Plumerai, UVDS, Dreams

Posted on July 27, 2013 by Brian John Mitchell

Here’s a short interview with Plumerai about the recording process for their new album that will come out in a couple of months.

I finished drawing the second UVDS comic & printed it up.

I also wrote the first draft for Ultimate Lost Kisses #14.  Going to try to get myself rolling on finishing up that story arc.

Earlier this week I sent email promos to reviewers about my comics for the first time in a year.  I’d stopped pushing the comic promos because of diminished interest & feeling like it was all noise instead of signal.  So I sent out to two hundred reviewers & I heard back from 3 so far.  Which is no huge surprise.  So I’m thinking about running a comic Kickstarter again, this one with a goal of reaching out to retail.  My idea is people would pay $20 to get 10 comics sent to them & 10 comics sent to a retailer either of their choice or that I research & find & the retailer can give away or sell the comics & use the money to buy more.  Who knows if it will work.  But I think it can’t hurt.

Last Night’s Dream:
I’m on a road trip with my family in a caravan of three cars.  I’m a passenger in my parents’ car.  A storm starts up bad enough that we can’t see & my dad pulls off the road into a covered loading dock of a warehouse & the other cars follow us in.  I get out of the car & my sister in the car behind us gets out saying, “Why did we stop here in this stupid indigent hillbilly town?”  Immediately after she says it she’s hit by a thrown stone & I say loud enough for whoever threw the stone to hear it, “Does everybody know now to be nice & not make fun of people?” Then I’m hit in the shoulder with a rock.  I stoop down & pick up a rock the size of a baseball & walk off into the storm in the direction the stone came from.  There’s two teenagers.  The larger one says something to the skinny one & the skinny one runs off.  The big kid throws a piece of broken marble the size of a brick at me & misses.  I run at him.  He’s eight inches taller than me & a hundred & twenty pounds heavier than me.  To hit him in the head with my fist with the rock clenched in it I need to jump in the air & the hit takes us both to the ground.  I land on my knees straddling him & my knees fucking hurt from the landing & I just take the pain as a reason to keep hitting him in the face & then out of the corner of my eye I see the skinny kid.  He’s got a gun pointed at me & his whole body is shaking.  I drop my rock to the ground, climb off the guy, & go back to the car.

I’m in some Rust Belt city with Shawn Atkins & we go into a comic shop called Five Days a Week.  I dive into the dollar bin & one of the comics I find for a dollar is a trade paperback of the first nine issues of Rom.

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2 Responses to Plumerai, UVDS, Dreams

  1. Peter says:
    July 28, 2013 at 8:12 pm

    Rom the robot?

Finally Checking It Out – Sans Soleil (Chris Marker)

Posted on July 26, 2013 by Brian John Mitchell

Sans SoleilSo most people that have ever talked to me about movies know my favorite film is Chris Marker’s La Jetee.  It might be my favorite piece of art.  It’s not for everyone, it’s under thirty minutes & made of still photos with narration & almost 50 years old.  I found out about it in the 1990s when 12 Monkeys was made (it’s based on it).  I managed to track down a copy of it around the year 1999.  When I tried to find some of Chris Marker’s other films, I couldn’t find any with English subtitles or that would even play on American equipment.  Eventually I did find one of his movies in a format I could watch & it was a documentary about Carnival in Brazil & it didn’t really do anything for me & I gave up.  I had knowledge that Sans Soleil was in some way a follow-up to La Jetee, but had given up on seeking it out when someone told me it had been added to The Criterion Collection – which meant it was readily available in a way I could watch it.

So Sans Soleil definitely works as a companion to La Jetee in that the loose narrative trying to hold it together is a time traveler from 2000 years in the future trying to decipher our culture & history through film.  It also has the inspirational vibe that La Jetee has of “the only thing keeping you from making a cool artistic object is you.”  It feels like Chris Marker took a camera with him on vacation to Japan, Africa, & San Francisco & just filmed things he found intriguing or interesting (which at times includes the television) & then afterwards he twisted a story around it through a narrator doing stream of consciousness poetry.  It feels simple & easy & free, but I’m sure it was laboriously & meticulously made.  I can’t quite tell if this film is smarter than me & there’s something I can’t quite figure out or if it just is meant to be taken as is.  I’m not going to try to figure it out & try to over analyze it until it loses enjoyability.  I’m just going to watch it a few more times & maybe eventually make my own version of it.  Basically, if this sounds interesting to you, you really should see it; if it sounds like artsy fartsy shit to you, you are also correct.

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“I Drive Your Truck” & Dreams

Posted on July 24, 2013 by Brian John Mitchell

So I’ve been a bit obsessed with the Lee Brice song “I Drive Your Truck” & I finally did a Remora “mecha style” cover.

Last Night’s Dreams:
I’m riding my sister’s horse on a mountain ridge.  Among the supplies I’ve brought are my paper cutter.  We get to a point where we’re on top of a mountain & all directions are too deep to descend from safely & there’s not even space for me to get off the horse without plunging to my death.  At least everything looks beautiful.

I see a guy I used to know walking through a field.  He’s wearing a suit jacket & pajama bottoms & talking on 1980s cell phone.  I think he might be homeless & crazy.

My sister calls to tell me she’s thinking about selling her house because most of the clients she works with for her job live on the opposite side of town.  While I’m on the phone she tells me the picture she had up of our grandmother fell down & landed in her dog’s water dish & was destroyed.  I start sobbing uncontrollably & she tells me I have nothing to be sad about, I did a good job.

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Greensboro & Dreams

Posted on July 19, 2013 by Brian John Mitchell

So the Greensboro craft fair thing was interesting.  I know I don’t have the best game managing a booth or whatever, but no one was interested in the earrings made from the buttons.  Also, the comics sold four times as well as the buttons, which hasn’t happened since I started having the buttons.  I’m still undecided if it is an event I should do again or not.  It rained & was over 90 degrees, so probably attendance could have been a bit better.  They’d comped me the space along with the table & tent & chairs this time, but at 150 miles round trip I didn’t quite cover my technical mileage expenses & right now I’m already in the red & don’t need to rack up miles to lower my income for the year right now.  Mountain Shade Australia provides the Heavy Duty Marquees & Heavy Duty Gazebos.  So it just depends what happens with my numbers as the time for another event comes along.

Last Night’s Dreams:
I’m on a long overnight  bus ride.  Maybe from Los Angeles up to Seattle.  I keep locking eyes with a woman three seats & two rows away from me, but then we each look away.  In the middle of the night, with most of the passengers sleeping, she comes & sits next to me & gently sings, “Staring, caring.  Sharing, daring.”  I feel like I’m supposed to kiss her & never not be with her.

I’m helping my grandmother in the bathroom & the toilet she’s sitting on starts to collapse through the floor.  I grab a hold of her & I’m losing my balance & I start yelling, “Help me! Somebody help me! I need help!”  But there’s no one to come to help.

My parents have left their house for a six month trip & left the house for me to take care of.  It’s the biggest mess I’ve ever seen it.  Every chair is covered in stacks of mail & books.  There’s no flat surface in the house without something stacked on it.  I wonder if things have gotten to the point where they’re actually abandoning the house forever.

I’m at the gates of heaven being asked why I should be let in & I somehow get the answer right.  “Jesus died for me.”

I wake up in a strange bed.  I hear murmuring coming from the next room & it’s my ex-girlfriend talking in her sleep saying, “It’s too hot.  It’s too hot.”  She’s on the floor laying on her left side wearing jeans & a long sleeve shirt & two toboggans.  I lay down spooning her & take the toboggans off.  I notice that two of her friends are sleeping on the two couches in the room.  One of them sits up & starts saying the confiteor prayer & her other friend & I both join in reciting it.

I’m at church in a basilica & I can’t tell if all of the people assisting in the service are robots or aliens or men in bio-mechanical armor.  Their armor/skin is a shining reflective magenta.  During the gospel reading, instead of holding candles they have some kind of staffs with glowing energy at one end.

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Buttons & Ebooks

Posted on July 17, 2013 by Brian John Mitchell

So I did an interview about Kickstarter & my current button project on there today for a podcast that will go live in a week or two.  It’s nice to be noticed & recognized.

I worked up the rigs for doing earring backs for the buttons I sell.  I have a craft fair event in Greensboro tomorrow, so I’ll see if I am able to sell them or if it was an idea that doesn’t quite work.  At least the investment was only $3 or so.

I finally made the PDF version for the Brian Hearts Katherine book.  So I guess that I’ll need to add it to my catalog of ebooks that I may one day sell in the future.  I did a brief cruise on Kickstarter looking at book oriented projects (for the dream diary & such) & it didn’t seem like too many are successful.  I might need to do some more research….

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Collapsing & Dreams

Posted on July 16, 2013 by Brian John Mitchell

So yesterday one of the women that used to help me take care of my grandmother stopped by.  She just happened to be in the neighborhood & just stopped in to check & see how I was doing.  It was nice.  It was pleasant.  As soon as she left I collapsed to the ground sobbing & gasping for air.  I thought I was better.  For the first six months it was multiple times a day.  For the next six months it was about once a day.  But in the past few months I thought I’d gotten pretty much better, to the point I thought I could fight off the urge enough that I might be able to work at a normal job again.  But yesterday made me feel like the only thing I’ve ever done a halfway decent job at is taking care of my Ethel & that now I’m just a useless waste of a human being.  Which hardly makes me unique, I think probably 90% of people are, but I still hate the realization I am part of that lot.  I still managed to get out of bed this morning & run a couple errands.  So I’m not as bad as I could be.

Last Night’s Dream:
I’m at church & in the communion line, the minister are dropping bits of salt into people’s mouths instead of giving out pieces of bread or communion wafers.  I guess it’s all the amount of truth we’re capable of digesting; but I don’t feel like I can handle that much truth (that the truth will destroy me because it is what I deserve).  I break out of line & hide in the back of the church.

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End of the Quarter/End of the World

Posted on July 15, 2013 by Brian John Mitchell

So I started working on my end of quarter paperwork today.  I’ve been avoiding doing it for a couple of weeks because I feared the numbers.  Over the past quarter I had several big road trips (two comic shows, a noise festival, & a couple shows down in Myrtle Beach) that weren’t too financially lucrative.  So in the end Silber is in the red for the year so far.  We’ll see what happens.  I’m hoping for a decent royalty check for the song placements on MTV to come through & get things back to even for the year.

Meanwhile, I’m still trying to figure things out about the “Silber Hiatus”.  I’m still trying to make things not be all consuming.  To be mellower about it all & not just spend the whole day thinking about Silber.  Essentially, to relax & just do things I want to do, but it seems like every day something comes up that I need to deal with.  Paperwork or filling orders or whatever.  But I guess 20 hours a week is a lot better than the 100 I was putting in a month or two ago & to be honest there doesn’t seem to be a significant decrease in sales or interest in things.  We’ll see what I can figure out over the next couple of weeks.

On the button sales at the live events, I am going to try to go to the craft store & see if I can rig up some earring stuff to sell the buttons as jewelry.  We’ll see if it makes a difference in sales.
In good news, the yeast took in my new batch of mead.  So I guess I need to go ahead & get the last bit of honey turning into alcohol.

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Buttons & Dreams

Posted on July 14, 2013 by Brian John Mitchell

So I did the button workshop yesterday.  It didn’t do too well.  A big rainy day.  I made $12 for 3 hours of time.  Sigh.  But that’s how it goes sometimes.  Gotta try things out to figure out what works.

The button kickstarter is getting dangerously close to being funded after a week & minimal promotion.  I’m also trying to work out with the artists to have some high tiered original art available, but some folks start with digital so those may end up as prints.

I’ve started to send off my dream diary manuscript to a few people for review & insight.  We’ll see what happens with it.  I feel a certain level of hope for it generating interest that I haven’t felt for anything I’ve worked on in months.

I am hoping to this week make the digital versions of a bunch of comics from the past year & run some promo for them.  I haven’t done any promotional thing on my comics in a long time, so maybe it will help get the word out since it has been a while.  I was getting diminished responses when running promo every two months.

Last Night’s Dreams:
I’m with a friend of mine at a film festival a hundred miles from home.  We run into her ex-boyfriend in the film makers’ lounge & he assumes we’re together & starts making out with a young girl who’s with him.  My friend tells me that the girl he’s making out with is his niece & asks if we can leave.  I shoot my beer & we walk out into the streets trying to remember where I parked my car.  When I start the car, the gas gauge is on empty & I don’t know where a gas station is in this town.

I take my grandmother to visit a friend of hers in the hospital.  Her friend has the wrong name on the tag on her wrist & has been put through the wrong surgery.  I fucking hate hospitals.

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Dreams

Posted on July 12, 2013 by Brian John Mitchell

So I think the first draft of my dream diary book is completed.  I still need a title for it if anyone has any ideas.

Last Night’s Dreams:
Pope Francis steps down.  The new pope is Charles Brown from Ireland.  I hope he has a big yellow hat with a jagged black stripe.

I’m swimming in the ocean & I overhear a guy who thinks he’s hot shit saying there’s good surfing in the great lakes & it’s hard not to laugh.  A big wave comes in & it catches me rather than me catching it & I land on the shore amongst people on their towels.  I see a shadow to my left & turn to see a sea turtle in the air that was cast out of the ocean landing a few inches from me.  It’s a small one that probably only ways 500 pounds.  It looks older & more alien in person than I would’ve thought.  The dry sand is coating its body making it look even older.  I want to help it, but I have no idea how.

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One Response to Dreams

  1. GoddakkAttack says:
    July 12, 2013 at 11:53 am

    funny about your dream cuz when i was in HS in D-land, some new kid bragged about being a surfer, even had the frosty dumb hair and then we find out he’s from michigan. maybe you dreamt of him.

Breaking Stuff

Posted on July 11, 2013 by Brian John Mitchell

So a while ago I was trying to figure out somethings about how to play with video in a primitive analog way (not using a computer) & I noticed that my Kaosspad had RCA jacks just like the video RCA jack coming out of my DVD player.  So today I decided to finally check it out.  Plugged the Kaosspad into the line & it didn’t give any signal at all on most of the patches & the ones that did just delivered a black screen with white lines & such not relating to the image going in.  So I found some cables to convert an RCA to quarter inch & figured I’d try out the same idea through a Behringer pedal I don’t really care about.  Similar results.  Now the whole reason I even own this pedal is because it has stereo output jacks, which means you can plug it into itself to make it feedback on itself & control it as a super-simple-synthesizer, so I figured I’d see what happens with that for a video signal.  The results were the same black screen with some lines only I noticed a red light flashing on my RF Modulator (my TV is old & can’t take the modern inputs, so I have a little adapter box).  I guess I fried the thing.  Which is fine I guess, I don’t really use the TV too much anyway except for trying to make weird video stuff.  Anyway, the moral of my story is that shit didn’t work out & it burnt out some equipment & I guess that’s why I never see people doing weird stuff using pedals & video projectors at shows.  If anyone has tips towards making what I’m talking about trying to do possible let me know.  Or if you have an RF Modulator that has RCA inputs on it that you don’t need anymore & want to mail me, let me know about that too.

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