so I usually try to make it count. Ordinarily, I like to help people when I can.

Muse: It’s really more of a “must” than a “like to” from where I stand. You’re a little OCD like that.

Nico: Point taken.

Muse: So what made Saturday a good day?

Nico: Well, I got up early, made pancakes and ground some coffee, and then I did nothing.

Muse: “Nothing”?

Nico: I mean I lay on my bed and listened to music for 5 hours. And even then it was only 2 PM by the time I decided to get up and do something.

Muse: Wasn’t there a time in your life when that wasn’t so out of the ordinary?

Nico: I believe those were the semester breaks while I was in college.

Muse: No, I don’t think so — I mean I’m sure you did that then, too, but college was very influenced by pot.

Nico: Oh, so you’re asking me when is the last time I specifically just lay down and listened to music?

Muse: Yeah, without any … additives.

Nico: …You know what, I can’t even remember.

Muse: And how did it make you feel to do that on Saturday?

Nico: Much better. Better than I have been in a long time.

Muse: Are you going to do this more often?

Nico: I probably won’t. I don’t get a lot of time to myself these days, you know.

Muse: And how does that make you feel?

Nico: A little worn out just thinking about it, to be honest.

Muse: How about this: you are always dividing your free time between clients and working on stuff for the agency. What if you took on one more client?

Nico: You need me to debug something for you?

Muse: No no, I’m saying you should think of yourself as a client if that’s what it will take to get you to feel better.

Nico: Isn’t that just “me” time? I’m fine with cigarette breaks.

Muse: As of now you kind of suck at partitioning off time for you. If you pay as much attention to yourself as much as you pay attention to work, then just maybe you’ll learn how to take care of yourself.

Nico: Fair enough. But other than to feel good, which I find to be a little indulgent, what is the point of that?

Muse: You went to work today, right?

Nico: Yes.

Muse: At a job you usually loathe.

Nico: Ok.

Muse: And today was still a good day.

Nico: Right.

Muse: Good work requires good workers, and good workers work well because they’re happy. Make happiness a priority. And maybe then most of your days will be as good as today. “Workaholic” shares its suffix with “alcoholic” for a reason. Moderation is key here.

Nico: I feel like people have been telling me this for a while.

Muse: Well, you are a stubborn asshole.

Nico: Alright, geez. But what makes you think I’m going to listen to you where others have failed?

Muse: I think it’s because you have to listen to me. I’m the muse.

Nico: You’ve got me there.