By Joe Klein
It’s that time again! January brings with it our favorite trade shows of the year! And, wouldn’t you know it, they’re all in one of our favorite places, just a mere ninety miles north of our “home base!”
Las Vegas is most definitely the place to be this month, and, as we are every year, we’re geared up to go! This week we’ll be attend
ing the 2010 CONSUMER ELECTRONICS SHOW and checking out the latest gadgets and toys at one of the world’s largest trade shows.
We’ll also be checking out the annual “adult companion” to the CES, the ADULT ENTERTAINMENT EXPO! The event, staged each year by the AVN MEDIA NETWORK is always a total riot, with nearly every major adult entertainment celebrity and luminary in attendance. The booths on the main show floor, open to all “fans” of the genre, is filled to the brim with “eye candy” in every direction. The vendor booths in the exhibit area below the main level, open to the trade and press only, display some of the craziest—and kinkiest—toys around!
Every year the AVN ADULT VIDEO AWARDS are handed out on the last night of the event, honoring the best performances and productions in many categories of adult entertainment. While other commitments and parties prevented us from attending last year’s award ceremony, we are hoping to attend at least part of the awards show this year, which has changed venues from the Mandalay Bay to The Pearl nightclub at The Palms Hotel.
It’s going to be a few days jam packed with gizmos and gadgets of all kinds, and our schedule is already packed to the gills with endless things to do and see. Besides trying to take in the acres of exhibits at the Las Vegas Convention Center and the Sands/Venetian Expo Center, we have a pretty large list of parties and press events. If past experience is any guide, we’ll be lucky to get to even half of the events on the list. But that’s just what convention week in Vegas is all about.
So, we’re off and running! As I have done for the past couple of years, I’ll be meeting up with our old pal MICHAEL BUTLER, who is the online host of the music channel at MEVIO.COM as well as hosting his own online podcast and live streaming shows, THE ROCK AND ROLL GEEK SHOW and GOOD CLEAN FUN. Michael will be doing his own video reports for MEVIO all day Thursday, Friday and Saturday. I’ve agreed to help out with camera and sound duties and even help with a bit of production assistance. So it looks like yours truly, NEW MEDIA JOE, will definitely be on the go!
We’ll try and blast out a few tweets whenever we get a chance. Check out our TWITTER FEED for those!
We will probably be so busy attending the show, press events and parties that we may not be able to blog or tweet “live” during the show. (Hotel internet connections and access also play a major role in all of this.) So, if we don’t post updates during the week, rest assured that there will be our own CES coverage and updates to follow later!
In the meantime, no need to wait for our coverage. There’s plenty of great ongoing, up to the minute and LIVE coverage of the Consumer Electronics Show to be found online! Below are links to some cool live new media coverage of CES 2010.
REVISION 3 CES COVERAGE AND VIDEOS
GEEK NEWS CENTRAL CES COVERAGE
SIN CITY get ready, because here we come! See you in LAS VEGAS!
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By Joe Klein
It’s a new year, and a new decade! But what a decade the first one of the new century has been. It’s been a turbulent ten years of ups, downs and “up-agains!”
It’s hard to believe that it’s been a whole decade since Y2K came in without incident, followed by a burst of the tech bubble. But tech’s dominance of our landscape continued to grow despite the decline of tech stocks. The internet was now fully embedded by the turn of the century, and record numbers were going online to keep up with all things going on around them. The internet joined cable and satellite television in bringing the world into our homes and desktops, giving us an around-the-clock front row seat to all the good and evil the world has to offer.
Technology and terrorism became available 24 hours a day and the information floodgates were thrust wide open. By the middle of the decade, the dam burst, and an endless flow of new media content began streaming out into cyberspace.
Then, social networks sprang forth and, suddenly, everyone was sharing everything with everyone else. BLOGS, FLICKR, YOUTUBE, MYSPACE, FACEBOOK, TWITTER and FRIENDFEED turned virtually anyone into a multi-media content creator and offered up the chance to become a new media maven! But, the use of social networks began spiraling out of control as countless millions of social media “addicts” started “tweeting” their every move and every thought and following those of others.
The last few years of the decade unleashed the torrent of content even further, as streaming video sites and smart-phones put all the information and content, even live content, into the palms of our hands everywhere we went. Just over the last year, the numbers of those blogging, tweeting and posting to Facebook “walls” has grown exponentially. The internet has gone “real-time,” and, now, GOOGLE itself is being considered a traditional “mainstream” source of information.
Over the last couple of years, we’ve experienced yet another economic “bubble burst” that resulted from a period of unbridled growth and optimism a few years back that may have been just a bit short-sighted. But, the new decade has dawned with more available technology, information and media content than we could ever have dreamed about just a couple decades ago!
The big question now is, “Where do we go from here?” It’s hard to say. With more to consume and communicate than ever, are we now approaching an information overload that could result in a social media meltdown?
Perhaps the Mayans knew something we don’t. Will it all come tumbling down at the end of 2012?
Whatever happens, it’s bound to be interesting. The coming year offers hope and the promise of a return to prosperity once again. There’s never been a more exciting time to STAY TUNED!
THE MAYAN CALENDAR 2012
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By Joe Klein
It’s just wild how things from your past come back to haunt you when you least expect it!
Okay, I wasn’t really haunted by this. But, it still was quite a surprise! Here I was face-to-face with a decades-old radio commercial I produced that’s just found a new life—online!
Back in 1990, I was still producing radio and television commercials, mostly for record albums and movie soundtracks, as president of my Los Angeles-based production company, L.A. TRAX, INC. The very idea of becoming the leading producer of music spots happened pretty much by accident way back in 1977, when SCOTT SHANNON was working for CASABLANCA REOCRD AND FILMORKS president NEIL BOGART, and he met me at a recording session for the record label where I was the engineer. Scott and I became good friends almost instantly. I had been a radio deejay for about a year as a teenager back in the early seventies, and Scott had been a deejay himself before coming to L.A. and getting into the music business.
One thing lead to another, and, within weeks, I started producing ads for Casablanca. The commercials must have “done the job” pretty well because, soon, I was producing several commercials every month for the label. It got pretty crazy.
(On the POP MATTERS website, a really great and in-depth story about CASALANCA RECORDS, written by free lance journalist CHRISTIAN WIKANE, which includes the story of how I got started producing ads for Casablanca, was posted earlier this year.)
Within a year or so, I was producing spots for a few other labels and, by 1980, doing ads for several more record companies. It was crazy, and it ended up in a fifteen year-long run of producing well over 1,000 record and soundtrack ads for just about every major label based in L.A., which was pretty profitable for me and, apparently, VERY profitable for the record companies that became my very loyal clients!
As much as I enjoyed producing all of those crazy record spots, the money and success I found from that endeavor pretty much derailed me from my dream of being a record producer and having a big hit, or two, or a dozen!
My career as a “record ad man” came to an end in 1992, when I, and the music business, mutually decided to stop producing radio and television commercials as an important element in the marketing of music. By that time, music videos had become the big thing, and the budgets for commercials were all but eliminated. I continued on as a voice-over artist for a few more years before dropping out of the business for nearly a decade.
In 1995, I re-entered media production, but, this time, in “new media,” and launched THE PODCAST VOICE GUYS, which was renamed NEW MEDIA CRATIVE back in the summer of 2008.
So, you can imagine my surprise when I got an email a few days ago from the administrator of the website for recording artist JANE WIEDLIN, (former lead guitarist of the huge 80’s girl band THE GO-GO’S). She had heard an old radio ad I produced for Jane’s solo album TANGLED, which was released on EMI Records back in 1990. I had produced and ad for this album, featuring the single WORLD ON FIRE that same year, and, as it turns out, it was the very last ad I produced for that label!
I was asked if it was okay to post the spot on YouTube. I didn’t see any harm, so I agreed. Just a few hours later, my crazy little record ad was posted and even appeared as an item on JANE WIEDLIN’S BLOG!
Too crazy. I admit that I haven’t really spoken publicly of late of my “past life” as a producer of record and soundtrack album commercials, because I am a “new media” guy now. It never really occurred to me that there would be much interest in the “old skool” stuff I produced so many years ago. But, I guess there comes the time that “Everything Old Is New Again,” eventually!
So, here is that wild and wacky old radio spot in all it’s glory, for your dining and dubbing pleasure! BTW it’s yours truly who performs BOTH of the male voices on the commercial because the announcer I hired for the voice-over near the end of the ad called in sick at the last minute!
Here is the full music video for WORLD ON FIRE, which actually inspired the crazy commercial. I have to admit that Jane is pretty HOT, indeed, in this video! What do you think?
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By Joe Klein
About a month ago, my “baby” became an adult! It was 21 years ago last month that CHRISTMAS IN MALIBU, the yuletide novelty I wrote on the beach in Malibu in the summer of 1988, was recorded by THE RAD DUDES and first released.
How the song, and then the record, came to be is one of the many interesting escapades and adventures I found myself in the middle of during the three decades I spent in the music business (from the early seventies until the mid nineties).
Wouldn’t you know it, my old friend RUSS TERRANA is a vital part of this story as well, as he recorded and mixed the record at Motown’s Hitsville Studio in Hollywood in October of 1988 (the record was finished and mastered in early November). CHRISTMAS IN MALIBU would be the last record to be completed at the legendary Hollywood studio on Romaine Avenue, where a large percentage of Motown’s product from the seventies and eighties was recorded.
Last year, former MTV VEEJAY MARTHA QUINN located KARMA AUGER, the lead singer of THE RAD DUDES and did a short interview with him on a special holiday episode of her XM SATELLITE radio show MARTHA QUINN PRESENTS. This lead to me getting in touch with Karma and reconnecting with him for the first time in over nineteen years! I had a great conversation with Karma on SKYPE and posted it online.
Unfortunately, I didn’t make it to Malibu for Christmas last year, but did travel to Southern California a few days after Christmas. i was happy to spend part of New Year’s eve with Karma and Martha, in Malibu! There was no shortage of “good karma” on that trip, as I reconnected with several other long, lost friends. The 2008 holiday season ended up being a very memorable one in many ways!
JOE KLEIN AND KARMA AUGER (2008)
All the buzz last year generated a bunch of radio and podcast play and, from what I am told, the video was popping up in all sorts of crazy places! This year I’ve already received numerous GOOGLE ALERTS about the song and the video. One alert was for an ITUNES PREVIEW of the song. I also just learned that CHRISTMAS IN MALIBU made the front page of the MEVIO Network and is right at the top of MEVO’S MUSIC CHANNEL as well, thanks to my longtime friend and fan, MICHAEL BUTLER, director and host of the Mevio Music Network.
Who knows what holiday surprises this year will bring for the little holiday tune that’s finally matured! They say some things do get better with age…
You can listen to CHRISTMAS IN MALIBU in high quality MP3 audio on the player below.
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HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!
Click on links below to read more about the holiday tune!
CHRISTMAS IN MALIBU CELEBRATES ITS TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY
MARTHA QUINN AND KARMA AUGER CELEBRATE CHRISTMAS IN MALIBU
KARMA AND JOE TALK ABOUT CHRISTMAS IN MALIBU AFTER 20 YEARS
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