The Shelf Life Of An Indy Album

Looks like I never continued on my diatribe last week, but where does this diatribe even point?  My friend, David Wittmer, helped me with the layout of one of the print runs of one of our earliest albums.  He had an office/studio setup with high-tech computer programs and printers, and I had none such stuff.  In the middle of working on a design, I got a call from a friend who was stranded in Tulsa, and she begged me to come pick her up.  So I spoke to the head honcho at the Borders there about selling some of our albums there, and she said certainly, be there by this time.  Why not? We'd sold in some record stores, anyway.
        Now, I was pressed for time, and two round CD labels were born through his printer.  However, they were not printed on sticker paper, so we decided to cut these out and glue them on by hand.  Unfortunately, there was no glue stick around!  Now it was past time to go!  I hurried to Tulsa, stopped by the Borders, but the manager had already left.  Will you take a message?  OK, I left the two albums with them.  Is there a glue stick I can borrow?  Not sure.  Well, the manager would probably just glue them on for us, I was informed.  Really?  This seems like such a backwoods operation, I'm loving it.  I left her a note.  They paid me for them and it probably added up to gas money for my trip, and then they'd just mark it up some.
        Months down the road, shopping for some birthday or Christmas present while visiting my brother, I checked the local shelf upstairs.  There they were sitting there.  Sure enough, they were shrink wrapped with a bar code sticker and everything.  Muy professional.  I was impressed.  There was a pretty decent review written about the album later.  Some months later, I checked again.  They were still there.
        Some years went down the road, and I decided to check and see if this Borders would now sell our new album.  I went in there.  At that point, I didn't even have a copy of the previous album, and I wanted one for a keepsake.  I went to look for it and didn't see it.  Pushing back several locally produced records, there it was, in the very back, completely concealed.
        I asked if I could just swap them out for a couple of new ones.  Due to some technicality, I had to purchase them back.  So I went to the counter and bought a couple of my albums for a discount.  Opened it up, and the CD label slid right off the CD, sans glue.  Ha.
       Now our new ones were sitting there.  Maybe they'd have a better fate.  Time passed again until I heard that Borders was closing and going out of business.  When I was in Tulsa, I though maybe I'd go see if the store was still open and maybe have a look and see about their fate.  The store was already closed and empty.

Your Digital Watch Doesn't Display The Time, It Just Says Now

Once upon a piddly time, we decided we'd make our own records (albums) (CD's, more likely) from scratch and sell them in stores that would carry them.  Be our own makeshift production company/record label.  We started branching out from our hometown, securing the region, whoever would have us.  We sold several CD's as the music industry was slowly but fo' sho'ly making its massive transition from CD to the world of digital.  When we first started making them, they were really easy to sell.  They'd be gone really fast, even though they were printed, hand-made, in minuscule runs.  As people became more and more inundated with listening and finding anything they wanted at the spontaneous click of a button, they exponentially became harder to move. 
         When you first start doing things, if you're doing alright, you think, okay, I'm new to this, all I have to do is keep up the practice and work and I can only do better, but in places as fickle and ever-changing as marketplaces, you have to constantly adapt to not be side-swiped by bloodthirsty competitors, and I, for one, have never been too keen on competition, anyway, not of the serious blood-lusting kind.  Well, maybe a little.  Eventually, everything was expected to be free because everything was exposed online for free and was available right now, then another click of a button, and attention spans became even shorter than they ever were.  We found out it was hard to even sell stuff online, because it's just a piece of air or code that (magically) carries a sound.  Oh well.  At first, musicians and businessmen had to rush to set up their online store and had to pay a whopping 30-some dollars for a website domain name and perhaps 200 dollars a month for a hosting fee just to have the website storage.  Which you still do, but for not as much.  Several people were interested in checking out others' websites. 
           The advent of social media made it possible for everyone to have their own website, for free, and more and more storage space became possible.  Then, everyone in the world had their own website and became addicted to looking at themselves online and all of their friends.  Soon, you could even access all of this from anywhere on your cell phone, and people everywhere constantly reached for their phones as a reflex to check out anything that was happening except what was right in front of their face.  Cafes were full of people staring at screens and very few people were actually having conversations.  People were consumed with absorbing information until they started talking like robots.  Musicians stopped getting paid to play in public places because people could just listen online to music being made by robots.  When musicians did play for free and maybe (if they were lucky) a meal, no one listened because they were on their computers typing about how they were typing on their computer right now.  What did it matter? The musicians were boring, anyway, and so was Hollywood.  Everyone was making up their own stuff now. 
             I'll tell you about when we sold our albums at Borders, what happened, maybe tonight if I have time, but I have to run to band practice real fast...
           

Grinding Teeth

         Grinding Teeth

          Horace B. True picked up a job as an imaging tech for a start-up firm in the city. He took thousands of photographs a day of legal documents with his fancy digital camera he was purchasing with deductions from his paycheck. There was a recent boom in this business all around the country where there were oil and natural gas deposits being drilled out of the virgin ground. He and his ilk served as middlemen for landmen who formerly had to "run title" by personally visiting the courthouses in the hopes of procuring rights from landowners to extract from the land. Here were copious books dating back to the turn of the century well over a hundred years ago. The older ones were awkwardly huge and weighed close to 30 pounds. Often, the courtrooms had been victims of fires in the past and many of these older books were destroyed. Also, many of the indexes were so sloppily written, it was virtually impossible at times to tell even a "4" from an "8."

            Every morning he woke, sometimes as early as 4 a.m. to go on a 300-mile round trip, but always by 6 to go at least 60 miles in a day, to go snap snap pictures of documents he didn't completely understand- warranty deeds, mineral deeds, mortgages, oil and gas releases, receipts, plat maps, affidavits, exhibits that sometimes went on for hundreds of pages, and then he uploaded them to a laptop, organized and numbered them (protocol), then he put them in order on a flash drive, according to what county, township and range to where he was assigned.

          The supervisor, who stayed in the office, was always on to him to work more diligently and meet the deadlines, even though he often worked around the clock for them, only breaking for a quick meal, then more work. He worried about falling asleep on the highway due to lack of sleep, but this didn't concern management, so the stress boiled to a pulsing headache and breaking out. Horace didn't understand the urgency of these oil companies to satisfy society's desire for oil when he was stuck in rush hour traffic, 3 hours to go 10 minutes, 1 person to a car, and the sunrise smothered in smog.

       Pulling books one day from the high shelves, he scooted a rolling platform ladder (which reminded him of a scaffold) around the vault, grateful not to be in the previous county where he'd been assigned to an abandoned third floor which housed ancient books covered in dust and cobwebs and where guano covered the floor.
       Stooping down to pull from the lowest shelf, a weighty book known as Deed # 5 came careening from the damaged, toppermost sliding rail and clunked into his skull. A strenuous thud and pop! All was white light, then blankness.

          Was this death by legal book? Or simply a coma?

         The court clerk ran in. Soon, the police. An ambulance screeched. The legal book went on trial for aggravated assault. As it sat before the judge, jury and plaintiff in the defendant's wooden chair, it was sentenced to 17 years in the state prison.
         Luckily for Horace B.True, he came to and regained his former composure, but now works part-time as a caddy at the Mingleton Country Club until he finishes his doctoral thesis on cervicogenic headaches. He spends his day navigating the course in his electric golf cart and plaid trousers. Unfortunately, for Ryan Petroman, he was fired the other day when he couldn't find any records contained in Deed # 5.

Remotely Out Of Control

Ah, so this is what TV's come to now- I see in the lower righthand corner- "25 Most Memorable Infomercials Ever."  I can't miss that one.  The channels are broken up into decimals- 88.9, 83.100 down to 83.22, down to 53 suddenly with 1 down click of the button, 1 click down to 16- there's 5 billion channels for each person on the earth, or aren't there 7 billion now?  A billion more while I said that just then.  16 down to 15.1.  I find the feeling of this remote control familiar yet a bit estranged.  I walk into these home box office mega entertainment centers with a muddle of boxes hooked up with tangled snake cables and don't even bother.  It's a chore to find the one remote out of 7 that will turn the damn boob tube on- it's an exercise to change the channels, adjust the volume.  TV's supposed to be for the lazy, a dumbing down.
     I'm just messing around now because that can't be a universal truth.  TV can be good sometimes and even educational.  All these channels, though.  People used to see the same thing on TV with the only 3 channels they had and they'd talk about it the next day.  Vonnegut addressed this situation to an effect.  Now, so many haven't seen the same thing, which isn't necessarily bad, it means there's more options, more individualization, but the culture loses some unification, some shared knowledge.  You gain something, you lose something.  It hasn't gone so far, though, there's millions of people who still experience the same.  It's just that no one's famous anymore, they just think they are.  OK, there's still fame, but maybe not like it used to be, of course, not much is ever like it used to be.
      And how many genres of music are there now?  I, like a lot of musicians, can't help but cringe a little every time I'm asked the question, "What kind of music do you play?" or "who are your influences?  I sometimes play silent music, the type you can't hear, at least not out in the open.  You have to plug in your telepathic headphones.

The Oklahomafrican Sun

11-1-11

      There's so many things I've never done that now I realize, and I wonder if I really care to ever do them or not, or am more concerned about the idea of doing them, because experiences aren't always all they're cracked up to be- like these people who run around obsessing with experience and soaking it all up, having to be and do everything, or get a taste of it (I've been some of that mindset), like a bunch of experience hogs, and then they find they don't have something that's truly fulfilling, because all they can appreciate anymore are the big roller coasters, and not the tiny subtleties of life, like the shadows of dancing trees shaking their branches and leaves along a sunglint wall, how the trees just stand there and soak up the sky and the sun and the wind and rain and moon. When everyone's just a one-of-a-kind. An aborigine typically doesn't hang out on a laptop as far as I know, a meerkat doesn't speak Spanish as far as I know, a hamster doesn't whistle, I don't skydive (though maybe I will sometime and I'm just waiting for something traumatic to happen so I can jump out of a plane and forget about it), a sloth doesn't fight morning rush hour traffic (I want to be a sloth in a dream world)- All this steel- complexed, green colored paper money chasing rushing urgency to crowd the earth with more man-made tumbleweeds (plastic bags blowing through parking lots) and obligations for unnecessities just feels unnatural- but it was created and self-imposed, self-inflicted.

     I'm knocking on your door- I'm not a salesman.  I tried and I can't much do it.

I didn't really want to sell you anything in the first place- just give until I have nothing

and then the world will say hey look at the bum who is sometimes in reality Christ-like- though

sometimes a rotten bum.

     This week I'm once again a spy from my own world on this world and the sunrise on

the Oklahoman plains is the African sun on an African-looking, Oklahoma grass-blowing terrain, and there is a zebra that lives in Oklahoma, a long-maned lion perched on his grassy hill, watching the same sun set in the distance of the Milky Way.

     There are giraffes, a hippo, rhinos, a jaguar that lives in the Heartland. I saw them the

other day, an unexpected free pass to the zoo from a friend. It was like a heartwarming

prison full of friends who for the most part are really well off and don't know any better,

kind of like everything else. Except I knew and they knew they were really just stage

performers and thrived on the love and applause.