bradg's blog

There still are live musical experiences that get me piqued.

I remember seeing Al "Year of the Cat" Stewart in 1977 and marvelled at how he was able to get a good sound out of the athletic complex at McMaster University. It was a teenage musical dream. He was a bona fide, big time "recording artist" and he was in my college town with his Spanish Border and Road to Moscow audio visual extravaganza.

Just recently -- and 30 years later, no less -- it was Lucinda Williams at the Jube (the Jubilee Theatre at SAIT). So how was the show? Well the Calgary Herald review (which will only be freely available for 30 days; 'cause after all newspaper prose has always been more valuable after the birds read it) and an op-ed piece (that's right, an op-ed piece?!) from the same fish wrap were pretty much spot on. You are, however, not reading this because you wanted affirmation from me that a mere newspaper review was okay. You are reading this -- I bet it's three years later and you've just done a search -- because you are a pure Lu fan.

Me? I'm a johnny-come-lately. I discovered Lu painting my house a few years ago when the satellite music service playing "adult oriented contempory" suddenly became interesting when "Righteously" hit the woofer. I stopped painting, got a pen, wrote down the artist name and went to buy the CD. It was, coincidently, the last CD I bought; everything since has been purchased over the net which no doubt makes me enemy number one to wigged out music exec grand-dads who fondly remember piano rolls. Okay, I did know "Passionate Kisses" but I had no idea that Mary Chapin Carpenter's hit was a Lucinda Williams song.

Fast forward to February 14th of this year and I pantingly parted with my money so that I could download "West" on its first day of release; as if DRM'ed AAC's could be collector's items. Wow what a record, er, recording. And fast forward again to the live Lu on June 14th singing "Come On" and "Unsuffer Me" from the West release with such spittin', snarly power that it makes the recording sound almost tame. Lucinda Williams is an American gift. An artist of such technique and attitude that she refines; in fact, redefines a genre. The antithesis of Nashville -- the George Bush of American country crap -- Lucinda is Louisiana raw and Austin authentic; she is the sweetest, perfectionist country punk to wield a guitar in years. I heart Bonnie Raitt but she is almost Hollywood in comparison to Lucinda's pure country-folk-punk. Emmy Lou Harris is close but only Lucinda is America's best song writer and "a righteous singer" .

As I write this, she is heading back to the lower 48; catch a show if you can. You'll marvel at her perfect balance between nervous jitter and musical exuberance. You will wonder how it is that she can charm with that Arkansan-Louisiana-Texas drawl one minute and cut loose with emotional venom the next. You'll love the band and especially Doug Pettibone's guitar. Lucinda is a mid-50's rocking wonder. If only Bob Dylan had the stuff she has now.

Lucinda's final gift of the night was her performance of Theivery Inc's / Flaming Lips "Marching the Hate Machines into the Sun". I bought it on iTunes the next day.

It was not enough that Todd Cochrane decided to try 15 minutes on Facebook. No... I had to do it too. Man, you would think that his experience would be enough. No... I had to do it too.

And now?

Facebook has my account (with my fake birthday -- I'm not telling you my birthday -- why do you need my birthday?) on "deactivation". You see; you cannot delete your account at Facebook. They will keep it and you "can come back anytime". There's nobody there from my town, my schools, my "era", my nuclear silo, my group, my work, my after-life or my make-believe Crimean War regiment.

What else did I discover? My own embarrassment at realizing that Facebook is a quasi-dating site. Count down from last year to a suitable year of high school graduation in, say, 1980. The numbers of Facebookers ('bookies?, 'booksters?, 'bookmeisters?) will fall at a rate of about 1/y from the previous year after about 3 or 4 years (where y is the number of years from this year). Take a look at the photos. Lots of young single people. This is social networking the way Tony Manero could only dream of social networking.

The interface is ordinary, the "tools" are non-existent, the look is pedestrian, the terms of use are decidedly tipped against the user and it doesn't do much. I am -- once again -- compelled to contemplate why I am so inexplicably unable to accept that pet rocks are incredible money makers. To the owners and operators of Facebook; this is brilliant. Why do Web 2.0 when the world only wants Web 1.163? Congratulations, and I will not be back. You are free to fully delete my "deactivated" account.

Facebook

Last night we left our porch light on in recognition of National Missing Children's Day. We learned about that by being privileged to attend a fund raising event for the Missing Children Society of Canada in Calgary.

The guest speaker was Melissa Hawach who was there to describe her story and her happy ending. While Melissa chided the TV News Guy MC for the media's sensationalizing of her experience, it is a pretty special tale by a woman who clearly crossed a threshold in her quest to get her daughters back. No doubt, Americans will probably be introduced to her story by way of a motion picture or movie-of-the-week but hearing about the mobilization of her will in person was an experience I will always remember.

From Calgary to Australia and into a chaotic Lebanon, Melissa tracked her children while developing a network of friends, supporters and lawyers to help get them back. It wasn't enough. Melissa took us to the edge of her final decision to get the kids back but she does not talk publicly about her controversial choice to go beyond what lawyers can do.

While Melissa was there to describe her extraordinary happy ending she made it clear that every year scores of children are the victims of parental abductions that remain unresolved. Beyond abduction, the Missing Children's Society helps parents seek run-aways and children who have errantly wandered. It's a good cause and worthy of greater support.

Reuters reports that Time Warner's Richard Parsons said at a recent media panel discussion;

"The Googles of the world, they are the Custer of the modern world. We are the Sioux nation... They will lose this war if they go to war. The notion that the new kids on the block have taken over is a false notion."

Aside from being a regretful, insensitive, bogus and inane analogy, Parsons demonstrates the kind of historical nonchalance that we get from "Big" media every day. Reflecting on Parson's comment one can only ask this question: In modern media terms, where can you get the most context and historical relevancy when considering a point of interest; TV, newspapers, radio or a Google search?

Identity, differentiation and expression are important to me. I usually have loads of time for people who share those ideals, even if they have widely divergent views on a variety of other issues. The older I get, the more I write, the more I interact with people from all over the Net, the more I realize how interesting it is to communicate with people who are different from me.

The more differences I experience, the less interested I get in negativity.

So I think it's important to note that I'm not the Brad Gibson who has written for Apple Mac magazines and sites like macobserver.com. That Brad Gibson also has his own blog and occasionally he writes some things that bother me. That's okay, he's an American in England and I'm the Canadian. Trouble is, he seems to also be a podcaster too. Okay, I hope he's not quite as acerbic in his podcasts as he is in his blog... I don't know because I have never listened.

Recently, that other Brad Gibson wrote about Rosie O'Donell in a demeaning and abusive way. There was a time in my life when I was not a big fan of Rosie but her regular chairing of "Hot Topics" on The View this past season has been riveting, humourous, controverial and thought provoking. We record the show daily and spend 10-20 minutes most week nights digging into the topics. Rosie has had an incredible year on the show.

And if she had not had such a great year? Nobody -- rich, poor, famous, invisible, alive or dead -- nobody should be the target of the kind of vitriol launched by that guy named Brad. The same kind of stuff, no less, that got Don Imus fired. So as a Brad Gibson, out here in Calgary, let me say again, "That Brad Gibson is not me..."

Todd Cochrane had a dream that he met with a Microsoft executive and the number of current Vista sales were something in the neighbourhood of the US national debt. That would be 8.5 trillion copies served. Since I laughed when I read the post that makes me hopelessly geeky.

Somewhere in the course of writing Canada's history in the 20th century the story changed from "warrior nation" to "peace-keeper". Today as we re-dedicate our great memorial at Vimy in honour of 66,000 who died in the First World War, we also mourn 6 soldiers who died on Easter Sunday in Afghanistan.

Ask an old soldier what he thinks of war and you will get the truth. The horror, the filth, the despair and the simple things that affirm humanity amidst the depths of man's lowest ebb. The soldier will also tell you about honour, duty, mission and the act of being a servant to the civics of justice. Although we have reached a cynical watershed as a society, with our distrust of spin and manufactured fear, there are still reasons for engagement in the desolate heat of an opium infused land.

In the twisted shards of a LAV III our greatest sons and daughters, our hopes, our dedicated and dedications, our vulnerability to those who would hate us, our strength of character, our commitment to a world -- that even in this place -- there is the possibility for a reasonable society. With our guns, our youth, our money, our diplomats, our building of roads and schools, our belief in defending the defenseless, our desire to protect children and advocate for women, we must continue to believe in keeping the peace.

For the 66,000. For the six.

While the headline is a tad Doc Searl-ish in its faux mystique, I'm at the point with my web site changes and infrastructure updates to coin a "new" term: disinfrastructure.

I embrace change for the simple reason that one day I'm going to be dead and I don't want to be taken by surprise. I have to say however -- even as a techie, nerdy, geeky, professional engineer -- that the last month working on my various site, server and content upgrades has been trying to say the least. Apparently, and thankfully, I am still married.

I have managed to consolidate almost all of my domains and have a spiffy new server set-up with a new host. (If all goes well I will give you a referral.) I have tons of bandwidth, a pretty good amount of storage and have the capacity to host dozens of domains. For my friends that are having a hard time with hosting, content management and updating; shoot me a note and tell me your story. I'm also thinking of providing pay-it-forward, free hosting for people I really like that just want to write. The downside of web publishing is the backroom horse-pucky of "content management" -- some people just want to get the words out.

Content in this post is written by Brad Gibson and you should be reading it from www.bradfordgibson.net.

The moral of my experience with my myriad of behind the scenes changes is that continuous change is better than batch change. I had built my media "empire" into a series of discontinuous information islands each with a separate set of management headaches. I had to take the leap to a completely new and well thought out structure so that things would not completely breakdown in the future. But step change or batch change is the hardest change of all. That's why short term dieting or manic exercise campaigns only produce short term results; they are not long term, continuous processes of productive change. The batch change is not a behaviour modifying experience; it's a trial. You get bored, you don't see results, you revert to previous behaviours and then... No change at all.

I was losing interest in my complicated path back to simpler, cheaper, more logical web content management and hosting. I got disinfrastructured. I think I made it through however and from now on you will be seeing continuous, planned change at this site and at my others -- especially currentthinkingradio.com.