The idea that rock stars specifically and artists more generally should remind clouded behind a veil of mystery is fairly widely accepted. Being too available, it is held, inevitably leads to the demystification of a persona. The alluring rock god becomes normal. Thus, it seems like one must work fairly aggressively to manage and monitor their outward facing persona to ensure that it conforms with the appropriate amounts of mystery and intrigue.

At the same time, the internet and social web technology and platforms push us in the opposite direction. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter -- all work best when lots of content is created on a regular basis. Those tools then push that content out over the web, the information gets indexed, and popularity rises as Google and other search engines catalog and represent this personal information back to the world at large. The social web works best when people push themselves to share more, to articulate more, to self-publish <i>more</i>.

Of course, it's easy to use these tools to lie. To create a persona that doesn't correlate to reality and that is a fabulization of qualities that the creator or artist sees as being interesting, relevant, popular or important.

It's just that it's very difficult to maintain. For me, personally, I've slowly been replacing artifice with reality and instead concentrating on super reality which means content built out of honesty while still trying to remain relevant.

I wonder whether a blog or self-publishing on the web is self-defeating for a musician that is attempting to hide behind phrases, words, melodies, slow movements of strings. But the stronger part of me posits that you can't go home again. And that the notion of an artificial person, constructed by a machine, is the very idea and the underpinning against which social communication tools on the internet are struggling.

Put another way: You don't think my music sucks if I write about it do you?

I was born a few years ago on this day, July 19th. Thanks Mom and Dad. It's been fun so far.

Finalizing the details for a show at Rockwood on September 1st at 10pm. We've been trying to get a gig at Rockwood for awhile. It's the perfect space to debut some of the new material and it's the right tone for the flavor of some of these new tunes. Tentative lineup would include the folks that contributed to the record including Bill Dobrow, Robby Jost, Pete Lalish, and Matt Ray. I may try and get Paul to do some laptop schmutz on top of things to Brillify the ambiance. We shall see.

I told Tommy that turn-out might be an issue given that it's Labor Day, 10pm before the hordes head back to their desk jobs on Tuesday. So the show might be more intimate and low key than we might otherwise prefer. But, that being said, it will be a great environment to showcase some of these songs.

We are in the era of the micro-celebrity. When you tell your friends about this observation and remark that it's a fascinating characterization of a truth that everyone intrinsically knows, please give me credit. Because I invented the phrase micro-celebrity.

New York magazine had an article about "micro-fame" referencing a few mainly New York types (duh, I guess) that are pursuing small-style fame by engaging heavily in new 2.0 social networking technology like Twitter and Plurk. These stories are mostly writers writing about writers. (If you haven't noticed social web articles are mostly about writers raging against their long held insecurity by celebrating the fascinating ways they've learned to share more about themselves.)

But this is actually not the phenomenon that I'm referring to and perhaps misses the point a bit. I am not saying that annoying, gratuitously aggressive women with distractingly narcissistic personas and some ability to articulate and market those personas are now becoming slightly famous. Because they are. And it's not new news.

Rather, what I'm really referring to is the collective transformation that is occurring across the cultural landscape, triggered mainly by Facebook, where average people are increasingly living their lives online. Micro-blogging functionality, mainly through status updates (Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, Plurk), have lowered the barrier to entry for people to flow their lives through an online medium. The average person now has new content fairly regularly. And things like a Facebook feed create the ability for that flow to be visualized and publicized without a great deal of effort.

So that's the first piece.

Second piece, and here's where the micro-celebrity comes in, is the fact that the long tail (kinda sorta) means that people actually care. That's the non-obvious result of all this. Not that all of these random people can increasingly live their lives online. But that a sum greater than 0 care about all these random people and actually scan and peruse this content out of mechanisms that relate to the reasons that people peruse the 'Stars: They're Just Like Us' section of Us Weekly. Because secretly we're all voyeurs. And we get bored. And it's kind of interesting to spy on people.

It's not that thousands of people (in almost every case) will care. Or even a couple hundred. But for anyone with fairly reasonable social skills, between 50 and 100 people will notice. Will digest. Will awkwardly bring up what you've been doing in the south of France because they noticed your Facebook updates.

And there, my friends, is where you have the micro-celebrity. It's truly micro. But it's the same motivations and behavior we find with real celebrities. But now applied to all of us thanks to the wonders of the world wide web.

So congratulations. You're a micro-celebrity. Put something on the web. And wait for someone at work to mention it.

And credit me, bitches. Because it's my word.

Last night E and I ventured into Brooklyn to catch Spoon at Prospect Park. The night did not begin well. I failed to look up the right subway stop and was going just on the Prospect Park website which tells you you can take any number of trains to get there. I'm such a Manhattanite that after living in New York for a collective six years I'd still never been to this place which is just as striking and beautiful, albeit smaller, than Central Park. We take the B all the way, get out just as the sun is setting in what seems like a questionable neighborhood and quickly realize we're on the opposite side of the Bandshell where the bands perform. So I convince my beautiful wife to hoof it across the park despite the general lack of people, the absence of good lighting, the eery setting of the sun and the darkened paths through the woods. She wasn't very pleased about the affair although we made it in one piece.

The show itself was typical of Spoon shows which means it was an "Eh". Britt Daniel and Jim Eno are two of my favorite studio recording artists and Jim has produced music for some folks that have played on my most recent record. But as a live experience (and this being my fourth or fifth time seeing them live) I find them wanting. The songs and the sounds on the record are intricate, detailed and sparse. The thing that makes it through to the live experience is the sparse part - which makes sense given it's so critical to the bands aesthetic. They want lots of open spaces in the music and a few key instruments driving the song forward. In my opinion, it simply doesn't translate very well. They end up sounding sloppy.

Still, there were some great tunes that did hit me but again mostly because I knew the studio versions. "Small Stakes" with a livelier and more rollicking drum sound was good. The piano riff in that song is classic Spoon. And "Finer Feelings" off of their heralded "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga" is a powerful and spirited rock tune. I've never read 'Commercial Appeal' but I feel I should after hearing about it in those song lyrics. And "Me and the Bean", my second favorite Spoon song, mostly for his "aw oh oh" which I maintain drips with history and references the past five decades of rock n roll. They didn't play my favorite tune, "Everything Hits at Once" but it's probably for the best because, again, I don't think the atmosphere would translate.

Last observation, and possibly heresy, but Britt Daniel is a songwriter first and a guitarist second. I wasn't that impressed with his playing. It was a couple steps above mine but every major artist probably is a better guitarist than I. And I'm sure he's better on the keys. But mostly he's just a really compelling and inspired builder and assembler of chord changes against which he straps melodies. And in that respect, he's in a league of his own.