My 1,000th Tweet

This is ridiculous. I'm writing a blog post on Blogger about my 1,000th Tweet which will then appear on Facebook. I'm actually writing this specifically to link from that 1,000th Tweet. My metareality just imploded. And in any case, I'm starving and I have scrumptious Pad Thai being made and delivered to me, so I might as well write this instead of looking out the door every two minutes to see if my lunch has arrived.

Anyway, you'll hear people -- mostly Caucasian people with way too much time on their hands and not enough desire to think about important stuff -- talk about why Twitter is better than this, or Facebook is better than that, or why it's all terrible but they continue to use it anyway, and so on. I really don't care about any of those things. As a social person and especially as a performing musician and recording singer-songwriter, all social network services are important to me.

A lot of people won't be very impressed with 1,000 entries on Twitter, especially considering that they span the last three years. It's not that I'm incapable of prolific Tweeting. There are simple reason why I don't Tweet every few seconds.

1. My job has me running the social networks of several large companies, and making entries in their Twitter and Facebook accounts is one of the things I do for work. Hence, I'm not always in the mood to do my own social networking after taking care of all of their needs.

2. I prefer to write things that actually matter to me in some way. It's not that "my Tweets are important, dammit!". It's that unless I'm feeling it, I ain't Tweeting it. That may mean I Tweet about what I had for lunch, but it may also mean that I don't Tweet my reaction to every news story.

3. While I'm a low-key public figure in my small-time rock star way, I'm more of a private person than you may realize. That's why you don't see many Tweets about my child, or about my love life, or about my finances, and so on.

So while I may only post an average of one Tweet per day, I do enjoy the aspect of connecting to the people who choose to follow me, and not filling their timeline with notices of every time I use the bathroom, stub my toe, or put on my sneakers (though I reserve the right to do so whenever I feel like it). However, I tend to enjoy other people who Tweet a lot. There is a short list of people on my timeline who are incredibly funny with an ability to deliver undeniably hilarious messages in under 140 characters. Brevity was never my strong suit.

I've also learned a lot about people on Twitter. There's something about the format that encourages folks to get to the point in a way that they can't do in longer form writing. A lot of what I've learned is about the misconceptions of what each gender thinks about the other... I can't tell you how many "this is what men like" Tweets that can't be further from the truth. I've also seen the phenomenon where all people want is good news, and the moment that you bring up something contrary to their message... well, it's sure easy to just block out that dark and rainy cloud and keep pretending that everything in the world is going your way and everyone you know agrees with everything you say, right?

Despite those things, I find that I now turn to Twitter whenever I get the inkling of an important event happening in the world. By the time the first news media services start covering it, I already know many details, and often those details are from people actually experiencing the event (and not some reporter's interpretation of it). So, hats off to Twitter, and those who make it an enjoyable experience for me.

Now to finish my Pad Thai (which is freaking delicious, in case you didn't know). And thanks for the follows, my Tweeple.

10 Random Notes

Note: When I'm not writing reports about my performances in SL, or my music escapades in other realities, I often still enjoy writing about various things. But even when I don't have any specific topic in mind to write about, I still tend to write. Here are some random topics and fun facts.

1. Kat and I really do share the same birthday and Second Life rezday. Respectively, they are June 6 and October 12. We found out about the birthday thing before we were dating (we started as friends, as many good relationships do). The SL date is easier to understand, since we enrolled in SL at the same time, together on the phone (back then, in 2006, she was living in Seattle).

2. I wake up every weekday at 6AM, which I don't like at all, and drive my son to his middle school. It's not very far away and he can walk if necessary, but I enjoy being able to see him off. I also pick him up on most afternoons.

Good morning? If I didn't have coffee when I got up on weekdays, I'd probably just... not.

3. I usually eat a banana every morning. Bananas are really good for you nutritionally, and on mornings when I get up early, I don't like diving into some huge breakfast right away.

4. I'm a fan of the Oakland Raiders NFL team, and have been since the '80s. I'm not, like, some completely insane football fan. It doesn't take over my life, as I've seen in some people. But I do look forward to football season each year, and stand by my Raiders even when they suck (which they have for most of the last nine years). I participate in football pools just for fun, and I also write a weekly football column for an online forum of musicians who also like the NFL.

5. I work for myself and my business is based in my home, so my daily apparel here in the casual beach city where I live consists of shorts and a t-shirt and sandals, or, when it starts to get cooler, jeans and a t-shirt and sneakers. I work hard and am relatively successful, but I allow myself the luxury of never dressing up unless absolutely necessary.

6. I'm a good cook. When I was growing up, both of my parents worked, and I usually had to fend for myself for dinner and such. So, I learned from an early age how to be comfortable in the kitchen, and can actually handle some relatively gourmet-level dishes. I usually reserve my good cooking for the weekends, when I can take more time preparing food than I have during the week.

I cook a lot of things, but some of my more delectable delights are (left to right) steak au poivre, dill shrimp salad, and eggs benedict.

7. Only a few of my fans know that I'm a semi-capable piano player in addition to being a guitarist and singer and harmonica guy. I actually started my musical life on piano, but shifted to guitar before my 7th birthday. Still, I enjoy tickling the ivories from time to time.

8. Like many musicians, I used to have long hair, halfway down my back. I just got tired of the look eventually, and also tired of having to do anything to maintain my hair. I keep it pretty short these days.

9. I exercise every morning. I didn't until the start of 2011, but as I get older, I find it's really a problem if I don't keep physically active on a daily basis. While some of my more macho friends laugh at my use of the Wii Fit Plus, I can tell you that like most exercise programs, as long as you stick with it and take it seriously, it produces results.

Despite my evangelism of the Wii Fit Plus, I still supplement my exercise with some free weights. While I have no goals of being some big buff guy, having nice muscle tone in your arms is generally a good thing.

10. I think shaving is overrated. Sliding a sharpened piece of metal over my face every morning has never been my idea of fun. That's why I'm one of those guys that tends to walk around looking as if he just awoke under a bus stop bench.

I do shave, of course, usually every few days. Today is not going to be one of those days.

Molaskey's Pub w/Lyndon Heart (09.15.11)

There's something I've never mentioned before on this blog, namely because I'd never done it before until last night. But now that I have, I want to do it a lot more!

I'm talking about multi-streaming. What is that? The very simple explanation is that it allows two or more people to perform live music together at the same time in Second Life. The way it works is pretty crazy. If you don't like techno-babble, you may want to skip the next part. Basically, when someone performs in SL, they broadcast over an Internet stream... the same way you access Internet radio online. I provide a stream address to the venue (basically a specialized URL), they plug it in, and you hear me in world. In a multi-stream, my stream is picked up by another musician in an application like iTunes, and then they play along, and send the combination of both streams into SL.

I'm in Los Angeles, and Lyndon is in Seattle. This fact doesn't stop us from rocking together in SL. Photo by Triana.

The upside is that our audience gets to hear both artists performing together, as if they were in the same room even though they might be thousands of miles apart in real life. The downside? Only one: the person who is "first in line" (i.e., the one originating the stream) cannot hear the people who come after him/her. It takes some good musicianship to do harmonies and such when you're not actually hearing the other person! But still, if you choose your material well, it can be a ton of fun.

All that brings me to my report from my very first multi-streamed show, which was last night at Molaskey's Pub along with my pal Lyndon Heart. Lyndon and I got to know each other last February at the San Diego SL Jam, and we have a ton of musical tastes and influences in common. We also have a common manager in Maali Beck, and it was she that suggested we do a show together. I've seen many multi-streamed shows in SL with artists including Lyndon, Max Kleene, Beth Odets, and others, but as I said up top, I'd never done it myself. Lyndon suggested that for this first time, it would be easier if I was first in line in the stream (I agreed heartily), and we got together in SL the evening before just to make sure that we were ready to rock with our technical setup. Yesterday morning, we picked out some songs that would work in that format, and then we did the show.

Molaskey's always brings in a great audience made up of people who really care about music. that's one of the many things that makes it one of SL's finest live music venues. Photo by Kat.

The way it was scheduled was that I had the 6-7PM hour, while Lyndon was booked for the 7-8PM slot. I came onstage and did my usual thing (a few originals, a few covers) until 6:45, when I was joined by Mr. Heart. We played together for a half hour until 7:15, and then Lyndon did his solo stuff for the remaining 45 minutes (actually, knowing Lyndon, he probably went quite a bit longer, but by then I was starving to death and had to leave SL to get some calories in me). But during the show, we had a fantastic crowd that combined my Zakster fans with Lyndon's audience and the regulars at Molaskey's. I haven't heard the section of the show with Lyndon and I together (and am really hoping that I can check out a recording later), but on my end, things were sounding really good. I couldn't be happier with the performance, and (probably more importantly) everyone seemed to have a great time.

Lyndon and I made a damn good musical team. I can guarantee that wasn't the last time we'll rock the grid together. Photo by Kat.

Molaskey's Set List (Zak Alone)...
Broken Day (Zak Claxton)
California (Joni Mitchell)
Breaking Us in Two (Joe Jackson)
This Afternoon (Zak Claxton)
Landslide (Fleetwood Mac)
Always Tomorrow (Zak Claxton)
Things Behind the Sun (Nick Drake)
Starman (David Bowie)

Molaskey's Set List (Zak and Lyndon)...
While My Guitar Gently Weeps (Beatles)
Sister Golden Hair (America)
Cinnamon Girl (Neil Young)
Mary Jane's Last Dance (Tom Petty)
The Weight (The Band)
You've Got a Friend (Carole King)

Thanks very much to everyone who came out to see Lyndon and I perform together at Molaskey's! Special thanks to those who helped support my show!
Sloane Cerise, Triana Caldera, Tayzia Abattoir, Kat Claxton, Phobe Cazalet, Marissa Fredriksson, GMetal Svartur, Bree Birke, Diana Renoir, Xerxes Ninetails, TheaDee, Aurelie Chenaux, my wonderful manager Maali Beck, and Molaskey's staff including Katydid Something, Apple MacKay, Cicadetta Stillwater, Mia Kitchensink, and the rest!

My "Gigging in Second Life" article in L2P

READ IT HERE!

While almost all of you know me as a fun-loving and silly guitar player and singer, there's a whole other group of people who know me as a fun-loving and silly writer and designer. I'm lucky enough to have my passion be entwined with my vocation; my real-life job is doing marketing communications for the music/audio products industry. Doing that gig over the last 20 years or so has allowed me to develop long-term friendships with many of the people who run the magazines that serve this industry, such as Guitar Player, Keyboard, Electronic Musician, Pro Sound News, EQ, and many others.

When I ran into my friend Bill Evans at the NAMM Show (a trade show for the music product biz) last January, I had an epiphany. Bill has been editing an online magazine called "Live 2 Play" ("L2P" for short), and suddenly I realized that an article about performing live music in SL would be perfect for his publication. We chatted about it, and he (being a smart guy) was immediately into the idea. I'd written about playing in Second Life before, in the March 2008 issue of Electronic Musician, but since several years had passed, I knew it was high time for a magazine that was geared toward live performing artists to give the SL music scene some well-deserved attention.

Of course, magazines of all kinds (both printed and online) put together their schedule of editorial content way ahead of time, so months had passed since I wrote and delivered the article. Then, just yesterday, I saw that the official Second Life Twitter feed had re-tweeted a link...

Intrigued, I clicked the link, and lo and behold, it was my article! It's always fun to be surprised by those kind of things. Anyway, the article should be pretty self-explanatory (read it now, if you haven't done so already). While I'm usually hesitant to talk about the compensation that performing artists get in SL, it was necessary to mention it here. After all, 95% of the readership of L2P has probably never even heard of Second Life, and to demonstrate that it's worthwhile to do shows there, I had to tell them that yes, they could actually make some money doing it.

Of course, for me, as a songwriter, it was more important to emphasize the real power of SL, which is to build a global audience for your music. I mentioned this as well. Hopefully, the end result is that we see a new influx of musicians into SL. As I've said many times, while there are others who might want to limit the number of people playing in SL (and hence reduce what they consider their competition for audiences), I feel that continually promoting SL as a live music destination has positive results for everyone. After all, the more musicians there are, the more new people will get into SL to come check out the shows, and that can't be a bad thing by any definition.

Crystal Gardens (09.13.11)

As I wrote last week, I did a show at Crystal Gardens apart from my regularly-scheduled Tuesday evening gig on Thursday, and it went surprisingly well. Keeping that in mind, I was utterly convinced that this week's show would have me hearing crickets at the end of each song, with no one bothering to come by and see me. But once again, my pessimism was unfounded; we had a good crew of Zaksters in the crowd, and it turned out to be a fun show.

Side note: in my experience, there's a big difference, mentally speaking, for artists who play in Second Life versus those who do gigs in the flesh. When you have a show in the land of reality, you often spend the whole day preparing for it, and then it can be hours to actually pack up your gear and transport yourself to the venue where the show is happening before you actually play the first note. Obviously, in SL, not nearly as much prep time is needed, and this is mostly a great thing. However, there's also the element of mental preparation. See, I can be in the midst of working, and my brain is in work mode. Get this thing written, get that thing posted, get this artwork sent to the printer, and so on. then, with almost no time to make the mental adjustment to being a live performer, I find myself at the show.

That's not to say I don't warm up for my shows (I do, starting about an hour before my scheduled stage time). However, it can often take a little while to get out of "worker bee mode" and into "virtual rock star mode". On good days, this happens quickly, and by the time I strum a chord, my energy level is high and I'm ready to rock the casbah. Occasionally, though, it takes awhile longer, and I find myself being whiny about life in general. But the mere act of putting on my guitar and singing usually helps that mental transition happen quickly, and I snap out of it and get to the rocking.

Team Zakster unites at Crystal Sands on a Tuesday night. Photo by Kat.

Back to the show: it was cool. My Tuesday evening shows at Crystal Gardens doesn't have anyone opening up for me, so there's always that pressure of trying to get people to come out for the show. This was formerly a giant pain in the ass for me, but since I started working with Maali Beck as my manager/promoter about six months ago, it got a hell of a lot easier. I can't tell you how nice it is not having to spend the 10-15 minutes before each show imploring audiences to attend the show, and instead taking the time, per above, to get my brain ready to rock. I'd say that it's made a noticeable improvement to my shows in general. Last night, I put together a rather typical Zak Claxton set, but after noticing that most of the songs I'd quickly pulled out for the show were pretty slow and sad, I made some course corrections and it all worked out just fine.

Crystal Gardens Set List...
†Down By The River (Neil Young)
Perfect Girl (Zak Claxton)
Fire & Rain (James Taylor)
In My Time of Dying (Traditional)
Shine (Zak Claxton)
Blues Skies (Irving Berlin)
The Worst (Rolling Stones)
Falling Down (Zak Claxton)
Tempted (Squeeze)
After the Goldrush (Neil Young)
Broken Day (Zak Claxton)

†My last performance of "Down By the River": September 21, 2009.

One final note: while I say it pretty often, it can never be often enough: my fans are great people. A good portion of the fun that comes along with being at a Zak Show has nothing to do with the music, or even my presence at all. My friends/fans bring a huge portion of that fun for everyone who attends the show, and i'm always grateful for their zany antics.

Are those bacon pasties on Triana's boobs? Yes. Yes, they are. Photo by Kat.

Huge thanks to the Zaksters who supported my show! GMetal Svartur, Triana Caldera, Alexis Fairlady, Darmok, TheaDee, Kat Claxton, Xerxes Ninetails, Diana Renoir, my manager Maali Beck, and CG owners Mikal Beaumont and Sandi Benelli!

Crystal Gardens (09.08.11)

For being such a positive person, I tend to go negative about certain shows. I mentioned to Kat earlier this week that because I was scheduled for two shows on two consecutive days, it was likely that both would end up being poorly attended.

Well, my show on Wednesday turned out great, leaving me with all the more reason to believe that Thursday night's show at Crystal Gardens would be an empty wasteland. However, due in part to a good crowd that was left over from Anek Fuchs' show previous to mine, we started strong and pretty much stayed that way. I was very pleasantly surprised, and if I were a smarter guy, it should teach me a lesson to not presume how things are going to go at any given show.

Wearing my "I Already Beat This Game" t-shirt and rocking out at Crystal Gardens. Photo by Triana.

Anyway, speaking of the show, this one seemed to go very well. My only complaint is that we'd been having a mini heat wave here in SoCal, and things were a little on the toasty side in my little upstairs office/studio where I do my shows (we don't have air conditioning here by the beach where I live). But despite generating a bunch of perspiration, I had a good time while I played, and it seemed that my audience did as well.

Is this a nice place to play some rock music, or what? Photo by Kat.

The set came out pretty good as well. Just the night before, I'd done a themed show of all-90s cover tunes, so for this show I went back to my usual eclectic mix of originals and covers that spanned decades. I also did another new cover for the first time, and pulled out a number of tunes that are rare for me.

Crystal Gardens Set List...
Bertha (Grateful Dead)
This Afternoon (Zak Claxton)
†Won't Get Fooled Again (The Who)
Thanks Anyway (Zak Claxton)
Wish You Were Here (Pink Floyd)
††Black Crow (joni MItchell)
Falling Down (Zak Claxton)
*Thick as a Brick (Jethro Tull)
†††My Heart (Neil Young)
††††She's Leaving Home (Beatles)
Redemption Song (Bob Marley)

*Indicates the first time I have performed this song in SL.
†My last performance of "Won't Get Fooled Again": October 14, 2008.
††My last performance of "Black Crow" (only played once before): August 23, 2010.
†††My last performance of "My Heart": April 4, 2010.
††††My last performance of "She's Leaving Home": September 9, 2009.

Thanks very much to everyone who made the show fantastic, including those below who helped support my show! GMetal Svartur, Triana Caldera, TheaDee, Sher Salmson, Alexis Fairlady, Diana Renoir, Kat Claxton, my manager Maali Beck, and Crystal Gardens owners Mikal Beaumont and Sandi Benelli!

Key West (09.07.11)

I think all performing artists like the idea of doing a show that's apart from the ordinary. Even with a big repertoire of songs, doing something like a themed show gives me a perfectly good opportunity to update my set list and bring in some new fans who are appreciative of the specific purpose of the show.