Hey - we're on the Tonight Show tomorrow!  I forgot to mention it before.  Apparently so did everyone else!  Morgan Freeman will be on it too - I'm hoping he narrates our performance, as he narrates every movie ever.  I'll wave to you.

I guess everyone has already condemned the Zune to death, but I figured I'd through my kindling onto the funeral pyre as well.  I've said it before and I'll say it again, but the whole concept of limiting how, when and where people listen to their music is suicide, whether or not you allow sharing.  3 times?  5 times?  100 times?  Doesn't matter.  Same goes for proprietary file formats.  What I really want is a portable Squeezebox.  It's already a great unit (though, we'll see what the Logitech buyout does to it), but a portable version would rule.  Imagine that - access your own library online from anywhere in the world.  Listen to internet radio, get rss feeds.  Lossless encoding if you so desire.  No drm, no limits.  Too good to be true, probably, but a man can dream, can't he?

Just posted the last bit, and checked my news.  I am deeply saddened to hear of the death of Robert Altman.  Altman is far and away my favourite director; even his worst films (Popeye, Pret a Porter) still carry his trademark style, wit, misanthropy, embarrassment, and joy.  His best (Short Cuts, Nashville, MASH, McCabe and Mrs. Miller) will live on as some of the best films ever made, but I also encourage you to watch some of his lesser-known (or lesser-liked) movies, like Dr. T and the Women, The Company, Come Back to the Five and Dime, The Long Goodbye, and Streamers.  I think all I need to do is list off all of his movies to remind myself what a great impact he has had, and how much he will be missed.

Congratulations to my friends over at Concrete, for winning Applied Arts magazine's Best CD/DVD Design Award, in the Dec. 2006 issue!  Oh, and it was for the Vanity Project, even!

Three brief things:
1. Finally watched "Reds" the other day, after years of reading the mythology surrounding it.  I just want to say thank you to Warren Beatty for this incredible look into the birth of American Communisim.  Well, it's much more than that - it's an intensely political film that deals with big ideas with tenderness and insight, but it's also about men and women, and egos and art, and it's really truly essential viewing.  It ran for months at the Cedarbrae Cinemas near my house when I was 11, but I was much more into Raiders of the Lost Ark and Mel Brooks' History of the World, Part 1 that year.  Glad to see it's finally on DVD.
2. Check out this video interview we did with Rolling Stone.
3. Fin, that is unfair to say that I like Skyline Chili.  I also like Gold Star.  And Graeter's Ice Cream.

Oh, it's only Monday?   Check this out anyway.  Ed sent it to me - he wades through the things for which I have no patience, occasionally coming up with treasures like this one.  Holy crap!!  Anyway, we have a day off in Omaha, NE.  I'm off to explore now - wish me luck!

    Yesterday, I had a spectacularly New York kind of day off – first we took the subway downtown to take the kids to Katz’s Deli on Houston.  Katz’s, for those who don’t obsess about food the way I do, is one of the most important and most likely the best deli in the world (although I do have similar feelings for Schwartz’s in Montreal, and I have great memories of countless giant sandwiches at the Carnegie deli, which I still visit the most often, as we usually stay in Midtown) – their pastrami is fantastic, and the way they slice it by hand seems to make the sandwiches that much more succulent.  Katz’s is one of the few truly authentic Jewish delis left in New York, and it has been standing in the same spot since the 1890s.  When I walk in, I am accosted by decades of the North American Jewish experience, and, more immediately, by the sight of delicious-looking hot dogs, which I still have yet to try.  I keep meaning to order one, but I am always drawn to the line up for the hand-carved pastrami, and by the time that’s done, I’m too full to even consider a hot dog.  My eldest son ordered a chili dog, but by the time I sat down with my wife’s and my sandwiches, it was already gone.  Even more exciting than Katz’s food, however, was the fact that as I laid the tray down on the table, I realized that my son was sitting back-to-back with Jeffrey Steingarten!  Steingarten is the food columnist for Vogue magazine, and one of my favourite writers of any genre, nevermind food writing.  His books, The Man Who Ate Everything and It Must Have Been Something I Ate are two of my favourite books of all time.  Anyway, I walk over to him – I can’t help myself, I am as excited as I would have been if it was Elvis Costello – and said “excuse me, are you Jeffrey Steingarten?”  He recoiled back into his chair with a look of terror, as though I was serving him with a summons or divorce papers.  I extended my hand.  He held his arm tight to his side, and I said, “I’m a huge fan! I love your books, and I even read you in Vogue, although, as you can tell, the rest of the magazine doesn’t hold much sway over me”.  He half-smiled, still looking shocked that anyone would recognize him, and we shook hands.  The man he was sitting with said “This is Steven Page from the Barenaked Ladies”, which surprised the hell out me.  Turns out he was a writer from Toronto, interviewing Steingarten for a book on Jewish delis.  I stumbled back into my seat, still glowing with excitement.  It wasn’t until I was walking back along Houston (spying Jim Jarmusch turning south on Mott St., just to remind me I was in Soho) that I realized that Jeffrey Steingarten hadn’t said a word, apart from “yes”, during our entire exchange.  I had successfully mastered Bumbling Fanboy 101.
    From there, we headed over to the Jim Henson Company workshop, where they make all the puppets for Sesame Street, amongst other things.  It was a real thrill to see these incredible artists at work.  My kids loved it, but I’m pretty certain I loved it even more.  Such great history, and such a huge part of my childhood – it’s nice to see my kids turned on by the same kinds of things as I was.  Our friend, puppeteer Matt Vogel, who plays Big Bird, was kind enough to take us on this behind-the-scenes tour.  Thanks for the tour and for entertaining my kids (and countless others on television) with your great talent, Matt!
    Later, I went to see Jersey Boys, the Broadway musical version of the story of the Four Seasons, which I enjoyed immensely.  I always get my back up about rock-and-roll biographies on stage or screen (see La Bamba, Walk the Line, et al – they are usually very hackneyed and way off the mark), but this one seemed pretty natural, and although there are some shticky elements, it was actually quite affecting, the book was well-written (by Marshall Brickman, of Annie Hall fame), and the performances were very good (especially Daniel Reichard as Bob Gaudio).  Being a musical about performers, songs could integrate smoothly and believably into the context of the drama, which eliminated some of the awkwardness of musical theatre.  Most amazing to me, though, was the extent to which the audience went nuts for the musical performances; they stand and cheer for each song, as though they’re applauding not for the performers onstage in front of them, but for the memory of the original performances that inspired them.  The suspension of disbelief that is required to completely forget you’re not watching the actual Four Seasons is huge, but the show even fooled me a few times (although I think calling “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You” a “weird art song” seems a bit of a stretch!).  It made me think of the main reason why that film Death of a President is such a failure:  I never once suspended my disbelief, and they frankly didn’t try hard enough to fool me, from the over-acted “testimonials” to the “Thanks, That Was Fun”-style words put in Dick Cheney’s mouth, to the cover of the New York Times with the photo justified to the left margin – if they don’t bother to make the New York Times look like the New York Times, how am I supposed to get sucked into their movie?  It ended up just being boring, where Jersey Boys was entertaining, and, for a guy in a band, pleasantly sentimental.
    My pal Jono and I topped off our evening with a dinner at the bar at the Union Square Café - our regular haunt, and never a disappointment – and some election result-watching.  As of this writing, the Senate is not yet decided, but I want to send my congratulations to our American friends for making a choice for change, and though I’m not naïve enough to believe that tomorrow morning we’ll all be living in a freer, kinder, more generous Free World, it might be a start!

ps - the fan-sourced Wind It Up video is out now!

    I have a huge heart on my t-shirt right now.  It says I Heart NY, because, well, because I do.  We just spent three spectacular days there, including two performances at Radio City Music Hall, and a fun New York kind of day off yesterday.  My family came down to DC and New York with me, and we did some great family things, including visits to the Smithsonian in DC, and the MOMA in NYC.  The shows were good, which was a relief, as the last few New York plays, notably the Hammerstein Ballroom on the Peepshow and the Beacon on the first Holiday tour, were tough – hecklers, drunken fights in the audience.  This time, the only stumbling blocks were a painfully slow load-in, and a disastrous technical glitch that apparently the audience wouldn’t even have noticed if we hadn’t told them about:  During our second song, The Old Apartment, our new, state-of-the-art, digital, front of house mixing console crashed – it just froze.  Whatever faders were up were staying up, and whatever was down (like Jim and Kev’s voices) was staying down.  So, Robin, our sound engineer, had to reboot the whole thing, so we were told to take an extended pause while the system restarted.  Of course, it’s no big deal, we can roll with anything, but it’s freaking Radio City and it’s only our third song, and we’ve had no chance to build any momentum.  So we pause, and we stall, and we check to see if the audience can hear us, which they can, so we start chatting and try to let them know that something’s gone wrong, but we don’t exactly know what it is, and how long it will take.  I kind of love these moments of panic onstage – they often make us take our improvs up to the next level, and sometimes we reach this level of sublime Breaking Away–style triumph that pumps us and the audience full of adrenaline.  Seeing this as an opportunity for one of these moments, we broke into an odd version of Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know?” which I barely remembered then and remember less now (it’s usually the case that we’ve forgotten the raps in the show the moment they are finished).  The hardest part of the whole experience was simply not knowing whether everything was up and running again or not.  And, of course, now that the whole thing screwed up in New York, it’ll work fine for the rest of the tour, which is how it needs to be – New York is always our test run for Omaha.

Ok, that's it.  I quit.  Our "Oprah" improv song in Boston last night might be the best song we've ever done.  There's nothing left to say.  I suggest you buy it when the show becomes available on our site.  I'll be under a palm tree with a drink in a coconut.