01-18-09 LA CA: 0956 hrs. It is Sunday and I am on break. I just finished going through the final edit of A Preferred Blur. Carol has gone through it with her red pen and sent me a three ring binder with the manuscript and all that red ink for me to go through. I just got to the last page. As much as I want to be done with this project and get onto something else, I know that I should go through the manuscript one more time at least. And to think, for a second there, I didn’t know what I was going to do today, this evening and tonight.
I got back from Mali last Thursday around noon. I got to the office and Heidi told me that Indie 103 had gone off the air. No one told me a thing. Apparently it all came down very quickly, desks were cleared out and people moved on. The station, for now at least, will be online only and my show will still be included. It’s too bad that the station couldn’t keep it going. I don’t know much about the workings of the station and don’t know what lead to it being shut down. I wrote Engineer X and asked if he could still do the show and he said that he could. He said that there’s no commercials so I can put a lot more music into the show. Since we’re no longer on terrestrial radio, I don’t have to worry about language in the songs so now I can just pick out music to play and not have to worry about getting the station in trouble. So far, I have put three shows together in this new format and I am really liking what I am getting out of it. As much as I will miss being on the radio, there’s something really cool and actually, much closer to what I think is the real idea of the show by doing it online. It’s more of an underground thing that excites me very much. Maybe the show should have always been like this. Anyway, here we are. I hope you get a chance to listen somehow because the shows are going to be a bit different now that I have more time for music and no rules as to content. Seeing how quickly the station went off the air, I figure it could go offline as suddenly. When I know more about the general stability and longevity of the whole thing, I will let you know. As it is now, I will go to the station tomorrow to track a couple of shows in the new format.
The trip to Africa was like all the other ones I have gone on: humbling, mind-blowing, life changing and quite revelatory. Mali is a very poor country. Many parts that I saw were beautiful but also very rugged and hard on the inhabitants. Of the entire trip, the travel, the music festival and everything else, it was the Sahara desert that had the most impact on me. Days later, I am still thinking about it and want to go back. I would like to camp out in it without the thousands I shared the festival grounds with. I bet the hugeness and the silence of the place would be incredible.
But for now, I am in LA working away on things. I have been back three days and it feels longer. This place does that to me. I have a lot of things to do so I will throw myself into it as much as I can. We have quite an ambitious release schedule for the year and prepping all that stuff will take a good amount of time. Usually by the end of February, I have a good idea as to what I will be doing for the rest of the year. So much of what I do is long range stuff like touring, you have to get it all in place months before you actually go out and do it.
The last several days have been eventful between the carnage in Gaza and the president’s last press conference and farewell speech. I want to hear Obama’s speech on Tuesday but don’t want to watch the hours of content that goes along with the event. I am looking forward to the day and days after when the rubber meets the road and there’s new things to talk about.
It is now time for me to go back to the book and plunge back in. Thanks for reading this. —-Henry