Update: I've since written "Hurtfulness and Full-Tilt Crazy" which is a long-winded apology for the title of this article and a good many other things. While the following is complimentary, it's mixed with bile about other things, and a compliment has to come straight-up to count. I haven't changed the content as I can't disown it by erasing it.
Eva Moon was there when the stuff was stolen in Dallas and she's one of only two musicians who have done anything to support my GoFundMe campaign.
The other one is Matthew Perrault / Matthew Broyles. He was at the Dallas show also and he's the one who got me thinking covering "Everybody Knows" by Leonard Cohen wouldn't be a bad idea ... and it wasn't. My version was highly metallic but I liked it. Thank you, Matthew. He plays frequently in the Dallas / Fort Worth area but getting out is difficult for various pitiful reasons. He does a cool live set as I've seen his band in Fort Worth previously and you can learn more on his Facebook page.
Note: don't be dismissing him as some bozo in a cowboy hat. You know what they say about still waters, right? Besides, he doesn't even wear a cowboy hat.
Cat isn't technically a musician but she lives music as much as anyone who ever picked up an instrument and she does play African drums. She says she can't sing but I don't believe it. Everyone can sing. If the audience doesn't like it, sing louder. That's the ticket.
Eva Moon has always had an unconventional act so right away she's intriguing but over the last few years she has branched out into developing her writing further for her musical and she's been doing quite well with it. She loves double entendres and you can check her out in "Unzipping my Genes" which was presented last in Seattle a couple of weeks ago. She will do it again in October but keep watching her calendar or meet her on Facebook to learn any new developments. (The musical relates to a personal battle with cancer. Eva Moon does not accept defeat.)
To my endless regret, I slept through Eva Moon's act in Dallas as it was early in the day and I just flat blew it. I had seen her act multiple times in Second Life but there she was for for real and I blew it. Pfft. Not good.
By the way, I really wasn't trying to hit on you when I asked if you might want to get high. I thought we might blow a joint outside and talk as I knew for sure it would be something unusual and that's got to be interesting. If I had come alone, as a million times I have wished, my intentions might not have been so honorable. It really was straight-up, tho, as I do much better with people one-on-one than in crowds which I really don't like at all.
The support is deeply appreciated as there's very much the feeling that the music didn't mean anything and I've made a complete fool out of myself. Now there's the feeling that saying anything to anyone just looks like I suck up and beg for their money but I do see that being so abrasive may not help the cause much either. It amused me earlier as I was talking to myself in shooting a video today because I was the roving narrator and there was a part where I said, "People online will never believe this is the same person."
If there is anyone else who has even shared the link to the GoFundMe, please do let me know as I will be flippin' happy to support you too.
Eva Moon was there when the stuff was stolen in Dallas and she's one of only two musicians who have done anything to support my GoFundMe campaign.
The other one is Matthew Perrault / Matthew Broyles. He was at the Dallas show also and he's the one who got me thinking covering "Everybody Knows" by Leonard Cohen wouldn't be a bad idea ... and it wasn't. My version was highly metallic but I liked it. Thank you, Matthew. He plays frequently in the Dallas / Fort Worth area but getting out is difficult for various pitiful reasons. He does a cool live set as I've seen his band in Fort Worth previously and you can learn more on his Facebook page.
Note: don't be dismissing him as some bozo in a cowboy hat. You know what they say about still waters, right? Besides, he doesn't even wear a cowboy hat.
Cat isn't technically a musician but she lives music as much as anyone who ever picked up an instrument and she does play African drums. She says she can't sing but I don't believe it. Everyone can sing. If the audience doesn't like it, sing louder. That's the ticket.
Eva Moon has always had an unconventional act so right away she's intriguing but over the last few years she has branched out into developing her writing further for her musical and she's been doing quite well with it. She loves double entendres and you can check her out in "Unzipping my Genes" which was presented last in Seattle a couple of weeks ago. She will do it again in October but keep watching her calendar or meet her on Facebook to learn any new developments. (The musical relates to a personal battle with cancer. Eva Moon does not accept defeat.)
To my endless regret, I slept through Eva Moon's act in Dallas as it was early in the day and I just flat blew it. I had seen her act multiple times in Second Life but there she was for for real and I blew it. Pfft. Not good.
By the way, I really wasn't trying to hit on you when I asked if you might want to get high. I thought we might blow a joint outside and talk as I knew for sure it would be something unusual and that's got to be interesting. If I had come alone, as a million times I have wished, my intentions might not have been so honorable. It really was straight-up, tho, as I do much better with people one-on-one than in crowds which I really don't like at all.
The support is deeply appreciated as there's very much the feeling that the music didn't mean anything and I've made a complete fool out of myself. Now there's the feeling that saying anything to anyone just looks like I suck up and beg for their money but I do see that being so abrasive may not help the cause much either. It amused me earlier as I was talking to myself in shooting a video today because I was the roving narrator and there was a part where I said, "People online will never believe this is the same person."
If there is anyone else who has even shared the link to the GoFundMe, please do let me know as I will be flippin' happy to support you too.
2 comments:
Komuso here in my google id form.
"The support is deeply appreciated as there's very much the feeling that the music didn't mean anything and I've made a complete fool out of myself."
I don't want to sound harsh, but every creative needs to get over this and just create. Rewards, pats on the back, accolades etc are a bonus, not the main driver.
Said best by:
“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
- Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
A cautionary tale snipped from
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/a-stranger-e-mailed-saying-he-planned-to-kill-himself-what-was-i-supposed-to-do/2015/01/07/53dfe8bc-2896-11e4-958c-268a320a60ce_story.html
"A few months later I would break this news to Post book editor Ron Charles, as I had broken it to every other recipient of Williams’s e-mail I contacted for this story.
Charles had opened the message in the morning, puttering around his house in his bathrobe and eventually checking his e-mail. Among the usual inbox clutter, Williams’s e-mail was a chilling attention-getter. Charles recognized in it a type of desperation, albeit an extreme form, that he sees with regularity as one of the gatekeepers for those angling to become the next big thing in publishing.
When we met to discuss the e-mail months later, he confessed that that desperation is one reason he doesn’t even answer his phone anymore.
“There are more people writing than ever who are desperate for attention, and we just don’t have that much attention to give,” Charles said. “No matter how rich or educated we become, we only have the 24 hours for each of us. And with everybody promoting themselves on every possible social network, all of us so desperate for eyeballs, myself included, with all of us living and dying by our click history, it is kind of an extreme and terrible example of everybody’s feeling of ‘Why aren’t you looking at me?’ ’’
It’s an unprecedented oddity that in our current culture just about anyone can get a book published. In decades past, self-publishing meant scraping together the money to pay a vanity press. Cheap copies arrived in a box and sat unpurchased in the author’s living room for years. Today, the Web makes self-publishing almost immediate with a few clicks.
There are the exceptional cases when fame follows these clicks, E.L. James and “Fifty Shades of Grey” being the most notable, selling more than 100 million copies worldwide. But for most authors, there is simply no response. Williams himself, in a post, recalled feeling slighted years ago after small publisher Branden Books produced one of his books, “The Water Book,” and it received no attention. Work colleagues and friends probably demurred because of the price, he said. At a time when books were selling for about $10, his was priced at $29.95. He ultimately sold or gave away 60 copies before leaving his remaining boxes on a bookstore doorstep one night.
“Unrealistic expectations are being flamed by people who make money off of self-published books,” Charles said. “And it’s flamed by us, the media, too, because we write stories about the few rock-star writers who self-publish their books and they become bestsellers.”
I appreciate the time you put into that and also that you saw it at all. For those who don't know it, Komuso is, to my knowledge, the earliest Second Life blues groovemaster.
This was like a Lesley Gore situation for me as, for example, the feeling of betrayal when the kit was ripped off and no-one did anything was fair enough, I was. It was ludicrous for that to propagate out to the thinking of a global conspiracy to screw up my life. That's the crazy but that's a different problem to solve.
The fundamental need for validation that what you did was at least good for a small something has become, as you note, extremely difficult. Anyone can publish a book and I have at least three of them. No idea if they're any good. I've made at least a hundred videos and I do know some of them were ok but mostly people don't watch them. I've sprayed music all over the place and I can see counts for people who listen but how do I know if they listen to it or hear a few notes, regard it as crap, and turn it off.
The above isn't toward making a case to justify my own craziness but rather the craziness facing the artistic community as a whole. That's also not to absolve myself of destructiveness due to craziness.
The most positive thing I can offer on this is continuing to pursue the idea of a header for AIFFs as that mechanism would give musicians immense freedom and make the approach of indies to their craft a very different thing.
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