Yesterday I wrote an open email to a widely read music industry newsletter re the longstanding mistreatment of songwriters in the entertainment industry, veering off into the music industry ignoring the Internet until it had almost swallowed them up. Today, Mark Cuban posted this on his Facebook page which led to it spreading virally. I’ve had so many people email me and send me Facebook messages today I decided to post what I wrote myself:
OK. I reallllly should be writing a detailed blog about the party I threw last Thurs. night here at Willis Wonderland to launch the new Bubbles & Cheesecake video, “Editing Is Cool”, and to debut my first official painting collaboration with Bubbles the artist, the Print Painting series, featuring canvas prints of five of Bubbles’ most popular images that I hand embellished with paint and vintage found objects. That sounds pretty ho hum, a party to promote something, but anyone who knows me knows I’m a hostess with mucho mostess and stiff is at the north pole of oppositeness of what went on here.
In order to do this party justice I need to go through 14 hours of video footage and this is not a job to do when you’ve slept for 21 hours total the previous week and your brain mass is still dripping through a strainer trying to get back to any semblance of normal. So I’m slogging through all of it as fast as I can but know if I drive myself nuts to finish in the timely fashion bloggers are wont to do I won’t enjoy any of it. So please know that the merriment of the “Launching Allee” party is forthcoming – you can look at a few photos from it in the meantime – and instead this blog is about how I took my own advise as offered in my brand new shiny video, “Editing Is Cool”, and got through the party without killing someone.
Here’s why I have been so blog poor over the last few months, my little 9 month labor of love, my life philosophy rolled into one bouncing bundle of sound, sight and spirit:
Allee Willis Presents Bubbles & Cheesecake “Editing Is Cool”
I do a lot of different things. I never knew what to call myself. Composer/ songwriter/ lyricist/ musician except I don’t know how to play/ artist/ interactive artist/ writer/ director/ producer/ party captain/ social planner/ technologist/ collector. By most standards totally different hats. By my standards the road to being a totally integrated, self realized individual. By entertainment industry standards a liability until the Internet finally pounded into their thick heads that someone who was self sufficient and capable in more areas than the one they signed a contract in was an attractive pet to have in the stable. With two notable exceptions my music publishers never got why I had the urge to paint, the art gallery owners viewed me as a songwriter who sometimes paints and very few of them ever got that my real artform was the Party, where all my pursuits sloshed together in one interactive swirl of social interaction and finely honed environment.
Winning the Grammy in 1986
