Resolution: Actually update my blog

With the year coming to an end, I think it's time I get my act in order and start updating this blog again.

Quick updates and thoughts since my last post in Feb. 2008:

1. Still working at the Las Vegas Sun and living, therefore, in Las Vegas. On Dec. 18, I was mesmerized by the six-inch blanket of snow that covered everything. Tree branches groaned and broke under the weight of the powdery sleet, yet I stupidly walked from the office to the restaurants across the street for dinner. As I waited for my take-out order to be filled, the snow had started to fall again. As my overweight frame made its way back to the warmth of the Sun building, I looked like an out-of-place Yeti trudging beneath a sidewalk lined with frosted palm trees.

2. Someday I will finish my record. Waiting until February when I hope to buy some new equipment (a better analog-digital interface without built in microphone preamps is high on the list; I bought a nice tube microphone preamp that I'd like to start using).

3. SNDVegas went well. The highlight of the whole affair was when I gave a "Team Gaspard" shirt to TBall, who immediately paraded around in the orange monstrosity in front of the "Gaspard" as in Bill. "Take it off," he said with some obscenities before stomping off. Also, had a great time hanging out with all the Mercsters, past and present, that were in attendance. The place does get into your DNA.

4. Even with all the financial woes in the journalism industry -- now the New York Times has to worry about its debt and the Washington Post Co. is trying to figure out what to do with the struggling Newsweek -- it's an exciting time to be working for a print product. A lot of the Tribune redesigns crackle with a lot of energy, and the possibility of a very different Detroit Freep in the near future is plenty thrilling.

5. I am now on Twitter.

6. That she of the buzz, Tina Brown, continues work on her latest venture, the daily online magazine The Daily Beast (so named for the fictional 'paper in Evelyn Waugh's satirical novel Scoop). I've found it to be a must in the morning for quickly browsing the news. Their aggregations are smart, and some of their contributing writers -- Tucker Carlson, Stanley Crouch, Brown herself, Jessi Klein -- are fantastic. Downsides? Editing of original content can be scattershot from day to day, and there's an overwhelming fascination with the rich and powerful. Do we need a story about how a woman landed a sugar daddy? Even with all the useful analysis, there's a salaciousness and upper crust fascination that is just so jejune in the final days before 2009.

7. Bay Area singer-songwriter Brittany Shane, has put out a new record, Have Heart Live Young that fulfills the promise of the EP she made a year ago. She's added some new sounds into her song arsenal, including girl group-style arranging and melodies, more complex vocal harmonies and a more disciplined approach to her vocal lines to augment her sturdy folk rock sound. There are also some awesome musicians on the album, including guitarist Michael Lockwood, who plays on Aimee Mann's records. Anyway, it's been great fun hearing Brittany develop her songwriting since we first met about four to five years ago.

8. This is an old post by now, but Marc Myers of Jazzwax blasted the Kennedy Center for honoring the Who with its lifetime achievement award while neglecting American jazz musicians. While I have none of his prejudice against rock music and the Who (he argues that their impact on music is negligible; perhaps so if one is considering the actual internal workings of the whole of music, but their societal impact and influence on rock and roll is quite large) nor do I consider the rehashing of the Pete Townshend child pornography allegations a worthwhile argument against, I do agree with Myers on the point that it's a problem when one of our country's highest art awards goes to two members of a British rock group. Where's Wayne Shorter? Maria Schneider? Or (not a jazz musician) STEVE REICH!

9. Greg Sandow has made a point of examining the slow demise of classical music in his blog, and I don't mean to poach his territory. But I do want to note a point about classical criticism. Here are three New York Times articles, one giving conductor Gilbert E. Kaplan a virtual encomium for his bizarre and fixed focus on the Mahler second in a long profile; a second straight review that is positive; and a news report that might as well dispense with all its quotes and just call Kaplan rubbish. So which is he? Therein lies the rub and the quandary. If the critics and musicians can't come to a consensus on his work, what about the average listener whose musical education has been on the wane for generations? Does the inability to ascertain a well-formed evaluation of the performance's quality make the average listener more interested in Kaplan's human story? Is his narrative -- his journey from average businessman to conductor of renowned orchestras -- what makes audiences like him? And is that so wrong? Maybe I don't want to hear the Australian pianist David Helfgott (immortalized by Geoffrey Rush in the biopic "Shine") on record, ever, (technically untrue -- he was on Silverchair's excellent "Emotion Sickness") but I'm sure it would be a great pleasure to see someone once so incapacitated by his psyche mount a stage and play the instrument he had won mastery of once, no matter how vexing his performance is. The notes may be disjointed, wrong and inartistic but there is still a narrative in the breaks of his mind and the attempt to bridge those gaps all made audible in real time.

CURRENT LISTEN: Gabriel Faure, "La Bonne Chanson, Op. 61"