joel/is/blogging/now

I'm in the studio right now. We are finally recording some much-needed bass tracks, featuring John Leftwich, who has recorded with Lyle Lovett and Rickie Lee Jones, among many others.

It's really a treat to work with great players.

Radio-ready is still a ways off, but these tracks are arriving at the stage where they stand on their own as decent demos to play for my friends. So if you want to hear them, and you have an email account that can handle file attachments in the 6 - 10 MB range, I can send you mp3s.

My friend Louis (code name Weezy) sent me some pictures of his home here in New Orleans. His house was within a block of one of the levee breaks, and it was submerged up to the roofline for a couple of weeks.

They're quite typical of thousands of homes here. The home that Louis shared with his wife, Terrilynn, and baby daughter was tastefully and lovingly decorated, and they had only been there a little more than a year. Everything is obviously ruined. But they are alive and healthy, and undaunted. They plan to move closer to Terrilynn's family in California.

I came back to New Orleans with my assistant Amy yesterday evening to have a look around the city, and to assess the situation with my property here in the French Quarter.

The city is surreal, devastated, decimated... it has a post-apocalyptic feel, but most of the people I've talked to have displayed a positive, upbeat, hopeful and energized spirit, and that includes those who have lost all but their lives. So far I haven't fun into anyone who has lost significant others, but I know there are many such people here and have heard that some of them are not doing quite so well.

So many (the majority) of the homes here have been affected, and completely ruined as often as not. Most people have not come back. Driving through the neighborhoods, in areas that didn't flood there is still a lot of damage. There will be a few homes that look mostly unaffected, and then dotted in between are houses that collapsed. It seems somewhat random. And then there are trees, giant twisted sections of metal roofing or siding, streets blocked off, street lights not working or blown around at weird angles. It didn't take us long to spot a tent encampment in Metairie. The first people I saw were two men, one giving the other a haircut out on the grass. The campers looked a little rough around the edges but dignified, alive, not defeated.It was early evening, and I saw smiles, animated conversation, and a few beers being shared.

Here in the French Quarter, which is one of the least-affected parts of the city, things look eerily close to "normal" at first glance. On closer inspection, even here the population is maybe a quarter to a third of normal, and more than half the businesses are still closed. Restaurants are slowly coming back to life, with limited menus, but less limited each day/week. Angeli's on Decatur finally started serving pizza again last night, which apparently created a bit of excitement on our block. They had a coming-back-to-life party with live music and a crowd of people who looked a little more open and grateful for a bit of community happening.

As for my property here, there were a few broken window panes, some things blown around, a few roof tiles off, some rain gutters blown down, and a little bit of incursion of pigeons. But overall, the damage was remarkably light. There were no real water problems, and no sign of the looting that I was mentally prepared for. The power and water were both on and working. Even the cable TV/internet connection is up, and the wireless equipment, TV, digital piano, tools and PC that I hadn't expected to ever see again are all here and undamaged. One day of work will have the property fairly close to where it was before the hurricanes. Amy has been going on about my karma (saying that it's good). I'll just say we've been ridiculously lucky.

We had made arrangements to stay last night with my cousin Frank across the river in Gretna, as we weren't expecting the place to be all that habitable to be able to camp here the first night. But we decided to stay. The usual night-time noise of Decatur Street has already started up again, and we used some cardboard and blankets to close off a couple of holes in the front windows to help with that. But there is a midnight curfew in effect, and by 12:45 the block was remarkably quiet.

Refrigerators are everywhere in the streets. Even in buildings that were otherwise unaffected, most people didn't empty out the refrigerators, and when power was lost, whatever was inside rotted, producing stench, goo, and generally maggots or other infestations. The refrigerators have become the main canvasses for an outpouring of political graffiti. From what I see, I can tell you that the local residents seem none too happy with either the local or national political leaders. One of the refrigerators had a delivery address writ large on the side of it as if it were a large piece of mail waiting to be picked up: George W Bush, White House, Washington, DC.

There wasn't much in our 2 refrigerators here. They're a bit nasty, but salvageable I think.

I spoke with Melanie, my real estate agent, who has more than a dozen properties in New Orleans, ALL of which went under water, including her own lovely home. She remains upbeat and philosophical as she wades through the paperwork and takes care of business. She says she's had a few calls on my property in recent days.

There is a lot of demand for temporary housing, and I think we will be able to offer a bit of that here for a while.

Interesting times.

Hello from Mexico.

I have been in Baja California at the Hotel Calafia for the last two days, taking a strategic planning retreat with my marketing team. It was such a good call, suggested by my marketing director, Juli, who I first brought here almost ten years ago. It keeps getting nicer.

It's beautiful here in this lovely hotel overlooking the Pacific Ocean. In the US, corporations pay a lot more for boring rooms at places like the airport Hilton. Here we had a lovely time and infinitely more pleasant surroundings at more affordable rates.

It went well.

Baja is lovely, the ocean is beautiful and soothing. I want to spend a couple of weeks down here sometime.

It seems the US housing boom/bubble, which is particularly pronounced in Southern California, is spilling over into Baja California. I see lots of building and renovation going on. It looks like an attractive thing to buy into, but I have enough worries.

(-:

I spotted this sign on the L.A. subway recently, and captured the image with my camera-phone.

The sign was above a seat, and it used to say "PRIORITY SEATING FOR ELDERLY AND HANDICAPPED," but some creative vandal had made some small alterations.

America.

I am headed back to L.A. today. I'm due in the recording studio at 2pm for a longer session. "Rolling up the sleeves," as Kevin said. It feels good.

Some of you have asked for links to songs so you can listen. The songs we're working on will be rough for a while, and finished products are a ways off. But I think we'll have some listenable reference tracks soon, and I expect I'll make some of those available.