I sent out the Silber newsletter last night about all the new stuff going on. Still trying to get everything up & running for sending the promo emails out for reviewers. That will probably start tomorrow.
Here’s another short film I stumbled across. This one is called The Gift. I’m confuse by how large its budget must have been.
Last Night’s Dream:
It’s 5:45am & I’m staying somewhere either for vacation or on tour or for a wedding & there’s some kids in the house asking me if it’s time to get up & I tell them no, but there’s no way they’re going to let me go back to sleep.
Usually I try to keep things on here upbeat (which is funny with how down things seem on the blog), but I want to mention something that’s messing with me. So over the past couple of months I’ve given out close to 200 order form flyers for my mini-comics when people have bought them. It’s a check list with all 63 books on it (or 60 books on the slightly older ones) & no one has responded with an order mailed in for anything. I mean, it’s great to sell a couple thousand books on Kickstarter & a couple hundred at conventions; but people not asking for more makes me feel like people are excited about them until they actually read them. Which isn’t an awesome feeling. Have they been getting worse?
In other comic news, I got the layouts done for Pow Wow #2 & #3 & sent them to ED to draw.
A new release available for free stream or download. Promute’s Drone of the Norns. Please spread the word about it. & of course if you dig it, feel free to donate a couple dollars.
Stumbled across this kinda bleak & depressing but pretty awesome short film. It’s called Zero.
So I’m working on getting the Promute release up on the website. They are going to be following a new pricing model I plan to start using for what has traditionally been our “free release” series. It’s going to be free to stream forever. Free to download for two months & then after that it will be a dollar for the album. It’s just kind of disconcerting to know that the donation amount for the free download stuff is around $1 per 10,000 downloads & that feels like I’m ripping off the artists. I think it’s a good compromise as far as getting the people to hear the stuff & letting them know it is of some value. So I’ll probably be sending out emails about them next week with the Silber newsletter coming out (if you read the blog, maybe you should subscribe to the newsletter? there’s a form to the right). Which seems to be quarterly instead of monthly lately. & I need to get up some download versions of the related releases before I contact the press folks about it. We’ll see what happens.
I got asked about appearing at a comic convention at Malta. They can’t cover the travel expenses, but I’m thinking about trying to do a Kickstarter to pay to go. But the problem is figuring out a way to raise money without spending money. I looked around at some stuff other people do & it seems like there’s a lot with people sponsoring travel projects with photo journals. & it also seems like there’s a lot with people trying to sponsor expenses to get to comic conventions with sketch cards & the like. So maybe I can do something with those two ideas. I wouldn’t launch the project until the current Kickstarters are done (August 3) & the convention is in December, so it could be able to happen with three months of lead time as far as buying airfare & all that. I guess I need to figure out what expenses will really be & all that. I can tell you that I’d much rather invest the time & money to do a convention someplace crazy like Malta over doing Chicago or New York, even if those are more likely to break even….
Here’s a rough character sketch I did for the monster for Pow Wow #2. I need to still get the finished drafts done & sent to Ed to draw. But that may happen tonight. I kinda like the sketch. Maybe I’ll do a shirt about it. I’m adding another layer to my long drone piece. It might be the end & I might finally mix it this coming week. Then I’ll sit on it for who knows how long before releasing it.
So as some of you may know, I’m a fan of La Jetee. Here’s a video Peter Aldrich sent me about the audio tracks on the film.
Last Night’s Dream:
I’m old & dying. I’ve waited my whole life for this….
I’ve been thinking of ceasing with free downloads altogether, maybe just one song per album. I mean i’m going to make the album anyways out of my drive to make it but my drive to make it has nothing to do with people actually hearing it or being able to own it for free.
While I like to give things away to people that want to hear and old fans….it really does the music a disservice i think for everybody to just offer it for free and it really doesn’t seem to be doing anything in regards to that age old argument of if more people hear it the word spreads and there’ll be more people at your shows and more people buying your album if they got to hear it first. (of course you could argue that if i released better music that would be the case but fuck you if you think that anyways :)) Seems like a load of crap in regards to reality. The people I find that really want to hear it will buy it even for little money. The rest just want it for free and not even if they’re inconvenienced by having to sign a mailing list and for those people i think if they have to stream it, that’s ok by me and if that’s too inconvenient for them…i don’t care if they hear it because obviously they don’t actually like it.
The free way doesn’t seem to benefit me in any way except for back in the day when i’d leave free cd’s laying about a cd shop on occassions. Download cards never seem to invite people to download the music, probably because there are too many steps between that card and the music
I mean eventually it’s going to wind up on some dl site from the east anyways so may as well let them do the work and let me try to convince you to send a dime my way.
Having it on Spotify or Last.fm and at least making the 1cent every 10000 listens is better for me and for them (listeners) as they probably already use the free service and I may be able to buy a cup of coffee in 4 years. Most people I know under the age of 30, if they wanna check out this band they heard about typically go to youtube to find it anyways and not to the band sites.
So Rivulets is working on some fairly intense music videos that really lean more towards being short films than music videos. There’s an Indiegogo campaign (like Kickstarter) going for it if you might be interested in supporting it.
Jon DeRosa has a video up for his new album. Here it is:
So a few months ago I was watching the anime Death Note every night as I went to sleep. Here’s my review of it for Finally Checking It Out.
Worked on the press release (which is the final step) for the duet record with my son. I sent it to him & we both think it’s done. So that might be up & available around Monday.
So I saw Prometheus a couple weeks ago & I’m still thinking about it. I think the last movie I felt that way about was Donnie Darko. So anyway, I figure it’s been long enough to talk about it without worrying about spoilers. So those abound in this. I’ll put some videos below to some more informed, entertaining, & in depth analysis than mine. I will say I went into the movie intentionally not having read anything more than “prequel to Alien” nor seen any trailers. & also I haven’t seen the Alien movies in a long time & I’m not going to bother to look up things to see if my memory on certain points are right or wrong.
So the opening scene that they never go back to of the guy killing himself, I assume that’s a seed of life thing & that’s what I assumed when I saw it. There’s a quote from Ridley Scott saying something about it not necessarily being on Earth, which is super interesting. My memory of Alien mythology is that the ship they find is the first time humans have encountered alien life. So what does that insinuate? It insinuates that if The Engineers are still around, they intentionally are avoiding humanity. It also insinuates that they were on a mission to destroy life on all of the seeded planets. Or rather, that the folks on the planet LV223 were on a mission to destroy all life. Because it would be presumable that humanity would have encountered some other races in space otherwise. Which means in general they were successful on that mission.
There’s debate over whether or not Charlize Theron is an android or not. The more I think about it, the more I think that she is. The biggest reason to think that is Ridley Scott saying, “There might be two androids.” But it makes sense to go with the undercover robot in cryo-sleep like they had in Alien & it kind of makes what seems like uneven acting on Theron’s part become something intentional. Is she falling out of character when she decides to have sex with the dude after the android accusation? Is she falling out of character when she almost cries when lighting the dude on fire? Or are those two things a robot trying to look more like a human? I think Theron is a good actress & that Scott is a good director, so I’m siding with her being an android.
I seem to remember the alien on the spaceship in Alien being about 60 feet tall & in this one The Engineers seem to be 7 feet tall at most. Which is a gaping plot hole if the ship in Alien is piloted by the same race as in Prometheus. But given that life starts by an Engineer going to a planet & killing himself by drinking the black goo, I’d say it makes sense that the alien in the first movie is the same species, but from a different environment that allowed them to evolve to that state. Or perhaps the larger alien race are the real Engineers & the seven footers are a derivative race just like the one on earth. The more I think about it, the more I think that I like the idea that the seven footers are a rival to humanity that decided to destroy all the seeds of the engineers.
The black goo of course is interesting. I mean, we all assume it’s a bio weapon because that’s what one of the characters seems to say. But the opening scene suggests that’s not necessarily so since it is how life begins. So I have to wonder, is it the same black goo in the opening scene as later in the movie? If the goo is both a weapon & the source of life, how does it decide which one it is going to be? Does it have to do with the emotional response of the organism taking in the black goo? Fear creates weapons & serenity creates life? Who knows?
There’s a nearly infinite amount of Christian imagery in here. I don’t even want to get into that mess really. People are going all Space Jesus about it & I really hope that’s not where things are headed for the franchise (it’s my understanding it was written planning to be a series of movies). To be honest the mythology that individual Engineers (perhaps rogue ones) spark life on planets is interesting. There’s no need to bring in the Space Jesus thing. I mean if you just say “Space Jesus” out loud it makes you feel dumb. But I will mention something here that is a suburban teen on acid inspired Space Jesus theory of my own fairly unrelated to this movie (& you have to be willing to go along with the idea that Jesus is the Son of God & the Bible is more or less conceptually if not factually true). So why did God have the Jews as his chosen people? He chose the Jews because they were the least of all nations. He empowers the weak & the stupid to confound the strong & the wise. So why would God choose his only Son to broker the salvation of the universe on a backwards planet like earth at a crazy time like 2000 years ago? Same reason. To prove his ways are so far beyond our ways. So for me that’s one of the reasons that life on other planets wouldn’t do anything to disprove Christianity.
It also had a whole lot of stuff about life issues. End of life issues with the old man wanting to live forever & the obvious abortion issue with the alien baby thing & then the thing with the android stating his life couldn’t truly begin until his creator died (which I think might be a reference to H. R. Giger, because I remember their being a thing when his mother died that he said he wouldn’t need to keep his art as tame as he had been previously). I’m not quite sure what it was trying to say. I feel like with the old man it was saying your meaning of life is what you do where you are & that it is not external or a quest to be completed. With the alien baby I guess it was saying that we can’t actually destroy life or that babies are monsters & I have no idea which. With the android I guess it was about being responsible in your duties to your loved ones with a hope of escape? I don’t know, this whole set of it I guess is supposed to be some weird starting point & I suppose I’d have to look more into the life histories of the creative persons involved with the projects to figure out what they were trying to tell me & to be honest, that feels like a lot of work.
So yeah, in the end I like it, I must or I wouldn’t still be thinking about it & trying to solve what seem like flaws to me. It was visually stunning & had great mood. Here’s some stuff from other folks:
So NME (New Music Express) just turned 60 & posted up the top 100 songs since they’ve been around. Joy Division (who oddly I had a dream about last night, see below) has the top slot, which is awesome, but they picked “Love Will Tear Us Apart” which I have always thought of as one of their weakest songs & maybe the least indicative of the band. So I’m torn about that. The number two song is Pulp’s “Common People” which is a good, but I think thew William Shatner version blows it away. Here’s the video from the same guy who did the Vlor “Watch Me Bleed” video.
The Sequential Underground podcast I’m on about Kickstarter is up now. You can listen to it here. Super in depth & about an hour long, so probably you should be doing something else while listening to it.
I’m having to kick back the new guitarist issue of QRD a little bit. A bunch of other work I need to get done that is more time sensitive.
I got asked today about doing a comic convention in Malta. I’m kind of thinking about doing a Kickstarter campaign to finance it happening….
Last Night’s Dream:
I am listening to a Joy Division bootleg that isn’t a collection of demos so much as really rough song ideas recorded at the practice space instead of in the studio. There’s one called “sound sound sound sound” that is 30 seconds & just guitar & bass that I want to work up into a full song.
the common people video that is the old star trek cartoon edited to fir the shatner song is a masterpiece. I thought Pulp was horrible in the 90′s but i became obsessed with common people and this last year and decided to listen to more and turns out there are no other good Pulp songs.
So I watched the post-apocalyptic BBC show from the 1970s called Survivors while assembling comics last week. My review is on Finally Checking It Out.
I launched a Kickstarter for my puzzle boxes & the bottle comics one is now fully up. I also made some pay-per-click ads for them on Facebook. Both already met full funding, but more backing means more cool stuff I can do. If you could post about them on Facebook & Twitter I’d appreciate it. In related news I recorded a podcast with Nick Marino (Super Haters) about working on a Kickstarter campaign for Sequential Underground. I’ll let you know when it goes up.
I sent out a couple hundred promo emails to comic reviewers about the new comics & the Kickstarter campaign, just have to wait & see if anyone does any coverage. I got out the new comics to subscribers as well.
I also finally put the new Silber shirts up on the website along with making the buttons & balloons at live shows available on the Silber Apparel page.
Last Night’s Dreams:
I’m collecting empty Newcastle bottles to use in my bottle comic project & it ends up they not only switched from clear glass to brown glass, they also switched from pop top to twist off & are completely useless to me.
So it’s been a long couple of days with a bunch of stuff going on.
So the guitar ensemble thing went fine. People had a good time & I’m trying to think about doing some more stuff where I have songs with multiple parts. The Remora catalog mostly has songs where there are two nearly identical guitar parts & a nearly identical bassline or a loop building to be more & more chaotic. Also my strumming patterns are close to the same in every song. There’s a reason for that. It’s that most of my songs are for the live show & that I am not a good enough musician to have semi-fancy guitar bits or odd rhythms while singing at the same time & my loop pedals only work in a certain way. But if I start to work more on recording again, I can write songs that I can never play live & make the loops using my 15 year-old version of Acid to allow more variety & dynamics in the songs. I mean, I guess I’ve been headed that way for a while as is evident on Remora’s Scars Bring Hope & Vlor’s Six-Winged, but the guitar show really cemented in my mind that there’s no reason for me not to embrace the ability of my technology to do more with my music. Whether or not it comes to fruition will be something we need to wait & see about.
Maker Faire NC was awesome. I sold over $100 mostly in mini-comics. I sold a Remora Zentraedi t-shirt to a gut who was one of the artists for the Robotech: Battlecry video game. I met a girl who makes block prints that’s trying to talk me into doing some block print comics, which would be super cool to try to do. I’ve been thinking about it ever since in the 1990s when the one girl who did the zine Thistle (not Katie, the other girl) did either a block print or linocut comic. Anyway, this girl has a laser cutter so you just deliver the image & it makes the blocks, which is sort of awesome. But I’m also torn about it because it seems like that kind of makes it not be the real deal. So yeah, there you go.
So there were a couple weird things for me personally at Maker Faire. There was this woman who wanted a fun & happy comic. I realized I don’t have anything that’s like that unless you think XO is fun & happy. So maybe I should try & do that, right a fun comic. I have no idea if I can. Also, I haven’t needed to be that “on” for ten hours in a long time. During the whole event there might have been ten minutes where I wasn’t talking to someone that was at my table (aside from the time it took to setup, play, & teardown from the Small Life Form performance). It reminded me of working retail & making that fun outward appearance for that long just wore me out & I slept for eleven hours afterwards instead of my normal six. I haven’t worked a job dealing with the public since 1998 & I forgot how much it doesn’t jive with my personality type. I’d also like to give a special shout out to Kirk Adam who helped me run my table for the first half of the day. He probably made more of the sales than I did.
I did a “soft launch” for the Bottle Comics Kickstarter. So I haven’t run publicity yet on it. I haven’t got final images up or anything yet, but you can go ahead & check it out. I also got in the art for Joe Badon’s Bottle Comic & he did this little video of him working on it.
In other comic news, I printed up the first batch of REH #4. Also, people with subscriptions will be getting three comics mailed out to them this week.
I just found out there’s another band going by Remora again, only this time as Rémora. I can’t find out anything about them other than that they have a show listed on SongKick (listed next to a show I did with Landing maybe ten years ago). When I Google them I just find my own stuff. I think they might be the same band from Ohio that’s been around on & off for six years now (forming the same year I played Ohio a dozen times).
In other Remora news, the new CD is officially out on Fluttery thought the order thing is still only working through Bandcamp at this point. Anyway, there’s this related video I made about my grandma. It’s kinda unwatchable & is all talking heads & crying & I’m not sure how comfortable I am with people watching it. So I’m just going to put a link to it on YouTube instead of embedding it.
I can’t give away every single secret! Next you’ll want me to tell people I record three vocals – one hard right, one hard left, one dead center – in tribute to Tupac….
So the most of the day today was just working on assembling comics & varnishing boxes. I have less than a dozen comics to go for my goal of what I’ll have on sale for Saturday & hopefully this next coat of varnish will get me to a level where I am satisfied with them.
I also got some stuff done for printing up REH #4 which I should finish tomorrow.
Tomorrow is the guitar ensemble performance & then Saturday is Maker Faire NC. After that I have a bunch of things lined up that I need to work on. I already shot a couple videos for the Kickstarter projects & I need to set those up. I have over a dozen interviews received for the next QRD guitarist special. I have three comic scripts ready to be laid out for artists. I have to write the press release up for the record with my son. I have to get the Promute disc set up for download. Fill out a ton of forms for some music placements. After all that I need to send out the newsletter that is over a month late to tell people about all these things.
Last Night’s Dreams:
I’m living with my buddy Don after the apocalypse. The house is boarded up pretty secure, the only way in or out is through one window. Someone is trying to pry open one of the windows & I bang on it with the butt of a rifle & they run off. Then I see someone pulling shit out of the pickup truck we have parked outside. Don is already out the window chasing the guy. I jump out the window & the guy trips & falls on the jumper cables he was trying to steal. I roll him on his back & kneel down on him with my knees pinning him down at the shoulders & I’m hitting him in the head so hard it hurts my hands. I call to Don to siphon some gas out of the truck. I pull the guys shirt up covering his bleeding face & when Don gets back I pour the gas on the shirt. I’m standing over him for about 15 seconds with matches in my hand. I say, “Consider yourself blessed,” & kick him in the ribs & go back in rather than setting him on fire.
I have a show for some religious event & it’s the first time I’ve been legitimately nervous about a show in years. There’s something wrong with my guitar & it won’t stay in tune at all, maybe the temperature difference between onstage & backstage. I don’t want to embarrass myself like this even if no one is watching.
I feel like I had a pretty good day today. I assembled about a hundred comics. I shot some raw footage for some upcoming Kickstarter projects. I did some prepping of the comic boxes (it was a rainy day, so I couldn’t put another coat of varnish on it). But the big news is I was talking to Joe Kendrick (WNCW) about doing some kid comics. My kid comics aren’t necessarily comics for kids, but comics by kids. I’ll have more news about it next week when I have everything worked out & have designed the booklets for kids to draw in & all that. I’m pretty excited about the idea. Hopefully it won’t be something that keeps me from being able to do any work of my own.
GoddakkAttack 
can’t really watch the video but it reminded me.. did you ever see Nine (the animated end of the world movie)?
I haven’t seen it yet, but I hear good things about it.