So Sunday night my grandmother decided she didn’t need a sleeping period which means I get to miss a sleeping period. Which I am not used to happening anymore & consequently I had trouble thinking straight enough to get anything done all day.
I checked the Silber MySpace for the first time in who knows how long. 1100 unread messages. I went through 150 (all but 1 sent via the Reverbnation thing) & there was one that was vaguely trying to communicate with me as individual. I guess I understand why people have deleted their accounts on it even if I disagree with the idea of deleting an account that so much stuff has been linked to over the years.
Did some work on press releases for some upcoming things & filled a few orders. That’s it. Pretty much a bust for a couple days. Maybe I’ll get an opportunity to get some things done soon.
So the “computer power supply I ordered” came in. Why the quotation marks? Because it wasn’t the one I ordered. It was a laptop power supply instead of a desktop power supply. Waiting for a refund to come through while trying to order another one elsewhere at a good price. So my music computer is still down for probably another week.
I just noticed that one of the pages was taking a long time to load (5-10 seconds longer than most pages) & it was because it still had Google Analytics installed on it. The moral of the story is pull that shit off your site.
In other Google news, they now have a thing where when you run a Google Ad you can have a feature to get a phone call instead of a weblink to your business. Of course it’s not really useful to me at Silber, but I think it’s interesting how much it points to how much more people are using phones instead of computers for their internet usage. Most people I know with smartphones seem to use them for at least half of their internet activity. Which probably means I do need to eventually make some pages for Silber designed for phones. Though of course I guess I’d need to get a phone to test it on first.
So the Remora show the other night was a hot mess. When I practice once for about the same length as a set without having played a show in a month, it shows. No consistency in quality, though I do think their were some pretty great moments. I keep running into problems where I’ll get electrocuted by a vocal mic & it throws me off for the whole show.
I just got up for sale the Robert E. Howard comic I did. I’ll make the digital download at some point. I just wrote a first draft of a script for a second issue.
I also just got up for sale Lost Kisses #22. One day I’ll make the digital version.
Speaking of comic stuff, there’s an article & interview about the Silber mini-comics over on Skyscraper.
Last Night’s Dreams:
I’m living in a hotel room with my grandmother. There’s some kind of monster that comes late at night to suck some of my grandmother’s life out of her & so I need to give her some of my life everyday so she can make it through. So tonight I’m going to skip a sleeping period & kill the thing, whatever the fuck it is.
I’m tired of not having seen the world so I get an ultralight (one of the ones that is basically a hang glider with a lawnmower engine on it) & I’m flying it over a frozen river. There are giant worms (maybe 20 feet in diameter) breaking through the ice & snapping at me. I’m not scared of them. In fact I move closer to the ice to get better pictures of them on my little video camera. I land at a nearby town where all the houses are about 200 square feet & only five feet apart. There’s a woman on a porch who calls me in & her neighbor is staring at me through his window & continues to stare at me through a window of the house once I walk inside. The woman makes me some tea & I sit down at an upright piano that has had the front removed. She pulls out a mini recorder & sets it on top of the piano & we start to record an album. As we’re working I realize I own entirely too many possessions.
So I got a request to put my Sun Ra sketch on some shorts. So if you are interested you can get it over on Cafe Press.
There’s a new EP from Plumerai that you can check out over on Bandcamp.
I did some work on a comic my niece wrote inspired by John Porcellino. She’s 9 & I maybe shouldn’t have let her read the Porcellino comics, but I don’t know that I have many comics appropriate for her & he seemed like a good enough place to go for anybody can do a comic about anything.
I took my music computer apart & ordered a replacement power supply. Just $16. Should be in by Monday.
I did some work on an article about music promotion, I’ll post it up in a couple days.
So I got a lot done the past couple days. Scanned in & laid out Lost Kisses #22. Got the paperwork done for quarterly invoices to my distros & got them sent out. Practiced for my show coming up in a couple days. Talked to Nick Marino & my Super Haters scripts will go live in a week & a half.
Then the bad bit of the day was tonight I tried to work on some music & my music computer won’t turn on. I’m assuming a bad power supply. The machine is pretty old, built originally in 1998 I think & rebuilt a couple times (though I think the most recent is from 2001 (the soundcard is external & so is the hard drive I use for storage of the music stuff). So I guess I need to figure out if I can find a free power supply or if I should get a new computer to use for music. Either way a bit of a headache.
I found a power supply for $16 including shipping. So I just went ahead & got it. Now I guess it’s just waiting for it to get here & seeing if it turns my computer on.
I don’t know if I really could expect ten years out of a new machine. Seems like somewhere around 2005 computers price dropped dramatically & they started to last 2-3 years instead of 10 for most people I know. Then again I have no idea why those people have computers in the first place.
So nothing exciting on my end today. Just doing some work on promo follow-up. But I did find out about this trailer for the John Carter movie. Dejah Thoris isn’t the unquestionable degree of red she should be, but it looks about as good as I could hope for (though I did kinda like the idea of it being done as a Pixar movie that was non-comedic that was thrown around about it a couple of years ago). If the stars align I may actually one day see the movie…. If you don’t know anything about John Carter, there’s a series of books that started coming out in 1912 (I think there’s seven in total) about a Civil War veteran being transported to Mars & fighting (as well as having sex with) Martians. Pretty influential to most sci-fi afterwards (I imagine even things like La Jetee & Slaughter House Five owe their ideas of uncontrolled time travel to the way John Carter slips between Earth & Mars) even though the author Edgar Rice Burroughs went on to be famous for writing Tarzan.
Yeah, I know, I think they would look a lot less Roman if they had their skin painted the colors they are supposed to be in the books. But I guess Disney is low on cash. The outfits they are actually supposed to wear would probably look even more homosexual than the Roman ones. Basically leather speedos with belts to hang swords & wallets & such off of. So I think I’m okay with them just going Roman style….
So some of the new releases are getting played on some podcasts like Drug Music & No Pigeonholes EXP. Check them out if you are into weird music.
I sent my scripts for a two-week story arc over to Nick Marino for Super Haters. It will probably go live in a couple of weeks. Of course I’ll let you know when that happens.
There was a Deadpool comic that I was working on with Nick Marino & the plotline was just announced more or less as the next plot in the real Deadpool comics. Basically a guy with a healing factor facing up against a version of himself formed from bits that were cut off in past battles. Which I thought was a pretty innovative & original idea, but now someone else is using it. Not sure if the collab will still happen or not. We may try to come up with something else. A little up in the air.
I’ve been talking a bit about doing a metal record (for Remora) & everyone I mention it to seems pretty excited about the idea. The working album title is Butterfly Corpse.
I got an email today about a potential music placement for Remora. Fingers crossed on it happening. It’s one that would be a fairly big deal & totally make me more optimistic about the future of me doing music. I’ll just have to wait & see what happens.
Just made available for free download is a collaborative album from Bret Hart’s duet series with Scotty Irving (Clang Quartet). Download it here or just listen to it below:
Northern Valentine appear on this new animal rescue charity compilation if you might be interested in it.
Recent dreams:
Meeting Dave Sim at an Applebee’s (wtf?) & he has brought in some kinda weird alcoholic home brewed stuff with him that’s the only thing he drinks besides water (once again, wtf?).
There’s a new Swans live album where the tracks were decided by people voting online. There’s a copy at the library, but someone stole the disc out of the case.
I’m walking with Alan Sparhawk in a shanty town under a big highway bridge somewhere (it feels like Asheville, but I suspect it is some other city) & he’s talking about he has a new solo record tentatively titled Three Organs that is just organ drones & that for the artwork he has an original Jackson Pollock sketch that he recently inherited from a relative.
I’m working with my father binding books by hand & rather than using glue to bind the pages together, we’re using cement.
I’m in the hospital in a bed & I can’t move my legs & I’m not sure if it’s because I’m paralyzed or my legs are gone & I tell the nurse to take me to my grandmother & she says that she’s alright & in good hands & I tell her that if she’s in this hospital then she’s in the hands of criminally negligent people who kill people on a daily basis. I pull the IV out of my arm & throw the pole at the nurse & start pulling myself over the edge of the bed.
In the mail I get a booklet from the IRS about tax paperwork for my divorce. I didn’t even know I was married.
I’m on tour with KISS as the merch manager (not actually selling anything, just in charge of ordering new stock when things run low) & we’re at some kind of after party at a house & Gordon Ramsay is the cook (I’m not sure if it’s his house). I’m in the kitchen & Ramsay pours me a glass of something yellow to drink & I spit it out when I taste it. He pulls out from the fridge a jar that looks like a lizard swimming in pickle juice & says, “That’s what you just drank.”
The next morning I’m walking on a beach with Gene Simmons & Thurston Moore & we’re all talking about how interviewers need to stop asking the same damn questions in every interview.
I’m walking around in a small town late at night with Krysten Ritter (Jane from Breaking Bad). We walk through a Walmart parking lot way too big for the size of the town & a folded up piece of that yellow legal paper goes by in the wind & we follow it onto a side street & into the small parking lot of a closed coffee shop.
I’m in a salvage store that used to be a warehouse & I’m floating about seven feet off the floor. There’s a guy who is climbed up onto some of the scaffolding shelving breaking open a wooden crate & I help him. Inside are two computer motherboards that look like the ones from 1990s towers. As soon as the crate is opened somebody shoots the guy with a tazer & he falls off of the scaffolding, I float away & people are trying to catch me with a fishing net but I escape it. The first door I try to use to leave the warehouse is locked, but I get out the second one & start floating away much too high in the sky to feel comfortable.
I’ve been feeling a bit out of it the past few days. I can’t really point exactly to why. I got out all the promos & need to start work on the follow-ups. I got the checks out to the artists for the second quarter. I still have to make the invoices for the distros for the second quarter. I did a couple of more serious drawings than I have in a while for Lost Kisses #22 (most notably a Sun Ra one where he looks like a Cosby kid).
Today I had an email conversation with someone putting in their first direct order from me where I got to put them on track for getting some out of print stuff from Trance to the Sun. It made me feel useful to get to help out a fan.
So I’ve been reading a bunch more music sites than normal (normal meaning almost none to be honest) lately because of searching for places to promote the new releases. I don’t know if I’m getting too old or or dumb or something, but I can’t hardly read reviews anymore. Half of them only reference bands I’ve never heard of to describe the music (not even giving me a genre) & a lot of them seem to have this scholarly air that I just can’t deal with. Music isn’t quantum mechanics & I don’t need a bunch of jargon & complicated words to confuse me out of liking something (because I am old enough not to get confused into liking something anymore). I don’t know. I guess if I’d ever really liked music journalism in general, I never would’ve felt a need to start my own take on it with QRD.
based on your interviews it seems like you only listen to stuff on your label. i dunno if that’s a marketing ploy or if that’s real but if it’s real then that could take some of the mystery out of you not knowing what other bands they’re referencing.
similarly Cat Power instead of Toni Halliday. i think that’s who her big ifluence was, or at least that’s what she said i don’t know what cat power sounds like.
The only new music I regularly listen to is on the label, but I do hear stuff other than that. But I see all these reviews of bands mentioning a half dozen bands I’ve never heard of & then they sound like a bad New Order or an early Jesus & Mary Chain knock off.
What do you think of Beth Gibbons (Portishead) as a comparison?
don’t think it’s that accurate but i guess close enough. But then i haven’t heard their last album so maybe on that one they sound alike. anyways it’s a step in the right direction from Toni so i’d go with it.
So I joined GooglePlus today. I did the math & I’m pretty sure it’s the twentieth social network I’ve joined trying to promote Silber. So I’m pretty sure I’m right with my decision a year ago to shift away from giving much focus to anything other than the Silber website for online presence. But go ahead & add me over there if you’d like.
I called PD Wilder (Hotel Hotel) to get some info about making some salsa from scratch. So I now have a couple jars of Silber Salsa & it’s strange because it ended up sweet & hot.
Spent some time today working on the press releases for some upcoming stuff that may be available sometime this week. So yeah, I’m trying to make some things happen.
Spent a lot of the day today doing some research towards music placement places & getting some packages ready to send to a few select ones. Fingers crossed for the magic million dollar game changing deal to come to fruition on that.
I got this email today from Brandon at KBOO about the new Azalia Snail: I thought I should relay this story from this week show to you. I was scheduled to do a interview with Jon Anderson (famously…but not currently…from the band Yes) and he happened to arrive while I was playing your new song “User System”, …”great music” he said as he sat down….and then a minute or two later.. “this is beautiful,… who is it?”
I just found out about this new (to me) guitar device called a Vibesware Guitar Resonator that I kind of want. Basically it works a bit like a big ebow mounted to a mic stand if I understand it properly. Of course who actually knows how an ebow really works in the first place?
I saw the first Harry Potter movie the other day (didn’t like it) & I reviewed it over at Finally Checking It Out.
The new season of Breaking Bad comes on Sunday. It’s my favorite show on television & I’m still not too excited about it. Which might mean I’m not in an upswing in my life.
I’m going to be writing a few scripts for my favorite webcomic Super Haters & wrote the first entry of my storyline today. It’s a challenge to figure out a way to get my story to fit into continuity & end as if it more or less never happened (the nature of comic strips to a certain point). We’ll see how it turns out.
I saw another episode of the new Outer Limits that I liked.
Just spending most of my time trying to get the last of the promos out for Azalia Snail, Electric Bird Noise, & Remora. Then I can start working on the next wave of stuff going on at Silber.
On the Silber Group on Facebook I started this “endless interview” thing (inspired by Ian Stewart of AutoREVERSE) & I’m hoping some other Silber artists start taking part on it too.
Here are a couple acoustic versions of Plumerai songs I thought you might get a kick out of:
I know usually I post old episodes of The Outer Limits (I generally prefer the old ones because I prefer the way I can ignore special effects from something fifty years old where more modern stuff effects seem cheap & crappy), but I saw this recent one about time travel that I liked.
Last Night’s Dreams:
There’s some black gunk covering the bottom of my shower & it’s spreading faster than I can clean it.
My doorbell rings at 7am & it’s an ex-girlfriend from high school. She tells me she’s left her husband & abandoned her daughters. I tell her she can stay at the house as long as she wants, but I can’t give her much attention because I need to take care of my grandmother.
GoddakkAttack 
i wouldn’t delete myspace, you never know when you’re gonna need some phat beats.
I also saw a thing that you can now embed stuff from MySpace on Facebook, which I thought was basically the only reason to join Reverbnation….
well the reverbnation players typically work. also the .03 cent per year you collect from rn
Sorry to hear about the sleep!
It looks like a few more days before her sleep schedule gets back to regular so I can think straight & get some real work done.