Blog and Podcast Starting

#1: Blog and Podcast Starting
Blogging. Podcasting.

My friend Dana, who has been helping me with incorporating the Internet and social networking in my singing career, suggested that I start a blog. I e-mailed her some samples and it took a few tries to write something that she found acceptable. I come from the old European school of diary writing. When I was growing up in Puerto Rico education was still dictated by the old standards of European education that the Spaniards had left in the island fifty years earlier. Memorizing multiplication and division tables, repeating lists of the causes of many wars, names of presidents and heads of states, our own legislators and senators, and writing essays in English and Spanish. To inspire us to write correctly we read the best of English, Spanish (meaning from Spain in this instance), and Puerto Rican literature. Stories, novels, essays, and diaries. The diarists I read were intellectuals. They described everything in ernest, even normal conversations, using words that had to be looked up in the dictionary. The pursuit of happiness was intellectual happiness.

When I moved to the States in my early twenties, I learned that the masses didn't procure intellectual happiness. Knowing words from the dictionary wasn't a goal. I remember someone saying to me: "Why do you speak like a book?" All the English that I knew then was from books. In Puerto Rico I didn't have English speaking conversation partners, I learned English to read the books I was told to read. I wrote how the books taught me. I spoke the way I wrote, with words that had to be looked up in a dictionary.

Reading other peoples blogs I've learned that a blog isn't like the old diarist wrote. A blog is like a converstion about yourself, but not your intellectual self. Your everyday self. The self that goes to the subway and sings. Perhaps the self that writes songs, but not the self that analyses what she's writing. The self that observes what's going on. My teachers would have called it pedestrian writing. I wouldn't have been able to get away with that kind of writing in school. Actually, I don't know if I can be a pedestrian writer and write a blog, but I can try. I do hope that even if ocassionally I write a word that you have to look up in the dictionary, or at least ask out loud what does it mean, that you choose to read my blogs. It will be hard for me to adjust, but I believe that if you have a good education, and I do have a good education, you can adapt to write in all styles and circumstances.

When I told my friend Andres Bedoya that I was going to start blogging, he suggested that I start podcasting as well. I never envision myself being part of the Internet when I daydreamed about a career as a singer. (I never envisioned myself singing in the subway stations either.) Andres who was handing me the copy of the cover for my upcoming CD An Angel Voice in the Subway, said "A podcast is like a verbal blog". Not having heard a podcast before I asked, "How long should the podcast be? Do you think fifteen minutes would be enough?" "Oh, no"- his friend Jackie chimed in. "A podcast had to be longer than that. I like to put one when I'm going to clean my apartment and listen for about an hour until I'm done." Andres nodded as Jackie spoke. "A minimum of twenty-five minutes."-Andres added. I thought about it as I was going from Brooklyn to Manhattan by train, and then bus. An hour podcast? It would be like a making a radio show. I always wanted to make a radio show. Should it have segments? I could make different segments. I went on and on in my head. But, could I make a commitment of podcasting for an hour every week. Every week. I have a hard time being pedestrian on paper, for a few paragraphs, do you know how much effort to hold it up for a whole listening hour? HA!

Then I had a brain storm. What if I included music. Sometimes it could be a finished song, mini-cantata or solopera, but mostly it could be the music as it streams in my brain. My music comes from an inexhastible source of music that I hear in my head 24/7. (Does that mean that I'm weird?) I'm sure I'm not the only person in the world that hears music in her head all the time, but I haven't met anyone that has this gift (or curse?). For the first 30 something years of my life I thought everyone heard music in their head, although I wasn't actually aware that I heard the music. It was just there; I though that everyone heard their own music too. It was like the blinking of my eyes. My eyes blinked, therefore everybodies eyes blinked. Then the Sony Corporation came out with the Walkman. Millions of people ran to electronic and music stores to buy it. After several months of what I thought was an odd behaviour, although I couldn't explain why, I passed a man than was peeing by a tree. As I walked by him, I heard what he was listening on his Walkman (the tree was very close to the sidewalk!) and I asked loudly in my head: "But doesn't his head orchestra play music for him?" That's when I realized that other people don't have a resident orchestra and chorus to play music for them inside of their head.

Now, twenty years after Sony revolutionized the world with the Walkman, we have a technology that can easily collect the music and play back but with a few adjustments. So, I'm going to regale you with the musical musings of my brain. I'll start with half an hour, and you can tell me if you like it and want to me to make it longer or if that's the right length.

There I've completed my first blog (Dana would say that it has to many subjects, and she would be right!) and you may hear my first podcast here:http://tracksofasubwaydiva.podbean.com/.