Dog Days...

It’s that chunk of summer we see every year, when the entire continent is sweating under a heat wave (except for here, where it’s always hot; a dry heat, but hot nonetheless) and not much is happening in the music industry.

We have several things going on at AD right now, but as I said a couple weeks ago, I can’t talk about them. So that’s no fun at all. I’m also doing a couple other non-AD things that would be interesting to you, the reader, but that I also can’t talk about. I have a stack of NDAs on my desk an inch thick, and they all basically say the same thing: “talk about this shit on your blog, and we’ll unleash a plague of lawyers on you that will make the Borgia Popes’ machinations seem tame.” While my nature is to scoff at such things when someone else’s signature is on them, when it’s my signature on them, I internalize the scoffing and soldier on.

Related: is there a band named The Borgia Popes? If not, why not?

Anyhow, I’m heading to Oregon on Thursday for five days at the coast. Nothing but fun and sun! Oh, wait, it’s a family reunion. So fun is out of the question, especially in an election year (although I’ve received word that the ultra-Teabaggers aren’t coming, so that should tone things down a bit). And sun? The Oregon coast and “sun” rarely, if ever, meet. My sister, thoughtful person that she is, secured a campground that has both electricity and wi-fi. So I should theoretically only have a brief interruption to my regularly scheduled vitriol. We’ll see how that works out.

So this is a semi-open thread. If something newsworthy happens between now and Thursday I’ll swap it out. Possible subjects of interest: the Microsoft Surface’s imminent arrival (I’m looking forward to a slate that actually can compute), Bitwig Studio in beta (lighting a fire under Ableton’s ass), the now-almost-certain implosion of Avid and what that means for the music industry. I bet I know which one you guys will want to talk about.