| August 26, 2005 | 22 Hours in Los Angeles, 2 Hours in a Karaoke Booth |
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22 hours in Los Angeles 3 hours in meetings 2 hours in a karaoke booth Allyson, Heather and I flew down to Los Angeles for 22 hours to meet with our Yahoo! co-workers on the entertainment, music, and news teams to discuss all the exciting upcoming content which, of course, I can't tell you about. But I assure you it's cool stuff. Since I always like to begin any excursion or adventure well-rested (ummm, who am I kidding? perhaps well-caffeinated, or maybe well-dressed), I started the day yesterday on 3.5 hours of sleep because I was down in Sunnyvale at 5a.m. to do some East Coast radio interviews for Yahoo! Buzz on my office landline. (My housemates and I don't have a landline phone at our house and it seems ridiculous to sign up for one when I'm moving to LA in just 2 months.) The highlight of our trip down south was definitely the 2 hours we spent with Laura, Richard, and Chris in an Asian-style (private room) karaoke place off of Sawtelle in West Los Angeles. I would pay at least $35 for an mp3 recording of our sextet's (the use of this word makes our behavior sound more debaucherous) awesomely-outrageous rendition of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody." It certainly brought a tear to my eye. Similarly, witnessing the tortured magic of Chris and Laura's spontaneous and unplanned performance of Akon's "Lonely" can hardly be described. Thankfully, Heather took some photos of it all, and we can console ourselves that soon she will be posting them to flickr. postscript: Here's Heather's flickr photoset. Labels: allyson, chris, karaoke, la, photos, yahoo posted by Jess Barron @ 2:53 PM 
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| August 17, 2005 | Brides, Bachelorettes, and my Scorching Hot Social Calendar |
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Forgive me, dear reader. I've been kept away from the blog-a-log internets by my scorching hot social calendar, which had me driving to Tahoe to get gussied up in pretty party clothes with August, Owen, and Bethany to attend Jen and Deneb's wedding. Their wedding was up on a mountain, and we had to take a scary cable car to get up there. And I'm afraid of heights. But we somehow survived. And Jen looked beautiful, and Deneb rocked out. And August, Bethany, Owen and I sat at a table of 8 with Kurt Loder. Yes, *the* Kurt Loder from MTV and Rolling Stone. I was really excited to talk to him, but he didn't want to talk to us very much. Maybe we're really, really obnoxious? Or maybe he's just really, really shy? (He did seem to enjoy August's conversation about '60s one-hit pop bands he loves like Herman and the Hermits.) On the way back from Tahoe, I took August to Sonoma to celebrate his 29th birthday and getting accepted into the 39th ranked Law School in the country (U.C. Hastings). Yay! I celebrated with him so hard and at so many wineries that I ended up throwing up. Not just once, but many times. And I was the only licensed driver out of the two of us, so we were stuck and had to spend an additional night in wine country and then wake up at 5:45a.m. to drive back to S.F. to pick up my velvety fruitbat of a dog from the kennel and then drive down to Sunnyvale to make a 9a.m. meeting. I guess I should be thankful I didn't throw up at the wedding. Then I worked really hard for three days, and did the radio show, and flew to Denver for approximately 28 hours for my friend Ellen's bachelorette party. This weekend, I hafta do all of my Burning Man packing and preparing, and then the following weekend I leave for the playa for 9 days. When I return from the playa, it will be September. I will have one weekend to unpack and clean up my stuff, and then I will be flying out to Vail, CO for Ellen's wedding which I'll be a bridesmaid in. The next weekend I'll fly up up to Portland for Selena's wedding. Monkey and Mici just decided to elope next weekend because she's too busy with Law School to handle taking time out for their October Marin wedding. In October, I'll make 2-3 weekend trips down to Los Angeles to (hopefully) find myself a new home down there (I plan to move to LA on November 1), and then I'll fly to New York for the ONA conference for that last weekend of October. Then I'll start moving. Basically, my entire life is scheduled through November 1. My head is spinning and I have a lotta plane tickets and hotel reservations. Does everyone else have a lot going on too for August, September, October? Or is it just me? Labels: august, bethany, owen, photos, tahoe, travel, wedding, wine posted by Jess Barron @ 12:48 AM
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| August 8, 2005 | Peter Jennings Was My Favorite Broadcast Journalist |
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I met Peter Jennings (and also rode up in an elevator with him) when I worked as an intern at ABC News in 1995. I was working for Diane Sawyer on "Prime Time Live," but we would always go stand on the catwalk and watch when Peter taped "World News Tonight." Peter Jennings was always my favorite broadcast journalist to watch work. He made fast and furious notes on all the copy that was given to him. I always got a sense that he was very interested in what was talking about, and that he was interested in conveying stories as accurately and thoroughly as he possibly could. It's very sad to hear that Peter Jennings succumbed to cancer on Sunday. It's hard to say what the future of broadcast journalism holds now, with the retirement of Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and Ted Koppel. Times, they are certainly a' changin'. So, who will give us the news now? Diane Sawyer? Hari Sreenivasen? Bloggers? Citizen journalists with video cameraphones? What do you think? Labels: journalism, journalists, news posted by Jess Barron @ 11:53 AM
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| August 5, 2005 | Anyone Have Any Good Lawyer Jokes? |
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The very day we returned to San Franciso from the wilderness of Washington state, August received a phone call that he had been accepted to U.C. Hastings, the only law school he applied to. (He had been on the wait-list, and had almost lost hope.) He's very excited and getting himself all worked into a Law School lather. His hobo days may be numbered... Does anyone know any good lawyer jokes? If so, please share. Labels: august, jokes, law, lawyer posted by Jess Barron @ 5:39 AM
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| August 3, 2005 | A Healthy 'Self'-Interest? |
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Go pick up the August issue of "Self" magazine and turn to page 109. There (in the "Happiness" section) you will find a quick mention about Allyson's and my podcast. (It's in an article about cool ideas for hanging out with your girlfriends rather than just going to see a movie or going to bars. I wanted them to write that girls should get together and start their own pirate radio stations, but the editor said that pirate radio wasn't "a good fit for "Self's audience." Podcasting was a bit more their style. And a bit more legal too, I suppose...) Here's a shot we took of the article. Labels: allyson, happiness, magazine, podcast, press posted by Jess Barron @ 11:51 PM
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| I'm very worried about dragons... |
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"Sleeping is giving in, no matter what the time is. Sleeping is giving in, so lift those heavy eyelids. People say that you'll die, faster than without water, but we know it's just a lie, scare your son, scare your daughter. People say that your dreams are the only things that save ya. Come on baby in our dreams, we can live on misbehavior." -The Arcade Fire, "Rebellion (Lies)"  August, Bocce and I road-tripped with Andy in his Element that was filled to the top with camping gear, food and supplies from San Francisco up to Klickitat, Washington. We left my house in SF at 7a.m. and after an entire day of driving, arrived at Esther and Jason's camp around 10p.m. that night.We promptly unpacked the Nutria Republic flag I had brought and hung it up. Then we opened some beers. Or maybe we opened the beers first. I can't remember now. "Oh my god, Jessica! There's giant bugs everywhere!" Esther said. "And we keep seeing them in the tents!" "Aggh! What kind of bugs?" I squealed. "I've never really camped where there are bugs before!" (Plus, I'm scared of bugs.) "Giant beetles and these things that look like giant roaches!" Esther said. "Also, ants! Part of the shade structure is on an enormous ant hill. We didn't realize that until after we had picked this spot. Also, when we were building it, we realized that we are on a lava flow and it was impossible to pound in the rebar." The terrain was definitely more apocalyptic than the sites of the 2 past Phoenix festivals I had been to. Though we couldn't see it too well in the dark, the land had been burned in a forest fire about 10 years earlier. There were dead trees with knarled branches like the fingers of the world's oldest woman all around. I decided immediately that the Black Rock Desert in Nevada (where Burning Man is held each year) was a much more hospitable place to camp. Our friends Phil and Lori who helped organize the festival stopped by to say hi. "We were talking to the fire crew," Phil said. "And if one person drops a cigarette on the ground -- all this dry straw grass will go up in flames and we're all gonna die. Seriously. There is only one road in and out of this place. And they said the fire moves like 10 feet per second. There's no way we could outrun it. And we'd never get these cars out in time on that road." It seemed true. The road in to the campsite wasn't paved and was too bumpy and rocky to drive more than 5 miles per hour, even in the sporty Element. I was glad we hadn't driven my lowriding Volkswagen Beetle. It was too late to pitch tents, and too rocky anyway, and also we were too tired, so we all drank until we fell asleep on the floor of the shade structure. I didn't sleep well, because I was too worried about the giant bugs we had seen crawling through the shade structure while we were drinking, and then in the middle of the night it started pouring rain and thundering. The shade structure kept most of us dry, except Wink who was sleeping underneath the connection between the two tarps. The next day Esther set up the Nutria Interpretive Center (which I called the "Nutria Re-Education Camp"), and I distracted myself by reading about nutria and then asking everyone to contemplate the many mysteries of their species, for example, "Just how frenzied *is* their copulation, I ask you?" For the next two days we played music, played more music, played more music, and played even more music, danced to music, ran around in the rocky hills and field, and got very, very worried when we encountered a pair of sneaky blacklight dragons lurking near what we thought was a cool-looking stage. "This stage looks really cool!" said Andy, as we approached a place with flowy colorful lights. When we got closer -- they popped up outta nowhere: a pair of day-glow painted dragons, making the moment at once completely dorky and completely hysterical. Thankfully, we didn't encounter many fabric batiks or blacklight posters of bare breasted alien women. As anyone that's ever been to an all-night trance party knows, this is a serious concern. But in this case, we were able to focus our worry on the dragons. We became Dragon Worriers (inspired by an Amber chatlog). And we laughed so hard that we cried. "Do you worry a lot?" "Dragons are a very real worry in this day and age!" "Too many people are concerned about dragons." "California is very dangerous." etc. etc. We realized that everyone knows that dragons *love* rainbows, and that nutria do not. Also, we vowed to avoid typing in the dark. We didn't sleep much at all, except sometimes on the floor of the shade structure in the afternoon. The other main psytrance stage didn't have any dragons (nor fabric batiks or blacklight alien posters, thankfully), but at 2a.m. it looked and felt exactly like a setting from the Sony Playstation game Karaoke Revolution. The purple and pink colors felt like they were straight from a video game. The crowd around the stage and the lights felt like they were straight from a video game. But, perhaps most of all, the speaker dancers (or "speaker bitches," as we called them) were 100% straight from a video game. They were not real; they were made out of pixels. That could be the *only* explanation for how they looked. How else could her nipples have been quite so perky? How else could his jaw -- and scowl -- have been quite so chisled? There really was no other explanation. In addition to our ongoing -- and increasingly frenzied -- worries about dragons, we learned about the Free Cascadia movement, where Oregon and Washington want to succeed from the United States and bring Northern California with them. Man, the people of the Pacific Northwest have some crazy stuff going on... Like dragons and nutria. It's like the freakin' "land before time" up there or somethin' with all these mythical creatures roaming around. You don't need to be worried about nutria; just worry about dragons and everything else will be OK, I promise. Labels: andy, august, california, dragons, esther, nutria, oregon, party, phoenixfestival, photos, worries posted by Jess Barron @ 10:42 PM
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