I just received this. Cool. We can house some protestors at our place for sure. I don't understand this whole thing fully. Nor do I fully understand why “we” should be against the WTO or the World Bank or the IMF or any of the other things that really cool people in the know are supposed to be against. I don't mind admitting it. try as I might, and I spend hours a day researching and studying things in general, its hard to get to know all the issues that are affecting us. the war on Iraq was an easy one. [Or was it?] this FTAA meeting coming right into our own backyard has made it very hard to ignore. All the better. Everyday I think about it. what the bigger picture is, what are we really here for. Besides just the fun and the money and the glamour and the friends and the art and of course our own survival—even say just family--- what are we really here for? (think of people like Gandhi or mother Theresa or ram Dass and then I start to get a better understanding of what resonates with me in answer to this question---I think people like bono and sting and peter Gabriel and Neil young are also onto it—kind of a combination of non-apologetic self service and gratification and service to others (the people that are running stars edge, the admin arm of Avatar, really took it in a direction that I didn't agree with or couldn’t relate to fully in the last few years with the introduction of the whole ‘selfless service to others’ concept. For me, I believe that it has to be a healthy combination of both. YOU have to be happy first, like just totally fucking selfishly happy, and I swear to God what starts happening is that you just automatically start reaching out all around you helping people.) Most recently....

Subject: urgent needs - housing/floors, young (and old) FTAA protestors
>Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2003 18:46:28 EST
>
>HELLO! Can you please forward this to your email lists -- very important and
>EXTREMELY TIMELY. -
>*****
>Hello. The FTAA meeting is coming to town -- and so are the "protestors" --
>who are here to protect worker's rights, the environment, our water (which is
>up for sale), and helping make sure people have a say in their own destiny.
>(They are not ALL here to "break windows!!" ). They envision a world of "fair
>trade" not just unaccountable-for "free trade." The city has done a great job
>of making it difficult for CHURCHES who normally open their doors to these
>mostly young folks to have a place to sleep. As such, there is a MAJOR housing
>crisis. If you can help with a floor, a backyard - anything, seriously
>anything.... one night will even do... please call citizens trade at
>
>ALSO, so you are comfortable, you can choose what kind of activist you want--
>there are kids coming down from college in Vermont, Texas, Portland - and
>even older activists, union workers, farmers.... You can even specify
>boy/girl/yoga-life/vegetarian/peaceful/gay/lesbian/etc! .... PLEASE help if you can.
>This is a SERIOUS, urgent need. (And could be fun for you too! - plus a way to
>take part, take action.) I have met many of these young activists and have been
>completely moved and inspired.
>
>(You can see some of the postings on http://stopftaa.org/housing.php but
>PLEASE also call citizens trade (I am not sure how updated that site it). But you
>can see the range of folks looking for places, and speaking from their
>hearts.)
>
>If you are not already informed about the FTAA (which you may be!), please do
>like I am and learn more about these vital issues - at mobilizemiamiftaa.org
>or ftaaimc.org.

Receiving more and more emails and calls for free stuff from radio stations. Sleep with you is starting to bubble. They want posters, cds for on air giveaways, T-shirts, stickers. And they're playing the hell out of the new CD. some of them. Its awesome. I am starting to understand something about it. I think that a lot of people in the indie side of the music biz don't understand how it works so there are a lot of myths that are perpetuated about the ‘local’ or ‘indie’ level. And they are perpetuated by a lot of the major players too. Its not just the indies that think all this. there is this idea that a band needs to break out of their town or ‘create a big buzz’ in their hometown and then branch out regionally and then eventually will get national attention or better yet attract the interest of a major who will then be able to give them national attention. So there is this whole creed and then methodology to how to do this. this is what we can call the Dave Matthews or the Marylyn Manson or even good charlotte approach. And this approach does work.

I watched Brian do it with his Manson thing. I watched him morph from a gangly geeky writer for a local community college newspaper into this mega-Goth-rock-shock-star on a local level in about five years and then of course it just exploded nationally as well. only an idiot would have turned the Manson project down if they ever came to a local show because they were amazing spectacles and filled to capacity with people. but plenty of people did turn it down. Year after year. It was Trent resznor who took the think national and made it a phenom. So who knows if Manson really needed the local hype or not. But I'm sure it helped. Same with Dave Matthews. Word is they were already touring and selling out clubs all over their region and selling tons of units. Tens of thousands on their own. it’s a legend in the industry. So yes it can be done that way. but I've been thinking about it a lot and watched it happen a lot over the last year or so and now I'm watching it with our band. Chris and Dashboard is a perfect example. This cat is from down here, my old town of Boca Raton, an hour up from Miami. And there wasn't anyone who really knew who this guy was down here when he busted nationally. Maybe there were a hundred people max. but he was just another local player who barely played around the tri-county area.

Trust me, there are no places to play up there where he's from. it’s a retirement community. But he prob knew this, so he hooked up with Vagrant records out in cali. They liked what he did, and they had the funds to promote his albums nationally. Not locally. Nationally. And then bam. Two years later Chris is making it big-time with dashboard confessional. Nationally. A band who has probably sold a lot more records in Washington or New York than he has in South Florida. It was national promo that did, not a local buzz. It was someone at vagrant who liked it, not some fans in his hometown. Can anyone say Mariah Carey? Christina Aguilera? Norah Jones? Pete yorn? Local groundswell buzz that turned into regional that eventually went national? No. overnight national promo that led to huge album sales nationally. Exactly. People have it wrong.

Go ahead and build your local buzz and fan-base if you want to. why not. But what I'm learning is that its like any other biz. Promote locally? You will sell locally, which means you will still be poor. Promote nationally and you will sell nationally, which means you have the opp of becoming successful at whatever it is you’re selling. Man it took me a long time to get this and I really feel like a fool for that. but I get it now. with Transcendence because we live in Miami, FL USA, we don't have a huge audience here for rock music. No one does. There are only 11% white Anglo-Saxon Americans living here according to the last US census reports. There's an inside joke down here. you go to any local band’s shows and you see the same twenty faces. And its true. There's only like twenty rock music fans left in Miami. look it up. it’s a fact. I saw it on the Internet. Lol. So Latin, hip hop, and dance music are huge. But not rock music. O.k. cool. So we aren't going to break attendance records in our own hometown, if we keep making the music that we do because of the nature of where we live, but when we get some amazing fan letter from fans in Hoboken or Kenosha or Poughkeepsie, and all these other places some of them we've never heard of, then we realize man it’s a national thing, its not a local thing.

You see a chart that your album is #9 in Winona Minnesota and you're thinking man that's fucking so cool. Where is Winona? You call our local Miami station and ask them to play some transcendence and they’re like, ‘uh... I don't know if we have that album.... who is it again?’ and seriously maybe you’ve been in their studio probably ten times in the last two years doing interviews with them, but they are just not your audience, for whatever reason. But drive up to Fairfax Virginia and the kids are going crazy for you. So go figure. This is the thing. You have to find your audience, wherever they are, and for whatever it is you do. And maybe its not in your own backyard, and hey, in the long run that's a good thing. Cause you want peace when you're home anyway. I think the coolest thing would be to break big all over the country except in your own hometown so you can still live there and kind of get around peaceably and do your thing and not be noticed. [I'm just partially talking out of my ass here, because you know what, when you work as hard and long as we have, it would be nice to be recognized in your own hometown. So fuck me for the above few sentences...]

Last screening: woke up this morning a bit hung-over which is always fun in a weird twisted kind of way and watched the royal tennenbaums. What a wonderful beautiful sad moving twisted film this is. I hope to make an album as good as this movie one day.
Current Spin: Robbie Williams---escapology. I love this record. awesome!