"As I reach for my last smoke"

Check out this article in the star tribune about the new smoking ban in the Twin Cities area taking effect tonight. It features interviews with local musicians and club goers and really discusses the nuts and bolts of the issue.

The two opposing arguments are:

Business owners rights:

What right does the government have to tell a private business what it can and cant do inside its own walls. If people do not want to breath second hand smoke, don’t come to my bar!!! If the public really doesn’t want smoking, the businesses that allow it will go out of business. Its not the government’s job to take this decision out of the public’s hands.

The Counter Argument:

Each of these bars employs a staff of anywhere between 2 and 200. In an economy where many people do not have the luxury to pick and choose job it is not fair to force people to work in an environment that is not safe. Second hand smoke kills, there is no denying this.

On the whole I side with the second explanation. I don’t believe that the lazes fair explanation holds water. There are plenty of health risks that the market has not weeded out. We force oil refineries to take precautions to protect their workers, why don’t we do the same for food service? This smoking ban is a great step in that direction. If you need to smoke that badly, step outside. It’s a great opportunity to meet someone anyway.

A Glimpse at the American Media and Public

Yesterday while I was working, Nadia, a women I work with, got a call from home (Malaysia) saying that there had been an earthquake. Nadia told me that she was concerned because the only time there had ever been an earthquake felt in Malaysia (during her life) was the earthquake that sparked the Tsunami in Dec 2004. This concerned us not for the Malaysia, as the damage there was minimal, but for the Indonesians who were trying to rebuild from the first Tsunami. We went to cnn.com and found the earthquake under the ‘breaking news’ headline. The article said that the earthquake had been an 8.3 (later updated to an 8.7) and would probably spark another Tsunami. It said that they would know whether a Tsunami was created within a half an hour.

Nadia and I decided that we would come back and check the status in a half hour and at 11:00 we did just that. Again cnn.com had its familiar red ‘Breaking News’ bar up. I figured that it would be about the earthquake which would likely kill thousands of people, Tsunami or not. To my surprise the bar was about the Michael Jackson trial!!!! What the hell??? I was not on the Entertainment Tonight web sight, I was on CNN, Americas number one source for realtime news. Somewhere some news editor decided that it was more important to inform the public about the Michael Jackson trial than to inform them about the earthquake that would eventually claim nearly a thousand lives! Because the media is a reflection of the people it attempts it to appeal to, this is not only a sad picture of the American media but also a sad portrait of the American public.

Why do I do what I do?

Over the past 8 weeks I have gotten serious on recording a ‘record.’ Not just one take acoustic guitar skeletons of songs but an actual album with bass, piano, drums (or at least fake drums) and a band sound. It been a very trying and time consuming experience but I have loved it. I have 5 songs done (as far as the recordings go) with another 2 that are a couple of good overdubs from being finished.

Last night, on my way to play basketball with some friends I took a CD of the finished songs to listen in my car in an effort to hear the songs from different speaker than the ones I mixed them on. I had tried this once before only to find out that my first mixes were absolute failures. This time I expected much of the same. To my surprise however, they sounded really fucking good. They sounded like a group of guys in a room playing music, not fake or overproduced or any of the other things I had feared.

Although this was great, it got me wondering, ‘What am I doing this for?’ Since I’ve been about 19 I have always recorded music. I’m pretty sure that in the naiveté of youth my reasoning was this: “if I record these and send them to a record label I will get signed and become a big star and have endless supplies of sex and money and drugs and all the things a nineteen year old strives for.” Now I am a mature 23 year old (haha) and I realize that making record probably wont help win any of those things nor do I necessarily want those things any more. O.K. I still want the money and the sex (albeit from my girlfriend now) but not in the same way I did when I was younger.

But I digress… The question of ‘why am I doing this?’ is not as easy to answer as it was four years ago. I really had to think about it. I enjoy recording music most of the time but it is a lot of work. Its much more fun to just sloppily play the songs alone in my room or live shows. I spent all night thinking about this and I am not sure that I came up with a satisfactory answer. I think the best one I have is that I am creating art. Like an artist who hangs a painting in his own wall, I feel a huge sense of pride when I listen to my songs (not that I do it often) and know those songs are mine. Even if the world outside of Minneapolis never hears them, they are mine and I know that I brought them into the world. Why is this reason not good enough? I think its partly because its cheesy, cliché and self absorbed

So I don’t have some terrific conclusion to my rambling. Just a gaping unanswered question. But that’s what I this blog is all about, right? To ramble about the meaningless nonsense that goes on in my head.

For those of you that are curious about my music I will try to post some lyrics and MP3s if I can find web space and figure out how to do it. If any of you are tech savy and know an easy place to post them and how to do it please send me an email. I will even beg if need be.

Bloggs and Blogging...

Well I guess now is as good of a time as ever to start this blog. I have been trying to gather the guts and/or inertia to get this thing going for about two weeks now and I think its time to get going. I have a job working for the University of Minnesota that is completely mundane and leaves me with a couple of hours of free internet time a day. I have decided that I will not waste any more of this time debating whether or not Wilco’s contribution to the Spongebob soundtrack, “Just a kid,” is a great song or something disposable that they threw on a compilation on viachicago.org; (for the record it is a great song because of its poppy disposability, not in spite of it). Its not that I don’t love that site because I do, (its a great resource for all music news, not just wilco) its more that debating every little intricacy of a band, any band no matter how great, will turn my mind to mush.

Of late I have wandered into the blogsphere in effort to broaden myself to topics beyond those of the Strib (the Minneapolis news paper) and Wilco (although I’m sure I will talk about them a lot, probably too much). A couple of blogs I have found good are MN Lefty Liberal and the Will Wheaton blog. These blogs are complete opposites with Mn Left Liberal being a great source of news and seriousness and Will Wheaton being a great source of random entertaining thoughts (coincidentally he is talking about Wilco today). I imagine my blog will fall somewhere in between. I will be random and (hopefully) funny at times while being honest and (again hopefully) insightful at others.

Music note of the day...

I am listening to Steve Earl's Jeruselum, for the first time. Rhapsody says the album was released in 2002 and I am wondering how I haven't heard this album before this morning. It is a great record, or at least it sounds like it is (that's a big claim to make after one listen) and the song "Jeruselum" is one of the better songs I've heard in a long time.

Alright, I guess that's my first post. A post about blogging, pretty lame, eh? Hey, no one said this would be easy. Tomorrow I will have something more insightful to talk about until then, if there is anyone out there, send me a comment wishing me well or telling me I suck or even better telling me that you will come back tomorrow and read my first real post. Have a great day!!!

Matt