Small Life Form video & a couple other things

Okay, so I finally made this little video that I have been tooling around with for a couple months.  It is my first experiment with using time lapse type stuff.  Originally the audio was Remora, but it was altered into Small Life Form in the end.

I got my car to pass inspection today.  Big plus in life on that.

The newsletter campaign seemed to actually generate a few sales.  I miss the days when there were enough sales it was hard to track what caused them.

Sent some discs out to a new distro.  We’ll see what happens with them.  Fingers crossed on it.

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Newsletter, Paperwork, Comp

So probably a lot of you received the Silber newsletter today.  Going to be getting the rest of them out through the week.  I probably should look into using some kind of service for my mailing list, but it seems like once you pass 1000 addresses everybody wants you to pay for the service so until I have evidence that a mailing list really brings in revenue I’ll stick with sending 1000 individually on my own.  If you didn’t get the newsletter, sign-up at www.silbermedia.com/contest

Did a bunch of paperwork getting ready toward the end of the month/quarter.

Talked a bit more with Ben Collins about the upcoming comp.  About forty tracks in for it.

I’ve got a lot of work to do.  I need to cram some more hours in my day.

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Productive Day

I found a Radioshack with some of the circuits I needed & cleared them out.

Got some silberspy photos done.

Still working on the Irata Myspace promo.  The end is within site (this week).  Talked to Jason about it & he said they’re getting a huge spike in plays & page views, but no spike in sales on their end or mine.  Silber’s downfall has always been clinching the sale.  I don’t know if I talked about it here before, but last week I saw an interview with a guy that works in advertising that revealed what I am doing wrong with my marketing.  I’m saying, “Here are the facts that display why this is awesome & you should buy it.”  People don’t buy things because of facts & knowledge, they buy things because of emotions.  So I need to create an ad campaign that more caters to emotion because I know it is true with who I buy music from in general.  I don’t buy an album because I think it’s good, but because I have some weird emotional connection to the players.  But how to market this way is still a bit mysterious.  Will homemade YouTube videos show that musicians are real artists that need their work supported or just that they are regular folks who need regular jobs.  Like they said in Spinal Tap, “It’s a fine line between stupid & clever.”

Got a CD comp that I’m on (the 919noise first disc).

I played a show with Bryce Clayton Eiman & slicnaton.  The show went well.  Good music at a more appropriate & less intense volume than the DJ.  But it definitely a spot where music was a background coincidence, which I always have a hard time getting used to.  At least if I’m going to be the background music in a hipster bar I’m playing my own music instead of Dave Matthews covers.  I count that as a victory.

After my show I saw another band with a flat tire & I blew it up enough for them to make it home for the night.  Nice to get a good deed done.

Last Night’s Dream:
I got my job back at the video store (has it really been 15 years?).  I’m trying to remember the commands to print out the paperwork.  I can’t believe that they haven’t updated the computer system.  Then again they also haven’t upgraded from video tapes to DVDs (how long is this job going to last?).  It somehow feels more like home than my home.

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Practice, Sleep, Radio Special

So the past couple of days I’ve been trying to practice playing guitar.  By practicing I just mean playing my own songs.  But I guess just having a guitar in my hands is good.

I’ve been in a funky mood as I guess some of you know.  Lately I just feel like everything I’m doing is a waste of time except when I’m asleep.  Gotta fix that up….

Did some work today on a playlist for a radio show in France for a Silber special.  A two hour block roughly chronological, but I had to cut tracks from a bunch of bands/releases.  It’s always exciting when these radio specials happen.  It makes me feel appreciated.

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Bass Series & Dreams

Got an order out for a distro today.  I should get $75 in the distant future….

Got out a bunch of emails to music supervisors about the recent releases.

Sent out some follow-up emails about the recent releases to reviewers who said they were going to review them that I haven’t seen the reviews of yet.

Sent out questions to bassists for the QRD interview series.  We’ll see if it works out as my list of bass players to contact is a lot shorter than my list of guitarists.  Sent out messages to about 20 bassists.  So let me know if you know anyone that I should get to take part in the series.

Last Night’s Dreams:
I’m walking down a rural street in a poor neighborhood (reminiscent of the opening scene of First Blood) & this black woman in her early twenties wants to know if I can “loan” her some cottage cheese.  Strangely I know I have some extra cottage cheese because the last time I bought some, it was buy one get one free.  When I tell her I actually do have some cottage cheese she seems really disappointed like she wishes she’d asked for  something else.

I’m building a lo-fi looper from a toy sampler.  I have the circuit board bare & I’m testing it & it starts to smoke & the audio it is sending out is ending up making anything coming in sound like an 8-bit keyboard.  If I can get it to stop smoking, this might be how I make my millions.

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Car Inspection & Dreams

Took my car to get inspected & it failed because of some kind of coding error inside of the onboard computer.  I really kinda hate modern cars.  I don’t know. Supposedly I can appeal to the DMV that my car doesn’t have anything wrong with it to get it to pass inspection.  Maybe I should move to South Carolina so I don’t need to worry about car inspections anymore….

I’m hoping to have something come along to kick me into a better mood.

Here’s a recent video from Thorn1:

Recent Dreams:
The family reunion is at a convention center hotel.  But the hotel is nice even by Vegas standards.  It feels more like a deluxe boarding school in a Hollywood movie complete with antiques in every room & mahogany paneling in the hallways.  My sister did the booking & it ran late so rather than being in our family reunion block we’re part of a cosplay block.  I am not even sure what it is I’m dressed as, maybe a Jack of Hearts form Alice in Wonderland?  I have a red wooden apple tied to my wrist with a piece of red satin ribbon.  Because it’s a family reunion with my family, it means drinking starts when you wake up.  Right now it’s about ten in the morning & I’m sipping a liquor drink that tastes like a mix of equal parts orange juice, apple juice, & vodka in the hotel lobby.  A girl who might be dressed as one of the Sailor Scouts from Sailor Moon (but definitely as one of the infinite number of anime school uniform heroines) grabs the drink out of my hand & shoots it.  So I have to go back to my room to make another drink.  Navigating the path to my room is pretty distracting with all these cosplay kids & I notice a pack of kids dressed for Robotech & another pack as Frankenstein Monsters & even a Galaxy Ranger set & think how the hell did I get stuck in the gay ass outfit I’m wearing?  I make it to my room & make two drinks in case somebody swipes one again.  On the way back to the lobby I hear a girl’s scream, it startles me enough that it makes me drop one of my drinks & immediately makes me sober.  I can’t quite place the voice, but I recognize the scream.  I run to the stairwell careful not to spill my remaining drink.  There’s a thousand doorways in the stairwell & I’m not sure where to go.  The girl that stole my drink shows up & shoots the wall next to me with some kind of laser that cuts out the wall & inserts a new door.  I open it & see a man holding a woman & sinking through the floor using some kind of matter phasing technology.  I don’t recognize the girl.  I rush & grab the man before he has completely passed through the floor & he lets go of the girl & he becomes solid, fused into the floor.

I’m in a theater watching an art film starring Tilda Swinton.  The cinematography is pretty incredible & any given frame could be a painting, but the intensity of the colors makes my eyes hurt.  There’s a scene where she appears totally naked & she looks like a child rather than grown woman & there is something more disturbing about it than titillating.

I moved in with my grandmother in 1998 (something that didn’t actually happen) & am still living there with her.  Her niece (my second cousin) was friends with Obama who came to visit & I walked with him down to the library.  He was really excited because he was going to do some voice over stuff for a John Carter of Mars animated movie (though when he described the scene I’m pretty sure it was from Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon instead of John Carter because I don’t really remember anything with jet packs in that series of books).  I checked out a new novel by Barbara Kingslover (which seemed like an odd pick for my book choices) & had a $52 late fee I had to pay.  Obama tried to check out some book, but the wouldn’t let him because he wasn’t a Lehigh county resident.

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Tour Dreams?

I didn’t do much while I was awake today besides doing the layout for printing Built, but I was busy in my sleep.

Last Night’s Dreams (curiously high tour content for some reason):
I’m on tour with my biological son Andrew & my biological father Bryce (funny how history repeats itself like that).  Since music doesn’t pay, we’re financing the tour by helping people burn down buildings for insurance money (nice to train your son in a viable trade).  Of course one of the jobs gets complicated because the guy who hired us wants us to kill him as well as burn his house down.  So we’re trying to renegotiate the contract to either help him fake his death for a couple grand or actually kill him (probably easier at this point) for $10,000 (with all the inflation in gas prices & everything else, you’d think the price of a man’s life would have increased in the past 20 years).  I’m for just knocking the guy out & leaving him on the front lawn as the place burns down, but Andrew & Bryce are a little more sympathetic & creating some extravagant plan to help this dude out.  I’m concerned it’s going to make us need to cancel the show, but Bryce & Andrew seem to think saving this guy’s life is worth canceling a show & we can use him as a roadie & take him with us.  Just what we need, another mouth to feed.

I’m on tour with Electric Bird Noise & we’re staying at the house of this girl named Kay.  She gets totally naked in front of me & I’m 100% not interested.  She starts yeling at me to get out of her house & I ask her if I can sleep in the car in the driveway & she says if I do that she’ll call the cops.  Meanwhile she won’t let me tell Brian McKenzie (who’s sleeping in another room) what’s going on, so I’m left wandering in the middle of no where thinking, “So this is how I finally really become homeless.”

I’m on tour & staying with an ex-girlfriend (which is always an awkward situation to say the least) who moved to this city from our hometown.  Her house may as well be hostel.  I think twenty people live here.  She’s complaining to me that she only asks the people for twenty bucks a week in rent & can’t get it & what do I think she should do.  How can you answer that question to solving such an obviously insane & unacceptable way for a 30 year old hyper-intelligent woman to live….

I’m on tour & I think I’m in San Francisco because Carta is on the bill, but strangely the vibe is more of rural Arizona or New Mexico.  It’s a coffee shop that used to be a grocery store.  I’m talking on the phone with Shaun Sandor (Promute) & in the middle of the conversation I see him walk into the building, but he is not on the phone.  I ask him (the version on the phone) how he is able to be on the phone with me while I am physically looking at him & he is not on the phone.  He says, “Do you mean to tell me you still don’t understand how time shifting works after all this time?”

I’m on tour & I’m staying at Bob Freville’s house.  He has a room that is literally filled with pennies.  I ask him what the pennies are about.  He says he got $20,000 in pennies (that’s two million pennies!) to finance his next movie.  WTF?

I’m on tour & hanging out with Irata at a bar.  Jason reaches into his pocket & lays a fistful of Silber balloons on the bar.  He says, “These are all defective man.”  I look at them & the ink is all smeared up on them.  I say, “Sorry,” & shoot a Newcastle.

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Updates & Dreams

Today’s big event was playing drums for Pointless Forest.  Practice space today, show on Monday.  My first time playing drums on a stage.

Did some work on the layout for the first issue of my new comic Built.

My grandmother stopped bleeding today.

I got in my big distro check.

Got a bunch of orders out this morning.  It was like it was 2005.

Last Night’s Dreams:
Riding in a car with Chris Olley (Six by Seven) driving.  We’re in England somewhere.  We’re talking about music & I’m surprised how little we have in common.

Low has a new video/single.  It starts off with a two & a half minute long drone & the video shows Alan floating/laying on the surface of Lake Superior from around a dozen angles (including some from underneath (within the lake)).  Then it has 60 seconds of silence except for what I think is the running noise of the underwater cameras as it shows all of the same angles, but this time without Alan in the shots.  Then the drone kicks back in with a beat resembling a heartbeat.  The video shows Alan as a marionette being yanked back out of the lake.  Then he begins singing:
“They say nobody knows
& no one comes back
But my name is Billy
& I have returned

Things aren’t equally right
But everything’s equally wrong
My name is Billy
This is my song”
I call Alan & tell him the song is cool, but I’m not sure of it as a choice for a single because it has a segment that is sixty seconds of silence.  I tell him I think his single should be a song that is just him & Mimi singing & nothing else because when the two of them are singing together, what’s special about Low really shines.  Alan responds, “I can hear the gears in my head starting to turn.”

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Rough Day & Obsessions

A rough day today.  Last night my grandmother had some blood when she used the bathroom.  This morning there was a lot more.  She has dementia, so the idea of going to the emergency room is out.  So I had to wait until 9:30 to get in touch with her doctor’s office for an emergency appointment.  So I had to sit in the doctor’s office with her a couple hours & the doctor said I could take her through the trauma of going into the hospital for tests today or wait a couple days to see if it improves & if it doesn’t then go to the hospital.  So I opted to wait & see what happens.  We’ll see what happens.

I got an email from a distro that I have a significant check coming.  Of course I get more excited by receiving a check & cashing it than getting a message saying one is coming.

Got some more reviews in for Lotte Kestner & The Wet Teens.

I’ve been noticing the MySpace promo for Irata has been way more successful than for the other bands.  So evidently metal is where MySpace still thrives.

Personal Obsession Entry:
I’ve been thinking lately that the way time passes is like a rolling tape on a cassette deck & that the brain is the player & while most people only hit the play button, there are a bunch of other buttons & knobs to twist to shape things & this is what people can do with the 90% of their brains they refuse to use.  So I’m going to start trying more to adjust the tone knob & maybe eventually figure out how to press eject & change the tape.

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comicspace, promo, Thorn1, dream

I don’t know if any of you use www.comicspace.com but they just totally revamped their website.  Seems pretty cool as it seems more functional socially, but it does seem a little harder to find the comics.  It seems like a bunch of folks I know abandoned hope in it a few months ago, so we’ll see what happens.

Did some more on the promo for the summer releases.  Hopefully I’ll get that done by Wednesday.

More research on some promo stuff as I constantly seem to do.

Here’s a video from a recent live gig from Thorn1:

Last Night’s Dream:
I’m trying to make vegetarian lunch meat that not only passes the “my grandma thinks it’s meat test,” but also the much more important “my grandma thinks it’s good test.”  It’s epic fail after epic fail.

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