Blooming Ideas

Blog site of one-time High Times Editor and all-around music, sports and pot pundit Steve Bloom, a fellow Knicks/Mets fan and James Brown confidant whom I've known since our days together at the old Soho Weekly News, the Avis to the Village Voice's Hertz back in the day. Bloom intersperses daily coverage of our beloved Metsies with idiosyncratic discussions on a variety of hot-buzz topics, including The Sopranos' "Gay Problem," his travails trying to get press tickets to cover a local Black Crowes concert, a New Riders of the Purple Sage live review and answering Yippie Dana Beal's complaint about High Times' supposed lack of support for this year's Global Marijuana March in New York.

Gripe of the Week

To paraphrase an old Woody Allen line, it's not a dog-eat-dog world, it's more like dog-doesn't-respond-to-the-other-dog's-IM. A record company publicist recently lamented to me, "I tried to pitch a writer on a band and I was told to email him instead." For a business that once prided itself on people-to-people communication, it sure seems like I have less and less contact with actual people and more and more with voicemails, cellphones and BlackBerries.

Actually, that should please me, being a writer, because expressing oneself in words has taken on increasing importance in the digital age - that and an ability to type quickly could save the world, if you believe 24. At any rate, I must admit to missing the old days when publicists actually used to call to tell you something they were passionate about — or that they were simply promoting — rather than just sending out mass emails into cyberspace like a message in a bottle, hoping one sticks.