I can’t believe I’ve jumped on another social networking bandwagon.  That’s right.  I am now a twitter-er (is that what we call someone who twitters?  Or is it “tweets”?).  I find this whole thing ridiculous.  But when I look back on my experience with these kinds of things, I remember that I took forever to get a myspace page (of which I’m on my third one now) and even longer to get a facebook page… I would resist for as long as I could until I just felt left out.  Well… this time I resisted for just a short while and decided to give in to the cultural psychosis of hyperactive social media.

If you’re interested in “following” my tweets… pop on over to www.twitter.com/JeffHawker

Does anybody else laugh at all the new internet lingo that has arisen in the past ten or so years?  When I was a kid, writing on someones wall was considered vandalism, but now it’s just how we say hello.  Terms like “add me” and “comment me” actually make sense to most people, when really they sound like bad grammar.  Whenever I had a dumb questions when I was young, my dad would tell me to look it up (or he’d make up a false answer and I was gullibul enough to believe it, which is why I bowed like a royal prince at the end of my children’s play)… now when I have a dumb question he tells me to “google it” or “wikipedia it”.  Somehow this language has become a social norm.  We accept these terms without thinking twice about them.  And now I will accept the new term “tweet”.  But I still can’t say it with a straight face.

It’s day one of my week-long hunt for gigs.  I haven’t have a lot of time, so I decided to just look online rather than going out to places.  I searched myspace for semi-well-known Vancouver artists such as “Said the Whale”, “Hey Ocean”, “Mother Mother”, and “Dan Mangan” .  I sent them a message asking to be an opening act for them sometime.  Dan Mangan replied saying that my music sounds good and it could be a possibility in the future (I don’t think he’s playing in Vancouver any time soon).  I haven’t heard from the others yet.

I eventually realized that it would help to be asking to open for artists who are actually playing in Vancouver sometime soon.  So I looked up all the upcoming shows in town and started sending out messages.  This was taking a really long time and many of the artists were actually DJs, cover bands, metal, or electronica (none of which would fit well with indie-folk).  So I limited my search to folk music and continued messaging artists.  I made sure to listen to them a bit and compliment them on their music.

I was surprised to see four replys (not including Dan Mangan’s) within an hour… all possitive!  One of the bands said they could add another date to their tour if I can book the venue for us.  The other three said that I could open for them.  So there you have it -  four prospective gigs, all from just a couple hours’ work.  Not too shabby.  If I can keep this up, I’ll be touring in no time.

Well I gotta get ready for my show tonight.  It’s at 8pm at SFU’s Highland pub.  Hope to see you there.