joel/is/blogging/now

I am on the train to San Diego again, looking out the window at the ocean. The surf looks inviting.

An acquaintance of mine emailed me with some of the same questions everyone else was asking about what I'd been up to and the situation with my property in New Orleans etc. So I pointed her to this blog, which was originally created for the purpose of answering just those questions, and then grew into an journal of sorts.

She read the blog, and then commented that it seemed rather self-absorbed.

It certainly is. It is Joel's journal about Joel, named after Joel. See, there's Joel's picture right there at the top. Joel's life and times, Joel's travels, Joel's property, Joel's family, Joel's business, Joel's websites, Joel's friends, Joel's thoughts... Very self-absorbed, indeed.

But that was its original purpose... to disseminate information about me to whoever's interested. I never said anybody should be interested! You are or you aren't. By all means, if you're not interested in this stuff, go find what does interest you. People do seem to ask me a lot of questions about all of these things. Maybe some are just being polite. If so, it seems polite to try to answer them; I hope I can be forgiven for this attempt at 21st-century efficiency in disseminating the information... the blog.

But enough about that! Let's get on with MORE ABOUT ME.

The best news is that, after about ten years of quiet, solitary, off-the-radar-screen work on my musical compositions, I am finally putting the wheels in motion to get them recorded so they can be handed over to humankind, instead of keeping them mostly hidden in my head.

I'm working with a producer named Kevin Dowling, and his friend Larry John McNally, a guitarist/songwriter/producer who wrote one of my most favorite songs, "Nobody's Girl," which was brilliantly performed/recorded by Bonnie Raitt some years back. I spent half the day in the studio yesterday getting the first two songs on track, and will go back in on Saturday to track a few more.

Kevin emailed me last night:

Hey Joel,

Nice Job today... I had a lot of little things to do tonight - but I did them listening to your songs... & it made things magical.

Looking at going back in Sat & really rolling up the sleeves. Talk tomorrow.

Kev

So I'm very pleased about that getting underway. This is something I knew would happen at some point, and have been assuring my friends about it for years. Now it's happening. I have spent very little time recording in the last 12 years, so I feel rusty, but it's coming back to me pretty fast. I do notice that these $2000 microphones and mega-multi-track recording systems are quite faithful in capturing every note that's slightly off pitch or out of time. I'm motivated to continue improving my chops... and also thankful for the modern-day editing possibilities too. There are so many new tools for musical perfectionists to tinker endlessly with these days.

In other news, there is a cover story that came out today about ME and my little entrepreneurial project of the last 17 years in a local magazine, LA City Beat:

http://www.stockroom.com/general/about/citybeat/

We are cranking up the PR machinery, and it's paying off. More to come.

I've kept a low profile personally for years and years, partly thinking that if I start a new career as a performing artist, it might be better if I wasn't known as the "sex guy" beforehand. This is particularly true since my sex toy business and my art come from sort of opposite ends of the spectrum of my personality, and they don't necessarily mix all that well. But my history is what it is, and it's all public record, so it's not like I could hide it. And the company needs (and deserves) its share of PR now. So we're going with what we've got.

If you've read this far, thank you for your apparent and inexplicable interest in ME.

(-:

P.S. Referring back to the topics of being self-absorbed and worrying (or not) what other people think about us, in my bit of morning reading yesterday I found a fun quote from that old hipster, Marcus Aurelius (in 167AD):

I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others. If then a god or a wise teacher should present himself to a man and bid him to think of nothing and to design nothing which he would not express as soon as he conceived it, he could not endure it even for a single day. So much more respect have we to what our neighbours shall think of us than to what we shall think of ourselves.

So, while we may have invented the term "codependency" in the 20th century, it seems the pattern was alive and well in the days of the Roman Empire, which bore so many similarities to the American Empire which has taken shape over the last 50-100 years, and come to its greatest fruition under the current administration. (As with Rome, our empire has overreached, and will face some painful adjustments to reality in the coming decades.)

San Diego was beautiful. I feel happy and buoyant there.

I'm back "home" now.

I'm still in a positive mood. But there have been some darker things on my mind of late that I've been meaning to write about.

This has a theme: "Let's Get Cynical." You can imagine it being played to the tune of that Olivia Newton-John masterpiece from the early 1980s, "Let's Get Physical."

It starts here: I once saw, on PBS I imagine, a documentary on primate behavior. It was observed that, among one of the lower primates (I'm pretty sure it was baboons) females tend to be more sexually attracted to males who show some capacity for nurturing their baboon kids. Fair enough.

So here's one pattern of male baboon behavior that sometimes arises from that female baboon preference: A male baboon hangs out with a female and her offspring. He waits until the female's back is turned, and her attention is elsewhere. He takes that opportunity to intentionally hurt the baby baboon in order to make it cry. Then he immediately starts comforting it, so that by the time the mother has turned back around, she only sees the comforting, and not the original stimulus that created the crying. The male baboon is now more likely to get laid.

Does this seem like corrupt, sad, and kind of sick behavior to you? Yeah, it seems that way to me too.

But for a baboon, I guess optimal behavior is "whatever works." It seems like it wouldn't take much intelligence at all to see through such a cheap trick... but baboons, while obviously sometimes crafty in their way, are not known for having much intuitive intelligence -- the kind of mental processing that allows you to speculate about and model someone else's potentially duplicitous behavior in your head, seeing "through" them when some of their motives or behaviors are veiled.

Who is responsible here? Look at it from the baby's perspective. Who are you disappointed with? Well, obviously the male baboon in this scenario is the perpetrator, the abuser. But your mom isn't seeing the big picture, and in fact is essentially encouraging and reinforcing this perpetrator's behavior by rewarding it. So maybe you're a little disappointed in her too, for the part she plays in this cycle. It takes two to tango, as they say. She should've stood up for you, or at least given the abusive male the cold shoulder. But she didn't. She bought that old "I'm really a nurturer" song and dance. So short sighted!

Unfortunately, as a victim of this abuse, there is no Adult Offspring of Abusive Baboons 12-step group for you to go to. And soon your brain's limited circuitry will be awash in the same adult baboon hormones, and chances are good that you will take up the same dance. Why not? That's what you know. That's the way it's always been done around here. Why would you be any different, unless some miraculous mutation has occurred to give your baboon brain some extra new modeling capacity that might give you a fleeting hint of a Better Way?

I see our national government playing the baboon trick on us with this Hurricane Katrina business. The smart people, the engineers, the ones with the technical knowlege and foresight, saw it all coming, and sounded the alarm. But they are not politicians, and they don't have the power to appropriate money or give themselves marching orders. The politicians had higher priorities than spending money on levees in New Orleans and other disaster preparedness, things like taking over other countries under trumped-up, sensationalized, false pretences. The Bush administration was busy and extended with its war effort, and meanwhile funds were diverted from disaster preparedness and top positions in agencies like FEMA were filled with political cronies who had no relevant experience.

Now people have died or have been displaced, and everyone is up in arms, and some people are angry at the government. So the politicians will do whatever works. They will say their heart goes out to the victims, and they pledge to make it right. Astronomical sums of money will be spent, twenty or thirty times what it would have cost to properly prepare for this storm in the first place. But where do they get the money? It certainly isn't theirs. It comes from taxes and borrowing. So it's your money and your future that the government will now allocate to salve the wounds that the government itself had a hand in creating in the first place. In that sense it's worse than the old baboon trick.

But wait, we're not done yet. Let's watch how those huge sums of money flow. Lots of things will get fixed and rebuilt, but who will do that work and at what price? Since it's the people's money being spent in the hundreds of billions and the people's future being mortgaged to fund the rebuilding, one would hope that there's a guardian, a treasurer somewhere who can keep an eye on things, get competitive prices, and make sure we don't spend more than is necessary, that our nation's treasury doesn't get looted. You'd hope so, but guess what? The government is already giving out fat, no-bid contracts to Halliburton subsidiaries and others with close ties to the current administration who have already been caught stealing in their obscenely lucrative, no-bid contracts in Iraq.

Let's look at it from their point of view, while at the same time considering the possibility that Bush and his cronies make up a sort of a power elite whose primary motivations may be fairly basic, selfish and baboon-like, despite whatever altruistic language they may offer us. Let's entertain the possibility that they really are more motivated to accumulate wealth and power for themselves than to nurture us, their constituents. Why should they do the "smart" thing and prepare for these disasters when they make such obscenely huge sums of money by NOT preparing?

And why should they pursue peace when they can make obscenely huge profits from war?

If you take a look at human history, examples of greed, ruthless conquest, and brutality (generally justified using lies, propaganda and political manipulation) are plentiful. Persia did it, and so did Sparta, Athens, Rome, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Conquistadors, Napoleon, Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, on and on.

We, the American Masses, have access to plentiful evidence that the current administration is falling into some similar patterns. But somehow we want to believe that, because of our fine and superior system of government, It Just Can't Happen Here. And we all have a steady supply of TV shows, material gizmos, and Ho-Hos to keep us placated. We don't have time to read the fine print on every single multi-billion-dollar government appropriation, and we don't have the technical training to make any sense at all of the language of it if we tried.

Ironically, the rational and somewhat cynical men we call our "Founding Fathers," who drew up the blueprints for this presumedly fine and superior system of government, talked a lot about those pervasive historical patterns of corruption and power madness, and they tried to build in some checks and balances to mitigate the selfish human drives which they believed would always threaten fair and rational government. They thought they had this science of government figured out to some degree, and that was the basis of their sense that they had built something better.

Today, the checks and balances that the founders devised have been systematically undermined and neutralized. Yet we, the American Masses, are still left wanting to think that everything is OK, and clinging to the lingering dream that our system of government and our culture itself is somehow stronger, cleaner or purer, and immune to some degree to the worst excesses of the past. The alternative is almost too horrible to recognize: a corrupted, cagey, greedy, troublemaking, and seemingly invincible bully of a superpower, armed to the teeth with doomsday weapons, controlled by a cadre of neo-Napoleons, and rigged for the further enrichment of the super-wealthy at the expense not only of the underclasses but of almost everything we should value -- the global political system, the principles of human dignity and liberty and fairness upon which our nation was founded, the sustainability of the energy supply upon which our technologies and production depend, and the life-sustaining capacity of the planet itself. So we hold our leaders innocent until proven guilty, and for some of us, innocent after proven guilty.

This is blindness and distraction. We are the mama baboon. By not seeing the pattern, and opposing it -- or at least cutting off the rewards for corrupt behavior -- we allow and encourage corruption to flourish. We may not be getting our money's worth, but we are getting what we pay for.

If you study neo-conservative thinking, most publicly articulated and exemplified by the Project for a New American Century website, it is clear that the Bush administration's warmaking is largely motivated by pure power considerations; The WMD justifications were just a matter of political manipulation and expediency. It looks like the neo-cons just thought the US should have more presence, power and influence in that region, and of course the reason that region matters is oil.

But even many cynics sometimes overlook the even more baboon-like and myopically selfish reasons why some groups would want to agitate and manipulate the country to go to war, and that is simple war profiteering itself. I'm talking about the kind of selfish greed that may offer justifications and rationales based on the national interest in order to mobilize a nation, but which in reality doesn't care if it destroys the nation it is manipulating, as long as there are countless billions in profits to be made. With that kind of money, the rats can swim away from the sinking ship when the time comes, retrieve their bullion out of their Swiss bank vaults, and buy their own countries somewhere else.

I don't know about you, but I've always seen the idea of a nation-state as a tenuous human construct. If you ask a rock or a deer or a tree or a patch of earth or a body of water or a section of sky whether it is American or Chinese or Ethiopian, it will offer no answer at all. Nations have only whatever reality and meaning we ascribe to them and collectively create. It is a socially shared idea... or it could just as easily be called a mass hallucination. When the "hallucination" is backed up by traditions, legal systems, and weapons, it certainly seems more real. But the rock and the tree and the deer still have not endorsed it. I'm keeping my own counsel on this question, the real meaning of the nation state. It is a construct that has a certain reality, but that reality has been been rapidly and dramatically altered and undermined by technology, communications, nuclear weapons, covert operations, jet travel, and globalization. Yet we're still using the same names, singing the same songs, and waving the same flags as if things haven't really changed all that much.

Maybe it is this cultivated independence from the nation-state idea that colors (or perhaps allows) my perception of some of the people in positions of power in the last 100 years, and in the current administration in particular. But what I see are the outlines of a power elite that has developed that same independence of thought with respect to the nation-state concept that I have cultivated for myself. I think there are some key players in the national governments who don't really believe in the traditional idea of the nation state anymore. However, they expect you to believe in it, and they will encourage you to believe in it, so that they can more easily press your buttons and manipulate you. They will profess their patriotism, offer arguments about the national interest, wave a flag, and sing you an anthem in order to manipulate you to patriotically fall into line, play your part, pay your taxes, sign away your liberties, or join the military. But I think maybe it's all in the service of a more covert agenda which is about something else entirely-- their own greed or extra-national political aims.

A friend of mine in Madison has told me that he has met a couple of Catholic priests who are members of a sort of underground network of atheist preists. These are men who may have once believed in the in the tenets of the church, but who have reached a place where they no longer do. And yet they go on fulfilling their roles and functions as preists, often (though probably not always) with a paternalistic feeling that the masses are better off having something to believe in and some guidelines to live by, until such time that they are ready to handle the truth, which is that it's all just tradition, ritual, and hocus-pocus. And I know that there are many people, including many conservatives, who see religion in just that same way. My grandfather was one of those conservatives. He was a Republican, and he wasn't bothered by the religious leanings of his party, because he thought religion was just fine for the common people. He just didn't see himself as one of those people.

Is it so far-fetched to think that, just as there are some atheistic preists, there will also be some people in positions of power in national governments who don't really believe in the validity of the nation-state construct anymore? And if they don't believe in the nation they are sworn to serve, what do they believe in, and who or what are they serving? If they are paternalistically manipulating us "for our own good," that is undemocratic, duplicitous and dubious, but at least it's kinda sorta well-intentioned. If they do it purely for their own self interest, it's just plain greedy and evil in my book. But there will always be such characters ready to step up and play that role, as long as we keep paying them handsomely to do it.

Baboon economics.

I'm on a train to San Diego.

This internet thing has come a long way since 1991, when, as I believe I mentioned in a previous posting, my internet access was a long-distance call from southern Illinois to Los Angeles on a 2400 baud modem, at 25 cents/minute. Now I have wireless internet access on a train, and most everywhere else.

It does me a lot of good to get out of Los Angeles when I can. There's some sort of magnetic vortex there that clouds my mind. I have overstayed my welcome there.

Maybe I'll venture into Mexico tomorrow.

I just received my first post-hurricane report on my property in the French Quarter from a friend, Brian, who works across the street at Rings of Desire.

He said there were a number of broken windows, some roof tiles blown off, and some rain gutters damaged. However, no signs of anything more serious than that so far. So that's great news.

He also said that someone had gotten into the key safe that was attached to the front door. The front door was open, and the keys were still in the door. I've had no report yet as to what was going on inside the property... whether it was looted, and whether there may still be people squatting inside. Brian didn't want to venture inside the building until he could find a National Guard escort.

It is interesting that someone got into that safe somehow, but if they hadn't, it would have been easy enough to just kick the door in. I had already assumed that someone would've broken in looking for food, water, or valuables, and I'm prepared for news that anything of value was taken. The place was sparsely furnished, so there wasn't as much to steal as in most homes. But there was a fairly new TV, some hand tools, an electronic piano, books and DVDs, and other assorted items.

The main thing of value is the structure itself, and unlike the majority of buildings in New Orleans, it sounds like it escaped any significant harm.

I was just reading an article on Yahoo News about how there were some rudimentary disaster-awareness and evacuation plans being cooked up in New Orleans that simply weren't ready in time for Hurricane Katrina. Apparently there was a DVD that had already been minted that was intended as a sort of public service announcement to be distributed through churches in New Orleans, particularly in the poorer neighborhoods. But the undistributed DVDs are sitting in a warehouse in Los Angeles, because the hurricane hit a little too soon.

The message to people was to make an evacuation plan, and not to count too much on government. Various government agencies were working on plans, but hadn't come up with much yet. (I think the first time I heard the phrase, "a day late and a dollar short," I was probably in New Orleans. It fits with the slower, more laconic, half-drunk spirit that one would often see or feel there, blended in with all the other diverse cultural elements.)

But, the article points out, "one-quarter of the city's population... did not own cars or have ready transportation out of town in the event of evacuation orders."

Pop didn't have a car, and wasn't successful in finding a ride out of town. But he did have a bicycle. He was with me when I bought those 3 bicycles that I kept at my place in the French Quarter, and we talked about how we might need them for evacuation someday. I remember thinking that they might actually be better than a car if the roads were clogged and/or there were gasoline shortages. Then, when the hurricane was bearing down on the city, he talked to other French Quarter residents who lamented that they had no way out of town-- while sitting on or standing next to their own bicycles. To them, evacuation automatically meant a car, a bus, a train or a plane. But how did people move themselves around and get out of harm's way when there weren't any cars, buses, trains or planes?

We're such a dependent culture... dependent on government, internal combustion, cars, electricity, telephones, television, bailouts, paychecks, insurance, institutions, entitlements... and other people generally taking care of us and telling us what to do (and, quite often, what to think and who to be). In little more than a century, just a few generations, the higher level of self-sufficiency and thinking for oneself that was a simple necessity of life for our great grandparents and countless generations before has been largely abandoned and forgotten. It seems to me that average Americans, citizens of this supposedly richest, most powerful nation on earth, are in danger of becoming herd animals. Certainly at the political level the herd mentality has largely taken hold, and is being manipulated and subtly encouraged by certain political machines.

It occurs to me that Pop's story of evacuating on a bicycle is a newsworthy item in this context. It's a strange, eccentric, charming, heart-warming, memorable, cute kind of story... if only because so many others just didn't see the alternative. I think, in this context, it might serve as a worthwhile reminder to people in general just to remember that they have options that they might have overlooked. Independent options, lower-tech options, fun options, adventurous options.

So maybe we'll make up a press release, our own PSA, and see if any of the news wires pick it up.

I bought a nice bicycle, one of very light-weight road bikes. I marvel at it sometimes. It's quite advanced even compared to my first 10-speed bike that my stepfather gave me in 1978, and that was a pretty nice bike too. I think, this bicycle may not outperform a car, at least not in the current era when petroleum is still available. But the technology is pretty advanced. If I could take that bike back to the days of the Roman empire, or even to the days of the American founding fathers, it would be an incredible and priceless technological marvel. I try to appreciate it from that perspective, rather than comparing it to the top-speed potential (or the relatively sedentary driving experience) of a gas-guzzling, road-clogging car.

For actual evac, something a little sturdier will probably be better, like a mountain bike with hardier tires. But I have one of those also, from before I got my road bike.

I also have a little stockpile of food and water, and a bit of cash on hand in case the big earthquake hits L.A. and disrupts the supply lines for the city. A quick survey of my friends reveals that almost none of them have even that basic level of preparedness. Los Angeles is probably about as unprepared for The Big One as New Orleans was for Katrina.

Americans have created a system where historic levels of independent thought and action aren't necessities for day-to-day life anymore. But I expect that the larger shifts of time, nature, and resources can and will expose the dangers of neglecting those independent capacities.

My mother has been reading this blog. Hi Mom. So, I guess that means now I can only put stuff in it that's Mom-proofed. I suppose I could tell her she reads it at her own sole risk, and let it all fly. But I guess I'll do what I always do-- strive for balance, while keeping all the variables and considerations in mind.

My father arrived in Los Angeles via Amtrak today. He did another 50 or so miles of biking and picked up over 100 miles of rides with assorted colorful Louisiana characters to get to a town in Texas where the trains were actually running. And then of course he met a few more characters on the train. He has plentiful stories to tell. He brought me up to date upon his return, and I encouraged him to get it all written down. He said he'd already started his travelogue while he was on the train, despite the often bumpy ride. So I expect I'll be providing a link to that prose one of these days.

My cellphone voicemail box filled today, and wasn't taking any more messages. I kinda love when that happens.

I am always backlogged with emails, answering machine messages, postal mail, cell phone voicemail, appointments, and customers and suppliers and friends and employees wondering why I can't make more time for them. Meanwhile, although I can be social and communicative, I remain a somewhat introverted person. I just can't do all that. That's one reason I hired my Chief Operations guy, Joe, and made sure to choose someone for that position who had a more extraverted temperament, as well as being more of a scheduler/organizer/administrator by nature.

Anyway, when my voicemail box is full, it sort of says "Enough." Whatever it is, it can wait. You don't need Joel's attention that badly.

It never lasts for more than a day. But I take a certain contrary pleasure in knowing that, one time out of twenty when people call my cell phone, pulling my electronic chain, maybe they just don't have the option of leaving me a message. Take another path. Talk to someone else. Work it out. Find peace with yourself. Do without my attention, instead of taking it for granted.

It's true, I do like to be supportive, to be a good listener, and to be a good leader when I can. But I don't want the world to depend on me too much. I need my freedom of motion. I need to isolate sometimes. And all of us need to branch out, to cultivate many outlets and sources for the good things in life.

I have been feeling the call strongly in the past week... the call of the world... particularly the part of it that is not the United States. I am liable to disappear for a while one of these days soon, without much notice or advance planning. I may even blow some appointments or leave a few loose ends untied. No great harm will be done. Friends, family, my company... you can all deal with it. I'm not much good to any of you anyway if I can't maintain my sanity and spiritual condition.

It helps to get away. Los Angeles is a challenge. Watching the USA creak and groan under the weight of its own fear, bureaucracy, hypocrisy, aggression, and hubris is a challenge. The multidimensional realities of running an alternative, technology-dependent company with a particularly-diverse staff of 35 employees are a challenge. Crises, real estate, renovations, cash flow issues, a rich catalog of friends with problems of their own... and then there's the challenge of trying to keep a creative life going on the side. No one should begrudge me the occasional disappearance.

Am I whining? Am I wallowing in self-pity? I hope not. I signed up for this life I'm leading. Nobody forced it upon me at gunpoint. I took all this on, driven by whatever creative fires, ambitions and/or demons I carry within. I seem to be expressing some need to live a little larger. Maybe in the end it just leads to learning a lesson about downsizing and simplifying, but this is my path today.

I won't begrudge myself a break, a respite... whether it's in the form of exercising my fundamental human right to split town, or something smaller like letting the voicemail box fill up.

Come to think of it, maybe I could just turn the voicemail off. Can't get me? Call my assistant, Amy. Tell her about it. She'll tell me whatever I need to know.

Amy is the best. She's been with me just almost a year now. Finding her was a stroke of luck, long-awaited and none too soon.

Amy says LUCK = "Living Under Correct Knowlege." She's inspiringly spiritual, and her idealistic outlook is always correct in essence, even when may seem sometimes impractical or unpragmatic. Living in accord with the highest ideals is not always the easiest/shortest path, but it does generally pay the highest dividends.

Last night, my producer friend Kevin came by with a songwriter/arranger friend of his, Larry John McNally. Larry wrote one of my favorite songs, "Nobody's Girl," which was beautifully recorded by Bonnie Raitt. They listened to about 8 of my songs, and we made some reference recordings. After over a decade of working quietly under the radar and mostly alone on my musical compositions, the time has come to take them out for a spin around the block. My next career-- the performing arts one-- is in the very beginning of its more public phase. It has been a long time coming, and I have deflected many comments and questions from friends over the years who wondered why I wasn't "doing something" with my music. But I was.

This is how I operate sometimes. I work quietly on something, and it may be somewhat opaque or puzzling to many people around me for a long time. But eventually it's ready for the light of day, and then it explains itself.

My company was like that. There were a couple of years in the early 90s when I was running my embryonic online sex toy company from the family farmhouse in southern Illinois. That was a very, very strange thing to be doing. Most people had never heard of the internet at that time, and didn't understand what it was or what it meant on those rare occasions when I bothered to try to explain it. As for doing business on the internet, that was a sort of underground concept that was sort of in a gray area with respect to its legality. Internet access was not so easy to come by then, and my internet access was a long-distance call on a 2400-baud modem to my former college in Los Angeles. Since there was only one long-distance company serving that area at the time (good old AT&T), the rates were not competitive and those calls cost 25 cents/minute. Meanwhile, kink was more taboo, much less mainstream then than now. Especially in rural southern Illinois, all this was so out of place that I might as well have been from Neptune. Finally, the business was still quite small, and not really making much money-- and the money was the only reason that most people can fathom for being in such a business in the first place.

But now, in 2005, it isn't the family farmhouse anymore, it's a 30,000-square foot warehouse on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. And it explains itself. Everybody knows what "e-commerce" is, and nobody questions it as THE new way to do business. Being in the commercial end of sex and kink is less racy and generally regarded as more legitimate these days. We have lawyers, accountants, contractors, programmers, agents, tenants, and dozens of vendors. We work with the best models, photographers, printers, designers, etc. We have 35 talented people on staff, and I take it for granted that, when we post a listing for a new hire, we will get an pile of applications from intelligent, responsible adults with college degrees and impressive resumes, and they will be excited to work in a place that's just a little alternative... but obviously not too much. And it makes some money too. Cool.

Barring unforeseen detours, I feel reasonably hopeful that my performing-arts work will follow a similar pattern. After pursuing it as a quiet, underground, odd project for many years now, it's ready to be brought forth in a more accessible and polished form, and it will speak for itself.

Pop is on his way back from Louisiana to Los Angeles via Amtrak. I guess they sold him a ticket without any ID because he's a hurricane refugee. It's nice to know that there is still some flexibility somewhere in the iron curtain of inefficient bureaucracy and self-defeating fear that I see descending upon the country that I grew up in.

Most of our website functions are normalized now, and we're more or less back to business as usual.

I still have no word on the condition of my property in the French Quarter, although there is cause for hope. And none for worry.

The situation in New Orleans is a toxic soup made from years and decades and centuries of corruption, politics, hubris, poor planning, racism, poverty, educational deprivation, and insolvency at the local, state, and national level.

I've spoken to European friends who have been surprised and puzzled over what a mess we have there, and what it seems to reveal about our people and systems. They say it's the kind of thing they expect to see in the so-called "Third World," but not in the presumably richest, most powerful, and most technolgically advanced society on earth. I tell them that America is a vast country, with many different sections and strata, distracted and drained by a misguided war in Iraq, and with lots of internal divisions and stratifications. Basically, New Orleans is "Third World." To me, that has always been one part of its warped appeal. I always saw it as a handy way to leave the country without leaving the country.

I'm going to nominate my friend Melanie Roy for mayor of New Orleans. If she ends up being president someday, perhaps I'll be remembered as the first person to nudge her into politics.

Tonight, I will be meeting with my friend Kevin Dowling, a music producer, and an arranger to go over some of my songs and talk about production/recording possibilities. I'm very happy to have some artistic wheels in motion, beyond what I'm always doing-- prose writing, the occasional poem, and composing music on my grand piano at home.

I hope you're all doing well. Thanks for all the positive comments about this weblog.

Joel


P.S. My friend Steve Volpin wants to know if he will ever be in my blog. Now he is. He's an excellent CRTP (California Registered Tax Preparer) if you're the kind of person who is used to spending more than $600 on your annual tax return. He is also one of those memorably eccentric Angelinos who make life here more interesting.