I've just figured out I have to re-design the Barbie page I set up to keep track of my trademark fight with Mattel. There's nothing wrong with daily (or frequent) bulletins, but it's getting to be too long a narrative for a short-attention span press to handle. I end up repeating some things over and over. I think I need to do another degree of editing and digestion. Keep the current pages as a record. Organize the facts and incidents (and their related URLs) into an easy to use list format. Have news at the top of the main page.

Now all I need is a little "free" time to do it in! I've got to get into my office to fax a new outline to my editor at Osborne, and I have to get back to my home to tape a KPFA interview at 1:00 (94.1 in the Bay Area) I did ostensibly to promote the Coffeehouse book, but the host was very sympathetic to the Barbie threat. Levi, my co-editor on the book, called in from Newyork (I was in the studio in Berkeley - my first time in a radio studio), and I'm interested to hear how they edited down our banter and tangents.

x

I just received in the mail tapes of a recent Zero performance at Wetlands in Newyork, in which Hunter sits in for Reelin' and Pitchin', a tune musically kin to Blue Suede Shoes he used to play with the Dinosaurs (trivia-mongers note: it was this band which effected the "Jr." on the end of J. Mascis's band's name, Dinosaur Jr., much as a third Warlocks band, apparently from Texas, possibly with a ZZ-Topper or two in it, but not Lou Reed's early band, put out a single that it seems Phil Lesh - I think, this is from memory - saw in a cut-out bin, requiring the fledgling acid test band change its name to the Grateful Dead, formerly the Warlocks) and Franklin's Tower.

The first run through was anticlimactic. It doesn't sound to me like Hunter's vocals dig into the Zero turf being chewed up by Greg's motorpsycho drumming. Still, Zero has their way with that song, as with so many others. The Franklin's would have no doubt affected me more starkly had I been in attendance will the full impact of the surprise upon me. In my living room, instead, I wondered about the arrangement, enjoyed the solos, the horn, but found it oddly wanting. The second set I listened to from the kitchen, making dinner last night, and It's Up to You, I believe, came through with clarity and power. I turned up the volume for Use Me Up, but I couldn't really listen and cope at the same time. This morning I noticed I still had Dolby B on but that the tape was recorded with no Dolby. I'm deep into Afro Blue at the moment.

Horses on the edges of
a vision going blind,
horses on the ledges of
the canyons of my mind

--Robert Hunter, "Horses"