It was an interesting morning at the lush and lavish studios of MWS Media. First, a sprinkler valve on the expansive and well-appointed lawn burst, leading to a few hours' of repair work and no water for cooking or showering for the on-site staff. While waiting for pipe seal to dry, I pursued a very active thread at the Podcasters Yahoo Group. The essential question: would listeners donate money to offset the costs of podcasting, and would they do it often enough to avoid traditional advertising and sponsors? Or are we doomed to have commercials in our podcasts? During the course of the discussion, I checked in with the Boing Boing newsfeed, and discovered a new site called PledgeBank. Essentially, this site encourages folks to pledge their support of something on the condition that others do so as well. This dovetailed nicely with the discussion I'd been having all morning. So here it is: I will contribute $5.00 each to five podcasters who are not supported by paid sponsors or paid advertising... if and only if twenty five other podcasters or listeners to podcasts do the same thing before July 14th, 2005. Who's game? Full details.

Well, the latest song I've put to the Garageband test has finished its run... "The Western Lands" ended up in the 65th percentile in the Acoustic category... which is actually just a hair higher than my last best rated song, "Elvis C." Here are some of my favorite reviewer comments for "The Western Lands" "Have I missed the point somewhere?" "Song is painfully sincere." "The lyrics lacked any real depth, and definitely need to be rethoughtout." "Oh my what a performance... I felt that... good job man... should be signed.. I thnk that if you should continue with that performance you should get signed pretty soon.." "could be a nice publicity for cocacola..or 7 up..." "I commend you on a seemingly effortless well made song." "You begin to lose sight of what is going on here, and that is, duh::: Music" "this is one of those songs that was onriginally done in the studio with electirics and drums and the whole kit and kaboodle and then the band felt like doing an acoustic cover of it." Note: all quotes pasted without correcting anything... the errors are the reviewers. So now, if you wanna hear the song, hop on over to…

So I was just checking out the computer, making sure my webcast stream was pumping out the tunes nice and regular-like, when I saw I had a listener! It was one Mark Mason, just hanging out and making requests at DIYER. So I got on the mic and had my first bona fide experience of webcasting when I knew, absolutely for certain, that someone out there was listening. It was pretty cool. I put together a little set, acknowledged Mark's requests, and had the unique experience of talking to someone without their having any possibility of responding... except that I knew he was listening. That made it really cool. Thanks for listening!

My friend has a birthday today. I met her when we were teenagers. We fell in teenage love. It was heavy and full of drama and my tendencies toward martyrdom meshed nicely with her mental illness. We were a manga soap opera before any of us knew of such things; we were a Terry Moore graphic novel and she was Francine and Katchoo both depending on the day and where her brain chemistry was. We had adventures. As we grew older and miles separated us, I often worried about my friend. Her adventures away from me took place in Adulthood, where things are more dangerous and the implications, longer lasting. She did amazingly strong things that I'm still so proud of, and she made the kind of mistakes we all make. I celebrated her triumphs and fretted over her defeats. She sent me letters boobytrapped with glitter and confetti. Finally, entropy contributed to our losing touch with one another, and a misunderstanding reinforced that. It was years before the Internet brought us back in contact. Lo and behold, my friend is alive and well. She's a poet and an artist and so brilliantly creative I wish I could take a…

Of all the people I've played with over the years, only two bands ever continued on to make music as more or less the same group after I'd left. Running Erin, now performing as Planet Roy, is the latest. I just received their CD in the mail. Listening to the songs, about a third of which were played when I was in the band, was a singular experience. Rather like hearing a version of Running Erin from an alternate universe. The alternate universe illusion is reinforced by the liner notes, where three years of the band's history (my three years) is expunged like the names of dissidents from a Soviet Union textbook. If all you knew about Gary and Erin's musical history was what you read in that jewel case, you'd never know they had a different bass player, and a different drummer. Of course, I understand the need to compress that time in the interest of creating a new identity for Planet Roy. It was a wise choice to skip everything that was not connected to the band they are now. But it's weird to be written out of history like that! My ego is twitching. Another strange moment…

It's all over the blogsphere today: Infinity Broadcasting, owned by Viacom, is going to change the format of an underperforming AM radio station in the San Francisco area to all podcasts. They're calling it "Open Source Radio." Don't you believe it. From their Terms of Service: You also grant the Site, its owner and operator, parent company(s), affiliates, successors and assigns, the royalty-free, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive right (including any moral rights) and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, retransmit, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, communicate to the public, publicly perform or display such content (in whole or in part), and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, for so long as any rights exist in such content. Translation: they can use whatever you upload to their site (like podcasts!) in any way they chose, whenever, forever, and you won't get paid for it. And no, you won't get paid for your podcast being broadcast on their AM station, or on their webcast. Not a dime for helping fill twenty four hours of airtime every single day. But they will have advertising! Nice one, Infinity / Viacom: prey…

So, I don't know if it's much of a secret, how I feel about Ray Bradbury. His R Is For Rocket is among the first books I remember reading in my life... and Dandelion Wine, S is For Space, The Illustrated Man, and The Martian Chronicles are in that primordial reading list, too, along with Edgar Rice Burroughs and Isaac Asimov. I've referred to Ray Bradbury as my "story father" in some places, and here's what I mean: I don't write like him, so much... I have my own voice, such as it is. But he's one of the biggest reasons I started writing in the first place. He's the first author who gave me a sense of wonder. I've met him a couple of times, in the early nineties, when he was only in his seventies, and while I've had other opportunities, I keep those two meetings in my heart with a kind of iconic fondness, if that's the right way to say it. Brave Men Run is for him, among others. Lest you think this is some kind of eulogy before the fact, it's not -- but when that sad, sad day comes, you can bet I'll have…

Today, the last day of a quasi-vacation I took from my Cursed Day Job, I was fairly productive on non-MWS Media stuff! First of all: I've started messing around with Sonar, in the eventual hope that I'll start laying down some tracks. I discovered a couple of things: 1) I haven't played bass, guitar, or sung in some time, and it shows. 2) I don't suck as bad at those three things as I thought I would after all this time. It's been nearly a year since I've performed anywhere in public! I do need to work at understanding the recording process (again.) Whatever I learned so many years ago is pretty much gone out of my head. Also, I'm lazy about it. This explains why most of my recorded work is either live or very, very lo-fi... I also got some writing in today -- almost 2,000 words on Brave Men Run, which is a re-write / completion of the old Sovereign Serials tale of "The Cat." I'm about 3/4 of the way through rewriting what I'd originally written, and the word count has surpassed the original work by about 15,000 words. There's a lot of fleshing out going…

Well, in about fifteen minutes John Kerry's going to allow for the fact that just slightly better than half of this country prefers the morals of the god of a sheep herder over sense, progress, and security. We lost. And we will lose: more lives in Iraq and Afganistan and probably here, too... we will lose the germ of scientific progress. We will lose the direction reason and method can provide. Last time this happened, it was 1985. I was seventeen years old and full of ire and indignation for our President. Now, I'm 37, and I can feel the spirit coming on. It's time to get active. It's time to spit in the face of the majority, with our words, with our actions, with our buying habits, and with our votes. Maybe, if the right situation comes up, it's time to serve. Fuck. Well. I expect a lot of good music to come out of this. I mean it. Sharpen your pencils and put on fresh strings, punx... it's time to get serious again.