I just uploaded a new piece of art to Fine Art America called “The Sight of Freequncy.” Take a look, and this time, I’m expecting my url minimizer to work. bit.ly killed me last time when my Socialite plugin malfunctioned. I’m using tinyurl.com now. It’s a little longer but not that much and it works. That’s a big bonus.

The Sight of Frequency

Mel and I had walked into a restaurant that I’d never been in before.  It had one of those country cottage motifs that usually nauseate me but it had these quirks about it that captured my interest.  We sat down at a table close to the kitchen.  Each place setting and menu was a set that came in a shallow dish.  The table we sat at was faux green granite.  We placed an order with an older waitress but I was talking about wanting to go to another restaurant to pick something up.  It was some sort of Chili’s or Tex Mex style place that in my mind was nearby and we’d be able to return before our food was served.

We jumped on a big Harley panhead and rode down an alley that had interesting obstacles like a troupe of old “classic” red Honda Civics and delivery vans that were congregating and driving perpendicular to the alley.  Then, there was the a large mound of car parts that had been covered by a giant tarp.  We finally made it to the end of the alley where I made a right expecting to see the restaurant on my right, but it wasn’t there.  I turned around and started to drive into a parking lot that might take me to a different alley but we stopped and ended up in a little cafe.  We sat down at a table and I quickly noticed that there was no music playing.  I asked them if they needed music in hopes that I could perform there.  One of the girls working there told me that she was going to have a soul retrieval and that the person doing it was going to play the hollow bone.  I asked who it was but she ignored me.  In the back of my mind, I was feeling a bit guilty for leaving the other restaurant and I really did want to get back before the meal was served.

Suddenly the cafe changed into a different cafe and I had this white brick shaped digital cassette player with me.  I was playing a heavy metal ballad for one of the waiters that worked there to demonstrate it’s peculiarity.  He didn’t like it too much and walked away.  A man sitting at a nearby table grabbed the player and started dismantling it.  I got up and walked over to him and started grabbing the torn-apart pieces from him.  He told me that he didn’t like the music and I explained that he still had no right to take what wasn’t his and destroy it.  I called him an idiot and stormed back to my table.  He got up to follow me.  He was a very large man and as he got closer, he seemed more threatening.  I awoke…

I was walking down the dairy aisle in the super market. From the top shelf, I grabbed a jar or Best Foods mayonnaise. I was a little perplexed when this large jar of the creamy white delight felt so light, so I opened it. This brand new never opened jar was less than 1/8 full. Now, I’ve always detested when the container for a product is excessively large for the amount of product inside but this pushed it all to a whole new level. I felt completely vindicated in making my sandwich right there on the spot, recapping the mayonnaise and putting it back on the shelf and leaving.

I was at an open mic in a small brightly lit cafe. It was a fairly clean cafe with polished wooden chairs and tables in a rich walnutty finish and matching wainscoting. It was a morning event that started at 8am and was ending at noon. I had been asked by the proprietor to do a 1/2 hour set at noon when the open mic finished but it was somewhat unexpected. I was standing in the doorway trying to work out logistics in my head and little concerned because I didn’t even have a guitar with me. On top of that, I wasn’t sure what songs to play because I was familiar with this group of people and what flavour of music most appealed to them. I guess it was an anxiety dream.

I was out on some sort of large farmland. There was fencing and a very large barn and I had a knowledge of hunting deer with some woman. I looked over to what looked like an abandoned garden area surrounded by chicken wire. There was an animal there with reddish fur and we were commenting that it was a coyote. Then there appeared another very large animal that I was claiming was a moose but the woman I was with disagreed. The thing that was odd about it was that it didn’t have fully developed front legs but rather short stubby legs like a kangaroo and it was walking on its hind legs. It was quite a unique creature. When I awoke, I realized that the animal that we claimed was a coyote looked more like a fox, but then, coyotes are illusive.

I was standing in a courtyard that had some sort of large canopy over it. It was kind of like an ginormous parachute with a gingham print and it completely enclosed me but allowed sunlight to bleed thru. I was talking with Kirby on the cell tho I don’t recall what we were talking about. Next to me was a very old and large tree. I presume that it was a eucalyptus because it had the bark features of the painted variety except that it was white. There were slight colour variations in the bark but overall, it just appeared to be a huge white tree. That wasn’t the unusual thing tho. What was unusal was that it was covered with large pictographic symbols, similar to what you might see in the Northwest US. The colours were blue, red, yellow, green and black and most of the larger symbols were symmetrical ass opposed to the smaller, less mature symbols that were still growing and had not yet reached full symmetry. I recall finding a split in the canopy where there was a large seem the fell to the ground and divided the canopy in two, but seeing it was only by accident because it was an optical anomaly and I only found it by standing in the right place and looking to my right.

I don’t have a lot of detail about either of the women; both were blond, shorter than me, and thin. The first encounter was brief and I don’t really recall much of it. The second was more detailed and explicit. The bed was probably a king with satin blue sheets. When I first remembered the act, we were actually standing on the bed against a large mahogany headboard and she had one leg up and in my arms and I was to the side and the back of her. Then I tilted her upside down so that her shoulders and head were on the bed while I was still standing and facing her. The sex was quite passionate and heated with no rest involved. It felt very carnal but there was an association between us other than our sexual intimacy.

I was working in a super market as a stock clerk. It was a little more than a super market as they carried home goods and some furnishings, kinda like a giant Target, but the shelves were more like Home Depot. I ended up walking a long ways looking for some place to put something and I realized that I was naked and I was talking with someone that was walking with me. I wasn’t really bashful about being naked but it was something I was aware of. I walked out into some sort of loading area in the back where I met a group of co-workers. One of them turned out to be my boss who was an Asian woman that went be the name of Deb. She was going to promote me to being a cashier of which I was pretty indifferent. She asked me why I wanted to work there in the first place to gauge my interest and commitment to the position. I told here that I’d worked in the computer industry for 15 years and that I was completely burned out on it and that I was completely happy with my new job at this market. I put a lot of emotion behind what I was telling her and she seemed to appreciate it.

I was with Anthony W in some dwelling that he’d acquired and was making upgrades to. It was an older home that had been Frankensteined since the early 1900’s and we were assessing a room that had once been an outdoor patio, but had a roof put over it to connect it to the main house. Whomever did the work didn’t put a ceiling in because it would’ve made it too low and I was holding up 2×4 to see if there was something we could do to close off the exposed roofing. Anthony was standing next too me and was talking about going into the back where there was a 3 story apartment building with one apartment on each floor, across from a large carriage house. I decided to walk out into the front of the house o take a look at the entire grounds, but when I turned around, all I saw was that the apartment structure was starting to collapse. I started screaming Anthony’s name over and over, but I had laryngitis and could hardly get his name out to warn him. As I started running toward the house, I watched the apartment completely collapse. I ran into the courtyard looking for him but couldn’t find him.

This week’s chapter is about growing your email list. Last week we created it and now Ariel has some great tips for adding names too it. She recommends that you reach out to your friends and family. This was the first thing that I did when I started my email list 6 years ago. My approach was to just add them with a simple unsubscribe link in the email which should always be present and tell them that they can opt out should they choose to. Make sure that you craft your subject line well. I use Sean Michael Imler AKA Rhythma Newsletter. If you don’t do this, chances are that they’ll delete the email as spam since it likely will not be coming from an address they already have in their address book. That being said, also request that they add the return address to their address book so that their ISP won’t flag you as spam.

Another recommendation is to create a folder especially for potential inclusions to your email list. I really like this idea because I’m always getting email from people but never really think of them as email list candidates. When you sell CDs or downloads from CDBaby, they capture the email address of the buyer, so that’s another source for your email list which is a great source because they’ve already expressed interest in your music. Never just add them without their consent though.

The item that I’ve recently put into action is offering a free download if a visitor at my web site signs up on my email list. It took me a little while to build this and tho I would’ve liked to do it with a uniquely encrypted password, that was more effort than I wanted to put into it so I opted to send the url to the user in the confirmation email. I can’t say that I’ve gotten any bites on this yet but my page views haven’t gone up THAT much since I’ve been working on this book’s plan.

And on that point, something you should absolutely do is to get Google Analytics going on your site so that you can track page visits. It’s really easy to hook up and it will tell you if you’re plans are fruitful. To be honest, I think that Ariel should put this in her book, maybe near the front of the book. This should go in a section about “measuring success” because you need a way to track that what you’ve done is actually producing success by comparing it to what you already have.

There are a couple of other recommendations that she’s suggested like starting a text message list and trading email lists with another band. I think the former might work if you have an audience that’s on the go and relies on their phones a lot. This won’t work if your audience is still in the 90’s. Someone told me about 2 years ago that texting was the new email list. I personally haven’t seen that but I am on a couple friend’s text message lists and I’m not crazy about getting them. I kinda want to use my texting for conversations, not announcements. A site that gives tools for collecting numbers for texting lists is BroadTexter. I should be hooking this up this week so that I’m not criticizing without actual experience.

The trading of lists I’ve always found a little weird because email is already so impacted with spam and other business promotion communications that I haven’t wanted to try getting email addresses that way. I like the opt-in approach but maybe the right opportunity hasn’t presented itself, and maybe I haven’t been looking at myself as a business. These are things I should cogitate on.

The gem here is actually scheduling time to do email list promotion and not waiting for people to find your list. This is something I’m working into my schedule. I’m not sure how email lists rank against Twitter, Facebook and MySpace work but I’d be curious to hear about other people’s experiences with these other networks and their successes with them by comparison. Could it be the email lists are too last decade?