I don’t know if it was being out of the office twice last week on work-relat­ed ‘mis­sions,’ or if it’s real­iz­ing that after being faced with an impromp­tu inter­view with one of the best-sell­ing female artists of all time, but indie bands at SXSW should be pret­ty fun.

Are you going to be there too? Want to offer your pithy insights for an audi­ence who isn’t com­plete­ly sure what ‘indie rock’ is? Be in touch [email icon thingy in top left] and we’ll see if we can’t shoe­horn you between say the Raveonettes and the Mae Shi.

I spent Fri­day night [and a bit of Sat­ur­day morn­ing] here. More impor­tant­ly, E=MC2 may be big­ger than Eman­ci­pa­tion of Mimi.

So some­thing is def­i­nite­ly hap­pen­ing. I’m hear­ing E=MC2 tomor­row morn­ing, pos­si­bly inter­view­ing (but more like­ly just meet­ing) Mari­ah tomor­row night. I’ll add a short update here Sat­ur­day evening when I’ve recovered.

There are a few things we’ve been work­ing on that I don’t gen­er­al­ly share since they’re either busi­ness-relat­ed and there­fore a bit secret, or seem so impos­si­ble that I psy­che myself out that they’ll ever happen.

Well, on the day the R.E.M. inter­view fell through [could­n’t lis­ten to the new album any­way, thanks to the ridicu­lous water­mark,] I find out that I’ll be spend­ing some two hours with Mari­ah Fri­day after­noon to talk about her new album and what­ev­er else she’s work­ing on, diet­ing tips, pol­i­tics, what­ev­er comes up.

Late last sum­mer our neigh­bor­hood end­ed up being named Olde Rich­mond after an abortive meet­ing in which an estab­lished orga­ni­za­tion stat­ed its inten­tion to absorb our human resources. So instead of Flat­iron, which many of the locals call this tri­an­gle between Fish­town prop­er and Port Rich­mond, we got Olde Rich­mond, which is embar­rass­ing beyond words.

In light of this and the forth­com­ing Con­stan­tines album, I plan on refer­ring to where I live as Kens­ing­ton Heights. Let’s see if it catch­es on. Real­tors, be on alert: Port Fish­ing­ton is the stu­pid­est thing you’ve come up with lately.

Also, when search­ing the unfor­tu­nate­ly named ORCA, I hap­pened across a very rea­son­able blog, Kens­ingdel­phia. Its author seems to be some­one who’s nei­ther a pro-growth nut, nor a ‘more pow­er to the gen­tri­fiers’ type guy, which is refresh­ing since most things I read by nu-Fish­town­ers reek of the sort of enti­tle­ment which stank up Williams­burg back when I lived there five years ago.

Maybe I’ll start try­ing to attend ORCA meet­ings! I can get caught up here!