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Download episode 0070 of Clone The Homeless

THY WILL BE DONE. hy Will Be Done

Michael W. Dean and Debra Jean Dean, being of sound mind and body, have a will-signing party. Their friends George Earth, Becky Haycox and Lydia Lam come over and sign as witnesses. Everyone has a great time, nibbling good food, giving each other backrubs, laughing, and chatting. They play with some electrical devices, then talk about personal stories about The Mentors, El Duce, MDC, Franco from MDC, Danny Plotnick, Moterbooty magazine, and Bomb touring with the Flaming Lips.

They talk about Jethro Tull (greatest band ever, sort of), people who don’t take care of their kids, why all humor is to stave off fear of death, fun with guns, home security and spy cameras, and they wonder if Kurt Cobain was murdered or offed himself.

There are a lot of “time-management systems” out there. Some cost money, some are complicated, and some divide the world into two types of people: “Those who use our great system, and those losers who don’t.”

They all seem silly to me. So I invented my own: The Dean One-Page Plan.
I’ve been doing this for years.

I have a section about this in my upcoming book for O’Reilly publishing, YouTube: An Insider’s Guide to Climbing the Charts that I’m writing with YouTube rock star Alan “Fallofautumndistro” Lastufka.

(System text covered by Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. System is not patented or trademarked, it is in the public domain. Do what you like with it and pass it on however you’d like, just keep the name “The Dean One-Page Plan” in the attribution.)

The Dean One-Page Plan
It’s simple. It’s free. And you can start doing it right now.
I organize my life with one one-page document a week. Every Thursday (you can start on any day you like) I print out a page from a simple three-column, many row template I’ve created. The three columns are labeled “DO”, “BUY” and “CALL.”

• Things in the DO column are things I need to do in the coming week.
• Things in the BUY column are things I need to buy in the coming week.
• People in the CALL column are people I need to contact in the coming week.

“DO”, “BUY” and “CALL” seem to cover almost everything I need to think about in a given week, month or year.

I include “e-mail” and “mail something to them” in the “call” part. You can change it to “Contact” instead of “Call” if that makes more sense to you, but I like the one-syllable-each simplicity of the sound of “DO”, “BUY” and “CALL.”

I keep the template for this document on my desktop. I print it out once a week (twice a week in a week with many small tasks), and scribble things out as I complete them. And write things in with a pen in the printed copy as they come up. At the end of a week, I print out the list for the next week, removing things that have been done, and adding things in to do. It really works well in my life.

You can download my template HERE, or make your own.

I deal with long-term goals by getting a calendar every December. I usually get one with kitty cats on it, but you can get one with whatever you feel like looking at for a year. Make sure you get one with a big enough space to write a few things for each day that you need to (like an inch and a half square). If you get as busy as you’d probably like to be, you’ll need it. I also write notes at the margin between the calendar itself and the photo at the top, for things I need to do at some point this month.

Enjoy your more-organized life, and tell two friends.

(Kitty photo in calender by Faith Uridel)

Crocs.

Crocs were invented to make people who wear Birkenstocks look stylish.

=====

Birkenstocks:

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This book is ostensibly sex advice, and has a lot of that, and it’s good. But it also goes off on some interesting rants.

Here’s a rant I particularly like:

The Pope blames pornography for the disintegration of the family unit. I blame the Roman Catholic Church for the disintegration of the family unit.

Since the Church opposes all forms of artificial birth control, the Church is directly responsible for overpopulation, which is the root of all major maladies the world over, as well as being responsible for the coming total collapse of the infrastructure of the world (some time around 2040, I’ll venture). And since the Church is to blame for unchecked multiple births by people not ready to have kids, this leads to boys being raised without fathers, or without competent fathers, which is the main cause for the generation of remorseless super criminals who will try to make your life hell in the coming technological apocalypse. These doods come in all colors, but you can easily spot them by their backwards baseball caps, cheap showy bling and very loud voices. They demand to be heard, even though they have nothing to say. (Except, “LOOK AT ME, FUCKERS!”) They have low I.Q.s, fueled with steroids, crack and malt liquor. They drop out of school at 15, the only education they receive is from “Grand Theft Auto” and Maxim. (Picture Mike from Marketing with a Glock instead of an MBA.)

These fuckers will rape your women for a laugh and slit your throat for a cigarette on Saturday night, and be absolved by a kiddie-touching priest on Sunday morning.

Defend yourself. Don’t spend your next paycheck on bling. Don’t spend it on the latest fashion. Don’t spend it on spinners. Go to WalMart, buy a shotgun, and buy a ton (literally) of ammo, now, while you still can.

Michael W. Dean and Joseph Matheny chat on the phone and there’s no way these two talkers could interview one or the other. So they rap together, in a concentric hypertextual parenthetical way, TCP over IP, about how to make money by releasing things for free, the coming apocalypse, a secret underground lair, and much more.

Indie media mavericks Michael W. Dean and Joseph Matheny interview each other. (Part two of two. from alterati.com)

Get the podcast here.

I’ve actually been looking for something like this for a long time.

A good program for word count of all files in a folder (not just of a single file like most programs) is Total Assistant. It’s $24.95 for the basic version, with a 14-day working free trial, here: http://www.surefiresoftware.com/totalassistant/

107 MICHAEL W. DEAN SONGS

TORRENT HERE. MUST BE OF LEGAL AGE.

“Whoever dies with their art on the most hard drives, wins.”
–Michael W. Dean
Complete BitTorrent zip of all Michael W. Dean music, 1984-2008

110 MP3s (107 songs and three interviews), plus many images and text files of all bands. 856 megs.

Michael W. Dean is the director of “D.I.Y. OR DIE: How To Survive as an Independent Artist” and the author of “$30 Film School”, among other things.

Archive contains all BOMB records, both Baby Opaque records (with Ian MacKaye on backup vocals on one song - a cover of “Long Black Veil”), all Rolling Scabs, all Deal Machine, all Mother and the Fuckers, plus several Michael Dean solo songs, and loop WAVs for song production, looped from Bomb songs by Michael Dean.

From Wikipedia: “Bomb was a San Francisco-based rock band started in 1986 by singer/bassist Michael W. Dean, guitarist Jay Crawford, and drummer Tony Fag (Anthony Paul Short, A.K.A. Blind Tony Fag). Their first show was July 4, 1986, opening for Flipper. Bomb’s sound was deep, hard rock with melodic guitars, relentless tribal drumming (reviews referred to Fag as “The Human Drum Machine”), strong pop singing, and sometimes-cryptic lyrics. Common subjects of the songs were death, sex, drugs, girls, boys, love, loss, Satan, God, cross-dressing, girls, suicide, hope and girls.”

Bomb put out one EP and four LPs from 1986-1999, on Boner Records and on Warner/Reprise. The Warner Bros. record was produced by Bill Laswell. The band was a fans’ favorite, but crashed and burned from narcotic abuse and infighting.

“D.I.Y. OR DIE: How To Survive as an Independent Artist”

Free high-quality iPhone/iPod rips, from the director. Torrent and media served from a 24/7 fat pipe.

Torrent here.

(Or here on Pirate Bay).

DVD, and all extras of “D.I.Y. OR DIE: How To Survive as an Independent Artist”. Director Michael W. Dean is giving away the entire film, encoded in high quality (30 fps, 800 kbps mp4 file, 640×480 size, with 128-bit audio, and no DRM). It looks great on an iPod, iPhone, Zune, etc., and damn good full screen on a computer.

Seven extras from the DVD (including interviews with Ian MacKaye, Steve Albini, and Lydia Lunch) are included.

FILM DESCRIPTION:

This film is a celebration of the artistic underdog! FEATURING interviews and performances from: Lydia Lunch, Ian MacKaye (Fugazi), J Mascis (Dinosaur jr.), Jim Rose (Jim Rose Sideshow), J.G. Thirlwell (Foetus), Mike Watt (Minutemen), Richard Kern (Filmmaker), Ron Asheton (Stooges), Madigan Shive (Bonfire Madigan), Dave Brockie (Gwar) and more.

Dean says, “People keep asking me, ‘Why are you posting the whole film when it’s still selling well on DVD? Are you CRAZY?’” Dean’s reply (in part): “It’s my gift to the world. People write me every day and tell me the film got them off their ass. I made the film to spread a message, not make money. And somehow, it still made money. That’s how I do things - it’s how I pay my rent on planet earth.”

The film on IMDB

Film site: http://www.diyordie.org

GET THE MP3.

Hilsinger wrote: On 9/4/94, Roger Water’s 50th birthday , we played a 9-song madley of Pink Floyd songs. The show was at Komotion Int’l, SF (r.i.p.), and included a custom lightshow of Mr Dean blowing cigarette smoke and waving a flashlight around in it. cool. We opened for GIFTHORSE and SUBLIME.

featuring members of BOMB, GIFTHORSE, HELIOS CREED, and M-FAKTER,
the band was:
Doug Hilsinger (lead gtr, bg vox)
Michael Dean (lead vox, rythm gtr)
Bean (bass, bg vox)
Chris McKay (keys)
Paul Delle Pelle (drums)
Jeff Mann engineered the recording live to DAT.

Friday was DJ’s shoulder surgery. She had a bone spur and torn rotator cuff. Two hours arthroscopic surgery…the doctor shaved down the bone spur and sewed the torn cuff. Should relieve the pain she’s been having for some time now.

She’s in a sling and will be off work 3 or 4 weeks. I’m taking care of her, lovingly waiting on her hand and foot. It’s fun. We’re actually enjoying the extra time together, even though it could be under different circumstances.

She’s also got a “cold therapy unit”, it attaches to her shoulder with three tubes and pumps water at 47 degrees, cools her down and helps with pain. Kinda looks like something out of Terminator 2.

I call it her “series of tubes”.

She also had a Novocaine pump, that pumped through a tube into the site…that was only for the first two days, today I had to carefully pull that out. Was interesting. Like pulling a wire out of a hole in your wife’s body. Was a little bloody, went in about five inches.

All in all, it’s going well.

Michael W. Dean
Media Consultant

So, after decades of doling out free advice to anyone who asks, I’m hanging up a shingle and starting to charge. I have to do this, I don’t have time to answer all the “help me with my project!” e-mails AND have a life AND make a living.

My rates are reasonable, and negotiable. Sliding scale. Info here:

http://www.michaelwdean.com

New 90-second song the wife and I wrote and recorded called “Dick and the Debbies”. It’s like a theme show for the Archies, if the Archies did speedballs and had lots of unsafe sex with strangers in bathroom stalls.

It’s for the upcoming Podiobook, The Plump Buffet.
Download MP3 here.

Me: bass and vocal.

Wife: vocal.

London May: Drums.
Officer Hutsskew: Guitar.

Guitar and drums recorded over the Internet.

Cory Doctorow Blogged on BoingBoing about Debra Jean Dean’s reading of the Declaration of Independence.

Yay! Spread the love.

A very cool guy named Torodd Eriksen from a town called Kirkenes (in Norway, on the Russian border) asked me to come tour the region with DIY or DIE and do Q&A and filmmaking seminars. He wrote me:

And after Kirkenes and Norway - you do the same thing in Russia. Russian societies are so hungry for artistic and political impulses. Generally speaking Russia is a safe country, but still it is one of the most unsafe countries for journalists. For that reason alone the skills and tools of citizen-journalism and documentation is very important in Russia……..

Beautiful sunny downtown Kirkenes:

I replied:

Three years ago I would have jumped to do this, and probably would have tried to meet a pretty girl there, get married, and stay.

However, now I’m married here, really happy, and feel I don’t want to travel in an unstable region where journalists get kidnapped. I basically believe I would be considered a “journalist” by some people, because I write for this well-known media company O’Reilly, for the O’Reilly Digital Media site:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/3220

How about this. Why don’t you tour this region in my stead, show DIY or DIE, keep the money, and you can bring a laptop and I’ll do a Skype Webcam question-and-answer period at each show? You can hook me up to the video projector, you’ll take questions from the audience, translate to English, ask me, I’ll answer, and you can translate back.
Much respect,

MWD

Debra Jean Dean reads the US Constitution:
http://www.debrajeandean.com/constitution/index.htm

Free Creative Commons audio book.

United States Constitution (with all amendments), read by Debra Jean Dean, engineered by Michael W. Dean

Audio file covered by Creative Commons, feel free to share and link.

“The best recording with the best voice of any free, non-DRM audiobook of
the US Constitution, anywhere.”

This one’s mine. It’s shorter, and a little more fun. Essay, not multiple choice.  You’re not limited to five answers.

There’s a quote floating around the Interweb, mis-attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler. Wikipedia says the actual author(s) are unknown, but it’s an interesting quote.

Quote basically says that democracies fail after about 200 years (give or take) because the lazy bums in the society vote in people who will allow them to not work. (My father-in-law says at that point they become, at best, socialist, and at worst, dictatorships.)

Here’s the quiz. Do you think it’s true that:
A. Historically,  democracies fail after about 200 years
B. It’s because the lazy bums in the society vote in people who will allow them to not work
C. At that point they become, at best, socialist, and at worst, dictatorships
? ? ?
—–
Here’s the quote:

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.

 

The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

 

From bondage to spiritual faith;

From spiritual faith to great courage;

From courage to liberty;

From liberty to abundance;

From abundance to complacency;

From complacency to apathy;

From apathy to dependence;

From dependence back into bondage.

http://www.politicalcompass.org
This is really good for a “take a test on the Internet” test. I usually hate those, but these questions were really deep, and I really had to think about some of them a bit.

It’s very much along the lines of the thesis of my post on Notes from a curmudgeon / book idea.

Take the test and post your results and comments below.

My results for the Political Compass test were:

Economic Left/Right: -3.38
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.62

Debra Jean’s was:

Economic Left/Right: -2.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.56

(which basically means we’re both left economically and libertarian socially. But she believes a tiny bit more strongly than I do that “people should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps” and I believe a tiny bit more strongly than her that “many people are idiots and need to be herded strongly away from impinging on the rights of others”.

Test opens with descriptor:

Welcome to The Political Compass

There’s abundant evidence for the need of it. The old one-dimensional categories of ‘right’ and ‘left’, established for the seating arrangement of the French National Assembly of 1789, are overly simplistic for today’s complex political landscape. For example, who are the ‘conservatives’ in today’s Russia? Are they the unreconstructed Stalinists, or the reformers who have adopted the right-wing views of conservatives like Margaret Thatcher ?

On the standard left-right scale, how do you distinguish leftists like Stalin and Gandhi? It’s not sufficient to say that Stalin was simply more left than Gandhi. There are fundamental political differences between them that the old categories on their own can’t explain. Similarly, we generally describe social reactionaries as ‘right-wingers’, yet that leaves left-wing reactionaries like Robert Mugabe and Pol Pot off the hook. ….

This is the house I grew up in, from birth to age 17. My bedroom was the two front left windows on the second floor. (photo makes great computer wallpaper, by the way.)

It’s in Westfield, New York. Westfield is on Lake Erie, between Buffalo, NY and Erie PA. Westfield is the home of Welche’s grape juice and Mogan David wine (and “Mad Dog”….MD 20-20, elixir of bums, which is made by Mogan David, though they don’t like to admit it. I think it’s the scum that sinks to the bottom of the vats of the good stuff.)

The house was built in the mid-1800s. There is a name and date scratched (probably with a diamond) in one of the windows, date is from 1860s.

It almost looks like a rich person’s mansion, but it only cost 25 grand when my folks bought it (with a long mortgage) in 1960, and we were a family of six. Parents worked 80 hours a week each. Yard was a quarter-acre, and there’s a two-story garage you can’t see in this photo that’s as about half the size of the house.

Maple, oak and pine trees….small town (5000 people), no serious crime, very little other crime, everyone knows everyone. You see the mayor at your church. I’d catch crawdads and hike through the woods. I was a Boy Scout.

When I lived there, I couldn’t wait to get out, I left at 17 to college, flunked out in two years, and left the state before I turned 20 to go be homeless in DC and really live. And now I fantasize about moving back to my little town. Debra Jean has caught that fantasy from me too. We spend time looking online, reading about the town, checking real estate prices & building codes, reading the town’s cute little newspaper, and thinking grand thoughts.

After my mother died in 2001, this house was sold for 110,000 bucks. A similar house at that time would have cost a million bucks in the town where I live now, and about three million in Los Angeles or San Francisco.

DJ and I may retire to that town someday. I saw 16 acres and a decent farm house for sale there for 82,000 bucks.

A great travel book I just finished by Bill Bryson called The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America was the search for the “quintessential American small town.” He never found it. But he didn’t look in my home town. It’s still the 50s in Westfield.

Maybe we’ll just get a summer place there… and live somewhere south of the Mason Dixon line / Bible Belt in winter. Maybe keep our place here in SoCal for winter. (I mean, comeon, did anyone in London or Boston have a picnic in a field last weekend??? We did!) In August it’s 105 F in SoCal, in winter, it’s 65 or 70. In upstate NY, it’s 70 or 75 in August and about five degrees in winter.

It won’t be for many years, and we’ll probably rent a place in that town the first summer, just to make sure it’s what we want to do.

DJ had a week off. We don’t party. So we just made a lot of sweet sweet love, and also created six killer episodes (two of one podcast, four of the other.)

Then:

DECEMBER 28: Cleaned the house top to bottom, including vacuuming and dusting everything.

DECEMBER 29: Went through all our receipts for the year, organized for taxes. Created spreadsheets to give our accountant in a couple months.

DECEMBER 30: Backed up everything on both computers to disc AND to backup drive. Shredded old backup DVDs. Virus scanned and defragged computers.

DECEMBER 31: Did spring cleaning. Removed EIGHT GARBAGE BAGS OF old clothes, old dishes, and other assorted crap….some of it from DJ’s first marriage, when her now-adult offspring were little kids.

Drove garbage bags to dumpster drop at Catholic charity, three towns over. (Our town is too snooty to have a charity. Might attract “the wrong element”.) The car was so full we looked like the Beverley Hillbillies driving it.
Shredded two garbage bags of decade-old tax records, crap from when we were in college and even from when we were kids…and assorted newspaper clippings, old bills, etc. etc.

Some of this cleaning, sorting and shredding was kinda emotional, but felt good when we were done. Like the house (and us) had taken a HUGE dump. (And at one point, our big industrial shredder gave a warning message: “Overheating. Please discontinue use for 30 minutes”, so we did. Was fine after the wait.)

Now we’re all ready for the new year. Yay us!

We’re staying in. I hate going out on New Year’s Eve. It’s dangerous and full of drunken fools.

In AA, they call it “amateur night”.

GREAT review of my band BOMB on “Cosmic Hearse”. Excerpt:

…Dean was a modern day Rimbaud, drinking and fucking his way through the bars and bedrooms of the city he loves and hates. Dean’s success is that he can do this without coming off as a pretentious tortured artist. Bomb was real, Bomb was fucked. Bomb had problems and they weren’t afraid to let it be known, in fact, they wore them with pride like a shiner or a hickey….

Love it. I can only hope that art I’m making now, that people are digging today, will still be getting reviewed in eighteen years.

Get episode 0060 of “Clone The Homeless”

Most humans should be ground into cat food. (A very special holiday episode of Clone The Homeless!)

Sun, 23 Dec 2007

The Deans go out shopping for studio soundproofing materials, two days before Christmas, and decide that all humans who buy into the holidays and aren’t useful for manual slave labor or pleasuring the king should be ground into cat food. Then they talk about turning your cat into a tribble, in a way that the cat doesn’t mind.

They talk about how to prevent identity theft, Ogling the asses of MILFs and GILFs at the mall (in front of your wife, much to her amusement), fashion tips for suburban slobs, misanthropy at the mall, Hugh Hefner’s bitches, genesis of Colbert and The Daily Show, mall punks, “It’s whore-ible!”, pervertibles, how Christmas contributes to global warming, soundproofing your home studio, and protecting the nest.

Entire episode recorded on location at some mall with the Zoom H2 portable handy recorder.

35-second YouTube video of Debra Jean being a human “kitty licking the screen” screensaver.

Download a three-meg e-mailable version:
http://www.debrajeandean.com/temp/KittyLickinGood.wmv
—–
We did this all in about an hour, including practice, three takes, editing, fluffing & folding, and uploading to YouTube. All just good fun on a Saturday night. Why the hell would we go out? We have all the fun we need right here.

Song: “Ode To a Cat” - Song by Michael W. Dean. Guitar and Drums: George Earth. Vocals, bass guitar and organ: Michael W. Dean. Cat: Charlie Squitten Jr. Backup vocals & cat wrangling: Debra Jean Dean. SAX: Bob Bartosik.
NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED (they were just mildly annoyed and would rather have been sleeping.)

Photoshop fun I had tonight at the expense of one of our cats, Fuzzy. (Full name: Fuzzbucket McFluffernutter).

Another version:

Another version:

Original photo is here.

(No cats were harmed in the making of this. One was humiliated slightly when he looked at the photos.)

– Michael W. Dean

I helped my friend Alan FallOfAutumn do a charity video for the Echo Park Film Center. It’s here. Please post a comment.

Alan wrote:

On December 17th and 18th, many of the most popular channels on youtube are taking over prominent pages of youtube to raise money for charity while celebrating nerdiness in an event being called “The Nerdfighter Power Initiative.”

Participants include the two most popular daily channels on youtube, “What the Buck” and “The Philip DeFranco Show,” as well as Charlieissocoollike, DaveDays, Fallofautumndistro, Nalts and others. All told, the participants’ videos have been viewed more than 50 million times, making this project among the farthest-reach among youtube users in the site’s history.

Each video on youtube has a thumbnail–a picture taken from a still frame in the video. During the Nerdfighter Power Initiative, several hundred youtubers–including many of the popular channels on the site–will display identical thumbnails advertising “Nerdfighter Power.” The videos themselves will be largely devoted to the importance of charitable giving. As fans comment on these videos, they will take over the entire front pages of the hallowed “Most Discussed” page on youtube. As John Green of the youtube channel vlogbrothers said, “We hope to blanket these prominent pages of youtube partly because we are so incredibly nerdy, and partly to remind the youtube community of the importance of reaching out to others.”

The Nerdfighter Power Initiative is spearheaded by John and Hank Green, known as the vlogbrothers on youtube. John, an award-winning young-adult novelist, and Hank, an environmental writer, abandoned textual communication for all of 2007 in favor of daily videoblogs. Their project, which has been profiled by the Wall Street Journal, BBC Radio, and many other media outlets, spawned a fan community. Those fans call themselves nerdfighters (an obscure reference to an even more obscure arcade game) and during 2007 the nerdfighters have fought tirelessly on behalf of nerds and other disenfranchised communities. Whether this means raising tens of thousands of dollars for microfinance organizations or trying to convince Merriam-Webster to include “nerdfighters” in the dictionary, the nerdfighters have become a community that’s about more than just one videoblog. The events of December 17th and 18th will mark their coming out party. Between those making videos and those commenting to push all the videos onto youtube’s front pages, more than 5,000 nerdfighters are expected to participate in the Nerdfighter Power Initiative.

Viewers of John and Hank’s project have also been asked to submit videos with the same thumbnail and over 400 have already pledged to do so. Nerdfighter Rae Rein said, “I can’t wait to talk about my charity. My sister Sam has Down Syndrome and I’ve always been an activist for kids with special needs. I’ll probably have her make a cameo, and show some of her art.” Amanda Melhuish said, “My charity is definitely Reach Out and Read - I adore the idea of promoting literacy with kids. I’ll be using Harry Potter to convey it all, of course,” referring to a shared obsession among many Nerdfighters. When asked about his charity, Michael Buckley, of YouTube’s most popular entertainment series simply said, “Is Britney a charity?”

An introduction to a few of the other participants:

Michael Buckley is the star of youtube’s most-watched entertainment series, the What the Buck Show. He has more subscribers on youtube than CBS and Fox News. Combined.

Philip DeFranco’s daily hilarious news analysis is watched by more than a million people each week.

Alan Lastufka, one of youtube’s newest partners, is widely praised for his collaboration videos, the most popular of which is the “iPwn” commercial, starring MadTV cast member LisaNova.

Charlieissocoollike is one of the most popular youtubers in the United Kingdom–although only 17 years old, Charlie has already been featured on the BBC news and in many newspapers for his goofy antics and serious commitment to helping children in need.

(E-mail interview I did today with a guy named Pete Crigler.)

Hello Michael,

My name is Pete Crigler and I am working on an essay on the history of Virginia rock music. I have just a few questions I’d like to ask you about Baby Opaque:

What was it like when you first got started and what, if anything, did it do for the particular scene you were a part of?

We started in Todd’s bedroom. We were a great band yet completely ignored. Our first show was at a frat, and they hated us. It didn’t get much better after that.

The inattention received by my groundbreaking band is part of the reason I packed up and moved to California. Things got better for me there. People cared about music that wasn’t 12-bar blues or covers of the top ten. I never wanted to be a live jukebox. I’d rather work at McDonalds.

What was success like and what was it like to break out of the regional area?

The only “success” we had was making great music. We played to an average of 20 people at all 20 or so gigs we did, total. And most of the people at those shows were the friends and girlfriends of the band.

We played a few out-of-town gigs: DC, Richmond and Norfolk, but always playing with hardcore bands. The audiences were bigger, but still scratching their heads. Hardcore punkers, for all their posturing of being alternative, can often be as closed minded as frat boys who want to boogie and drink to roadhouse blues. They’re actually often the same people, with different haircuts.

Was there a lot of unity or rivalry amongst other bands when you started, and is that still around?

No rivalry at all. We were great friends with the Landlords, The Happy Flowers, 98 Colors, Rude Buddha, LCD, and all the other Ch’Ville bands that didn’t pander to the frat crowd. And I played guitar in the hardcore band, The Beef People, after their guitarist got kicked out of their all-boys boarding school for having a girl in his room.

All these bands were very different in style, but united in a “we’re all outcasts” kinda way. We shared equipment, booking contacts, rehearsal space, and more.

Baby Opaque put out one LP and one EP, and pressed a thousand of each. We probably sold less than half that. John Beers still has a big box of the LPs in his basement. You can buy both records online, when you can find them, for either 50 cents or 50 dollars. I’ve seen them go for both on different sites.

This year, when I put all the Baby Opaque stuff online for free at www.babyopaque.com , we got three times as many downloads in the first week as Baby Opaque has sold records in 21 years. And the music continues to get a lot of downloads.

When did you first become interested in music

I loved music since before I could talk. I wanted to be a rock star starting at age five, from seeing The Partridge Family on TV.

Was there much of a scene to support you when you got started?

The alternative scene in Ch’Ville was tiny, and we were all friends.

There was a zine called “Live Squid”. It was pretty nifty. I don’t remember a lot more. I was drunk. You might want to ask John Beers. He didn’t drink, and was a lot more of a fan than me. I had trouble paying attention to things that didn’t involve furthering my personal plans for world domination. Still do.

How did Bomb get started and were you guys comfortable with all the notoriety you were getting.

I was fed up with the lack of support for my music in Baby Opaque, and was also drinking a lot. I tried to kill myself and ended up in Blue Ridge Mental Hospital.

Right after I got out, I got a postcard from Jello Biafra asking me for a copy Baby Opaque’s EP. I’d never written him before, he wrote ME, and I was blown away. I moved to San Francisco as soon as I could sell all my possessions. (I found out later that as a compulsive-obsessive completist record collector, Jello wrote that same postcard to most of the bands that were ever reviewed in Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll magazine.)

Also, I went to see Flipper in DC. We snuck backstage and asked them a lot of glowing questions. One of them finally said “You should get the hell out of here. But your girlfriend can stay.” I was impressed. I wanted to live in California and act like that.

I took a Greyhound bus to Frisko. I’d never been west of the Mississippi river. I took LSD three days in a row on the bus to “prepare” myself. Big mistake. I was a mess by the time I arrived.

I crashed on my one friend’s couch in Berkeley, commuted into the city daily on the subway to work as a bike messenger. I met Jay from Bomb in a bar when I was trying to sell him a Baby Opaque record to get beer money. We started talking, and jammed shortly after. It was magic.

We had something special, and it caught on quickly. Again, we weren’t hardcore but ended up playing a lot of hardcore shows, all over America and Europe, but we were so fucking good and the music was so aggressive that even though it wasn’t punk, punkers got it.

Bomb’s music is up at http://www.hitsofacid.com

What was your experience like with a major label with Bomb, and did it leave you bitter or disappointed?

Lol…the phrasing of the question makes me think you’ve heard me talk about this before. Or maybe you just know a lot of people who’ve been on major labels.

Warner Brothers signed about ten “alternative” bands around the same time they signed us (1990). They singed L7, Babes in Toyland, Flaming Lips, and some others that I, and history, can’t remember. It was typical corporate thinking that has been repeated since Thomas Edison first scratched a wax cylinder in 1877: “We don’t understand it, but the kids like to shimmy to it, so let’s throw it all against the wall and see what sticks.”

Apparently only the Flaming Lips stuck, because they’re the only band of those ten that still has a deal with Bugs Bunny.

Warner Brothers gave us a shitty deal. Our lawyer said it “looked like a 1965 Motown contract”.

We signed it anyway. When we started in 1986, there was no way in the world a band like us could have gotten signed. We didn’t change (other than getting better, putting out three albums - one ourselves, one on Boner Records, and one on Rough Trade – and touring incessantly), the industry changed. Nirvana and Jane’s Addiction went mega-platinum.

A manager from LA named Charley Brown contacted us. He had gotten Jane’s signed, so he had moxie in the biz. We figured “why not?” and signed with him, then with Warner Brothers.

WB put the record out, then promptly ignored us. They didn’t give us ANY tour support, didn’t help book a tour, wouldn’t give us a paltry five grand to make a video (Even when Kevin Kerslake, who’s done some of the biggest selling videos ever, lowered his price to that, because he was a fan). Warner Brothers didn’t even send out promo materials on time when WE booked our own damn tour. The promo packs often showed up the day we got there to play, far too late for the club to do anything with them. We still starved, and surprise surprise, the record tanked. WB dropped us, but didn’t bother to tell us we were dropped. We found out from our lawyer, who read it in a trade paper.

A lot of indie musicians rant endlessly about the problems of major labels without having any experience with them. I have experience. When I rant, you should believe what I say, because I’ve seen all sides of that rusty coin.

What are you up to now, is it the same as it was before?

I’ve kinda reinvented myself as a filmmaker, writer and podcaster. I still love to reach the world, but I like to get paid for it. But I still do a lot of stuff free, like this interview, because I enjoy it, and I’m honored that people ask my thoughts on things.

When I was in Bomb, I was really cocky, and it turned me into my own worst enemy. I can’t put all the blame on circumstance that we didn’t become as well known as the music deserved. I was a selfish shit, and people don’t like to work with those.

I’m still full of myself, but now I realize there’s other people in the world.

That said, a lot of what I do now is ignore the world. I’d say I’m about halfway to my lifetime goal of being famous while being left alone. I dig it.

I now treat people with respect, unless they fuck with me, then I show teeth, and use said teeth if needed. But  for the most part I avoid  daily contact with the world, and I’m very happy with that.

I’m married, very happily, and have made a “nest” for myself and my wife. We live in the sticks, an hour outside Los Angeles. Our house is comfy, quiet, secluded, and filled with cats, joy, and all the toys I need to get my thoughts out into the world, on a daily basis, forever.

I still play music, but only in my home. Usually as background or mood music for my films and other people’s films. I don’t tour, but when I do sit down to make some music, it’s often heard by more people than all my lifelong album sales combined.

I work at home, and the wife still has a day job. I have a five-year plan to get her to be able to retire and work at home, so we can just make love constantly, make art, laugh and pet the cats full time. She and I do voiceover, in our home studio. We love it, and have gotten some paid work doing that. She’s great at it. Our voiceover sites are here: http://www.michaeldeanvoice.com and http://www.debrajeandean.com

Six years ago I quit drinking, and drugging. That shit was getting in my way. It worked for a few decades, but I couldn’t sustain it, and it was getting worse.

My dear friend Brian Childers died of liver failure last month. I was in The Beef People and Bomb with him. We had similar drinking habits for a long time. I miss that guy, really hard.

Do you still keep in touch with your bandmates from Baby Opaque and Bomb and what are they up to?

I don’t talk to the drummer from Bomb. Last time we talked, a few years ago, he was a shit to me for no reason. I don’t need to take calls from drunks in the middle of the night who insult me just because they’re unhappy with the life they’ve created for themselves.

Jay and Doug from Bomb are menschs. I love those guys. They’re in Frisko, I’m in LA, but we chat on the phone and by e-mail often.

I had a lot of issues back in the day with Bomb’s manager, Charley Brown, but we’ve resolved them and chat on the phone often. I like him a lot. I even named one of my cats “Charley” after him.

I recently got in touch with Todd from Baby Opaque. Haven’t spoken in a while. He did come see “D.I.Y. OR DIE: How To Survive as an Independent Artist” http://www.diyordie.org when I showed it in a bar in Minneapolis when I toured with the film. Todd seemed happy and healthy. We’ve exchanged a few e-mails lately, but he’s a busy family guy.

Michael Bérubé from Baby Opaque has done quite well for himself, he’s a tenured English professor at Penn State. I love that guy and dig his mind. About once a month, we exchange about ten long, funny, smart e-mails each back and forth in the space of a day. He’s a genius.

I still talk to John Beers from the Landlords and Happy Flowers, He always sends me a Christmas card too. Sweet.

I’m really good friends with Charlie Kramer from the Landlords and Happy Flowers. We e-mail constantly and talk on the phone when we can. He’s now a government economist.

Rock on Pete. Thanks for asking, and I’m honored to answer.

Michael W. Dean

http://www.stinkfight.com

Today, as part of our honeymoon, Debra Jean and I drove on a whim to the Grand Canyon. It took almost four hours each way from where we’re staying near Phoenix, and was TOTALLY worth it.

The Canyon is awesome, and I’ve never seen it before. DJ has been there, but not as an adult.

We loved every minute of the day.

There’s a few pix here on StinkFight, but the rest of them are at

http://www.debrajeandean.com/GrandCanyonWeb/grand.htm

I know it sounds like a cop-out, but I don’t really have any words to describe the awesomeness of the day. I’m speechless. And the pix speak for themselves.

Me representin’ for my homies, The Echo Park Film Center.

Me representin’ for my homies, The O’Reilly Digital Media site

So, tomorrow is Black Friday, the most insanely busy shopping day of the year. It’s also the day, historically, that the festivity-industrial complex rolls out the cheezy xmas decorations and music to get you in the mood to celebrate the birth of Our Savior by selling you lead-tainted plastic crap and amazingly realistic first-person shooter video games.

My sanctified offering is this song “GOD REST YE MERRY BONZO”. It’s sort of perverted xmas music…. me doing the classic xmas tune “God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman” over a loop of a drum beat by John “Bonzo” Bonham, from Led Zeppelin.

I sang, played bass, sleigh bells and piano. My friend George Earth played guitar (he recorded it for me over the Internet.)

Dig it, share it, use it, love it. And pass it on.

It’s that time again…….

So, kitties……More from our new series, “Dirty, filthy blues quote of the week.”

Each week around Sunday night (the longest period before more church, lol…) I’ll post a new quote from my friend Debra DeSalvo’s book, The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu.

I love this book.

The quotes won’t always be dirty and filthy (though sometimes they will), but they’ll always be great. And they’ll always be dirty and filthy in spirit, because it is, after all, the blues

Here’s this week’s quote:

—————-

blues

(part three) 

Although very early blues did not have the twelve-bar, three-line AAB structure of the classic blues of the 1920s, the three-line structure of the blues verse that eventually emerged was a function of call-and-response singing. The lead singer would repeat a line twice while waiting for another singer to improvise a response. African spiritual chants often repeat an important line. Yorubans, for instance, rely on the poetic chants of a divination system called Ifá for insights into their personal problems[i]:

            The life of Ifá surpasses water’s coolness

            The life of Ifá surpasses water’s coolness

            The speaker-of-all languages married a woman

            Who herself bathed only in water that is cold

            The life of Ifá surpasses water in its coolness

Work songs were primarily sung primarily a cappella, but after Emancipation, the guitar and harmonica made it possible for traveling country blues singers to earn money playing for juke joint dances, passing their songs along in the process. Over time, the blues developed into music played and listened to for pleasure, not for work. It became music that expressed the singer’s individual struggles and passions, both carnal and spiritual. It is interesting that the idea of the instrumental solo, relatively unimportant in West African music, became very important in the blues, which emerged in a country that idolized the individual and had steamrolled over the concept of tribe altogether.

Unlike Africa’s wandering griots, who keep tribal histories intact over centuries, emerging blues singers, according to musicographer Samuel Charters, used “little history and even less political comment.” Most observers believed, Charters wrote in The Roots of the Blues, that “The blues function in American black society as a popular love song~~in the early period almost obsessively concerned with infidelity.”[ii] It is possible, however, that all those songs about wreaking revenge on a “no-good woman” who kept a man “in chains” were metaphorical expressions of the determination of African Americans to free themselves from oppression.  (See also signifying.)

While Charters was in Africa, he observed that although their songs served different purposes: “The voices themselves [of blues singers and griots] had a great deal of similarity in tone and texture. If a griot like Jali Nyama Suso had sung in English the sound of his voice would have been difficult to distinguish from an Afro-American singer. There was the same kind of tone production, the same forcing of higher notes. In the gruffness of the lower range and the strong expressiveness of the middle voice I could hear stylistic similarities to singing I had heard in many parts of the South.”[iii]

Blues guitarists transferred African vocal devices to the guitar, and bent the strings to mimic singing but to mimic singing by reach intervals beyond the limitations of the frets. They flatted the thirds, fifths, and sevenths into quartertones~~blue notes.

Alan Lomax offered an interesting take on this in The Land Where the Blues Began. He theorized that “interval size is correlated cross-culturally to those factors that restrict the social independence of the individual.”[iv] He noted that where strict castes have developed, such as in India, musicians use quartertones and other intervals smaller than a second. In contrast, hunters and gatherers from more easy-going societies, such as Native American and African Pygmy, sing songs filled with great leaps, such as octaves and fifths. In sub-Saharan Africa, “where only a modest level of social layering stiffened social intercourse,” the most common intervals were thirds and fifths. These were sometimes flatted but not nearly so much as they are in the blues.

 Lomax attributed this favoring of narrowed intervals among blues musicians to “the painful encounter of the black community with the caste-and-class system of the post-Reconstruction period.”[v] Freed by the Civil War, yet hemmed in by racism, African Americans wound up on very bottom of the social heap as day laborers and sharecroppers. “Homelessness and orphaning were the order of the day for Delta working-class blacks, creating the wellspring of melancholy whose theme song was the blues,” Lomax wrote.[vi]

This very expression of a tough situation, however, became a way out of poverty for some African Americans. The country blues, sung by one singer accompanying him- or herself on guitar or banjo, evolved into the classic blues of the 1920s and 1930s, sung by such stars as Bessie Smith in front of a big band or piano-led combo. The blues gave options to women like Memphis Minnie and Bessie Smith, who without it might have spent their lives scrubbing white peoples’ floors and washing their clothes. [M: I changed Ma Rainey to Memphis Minnie cause Ma Rainey worked a lot as a housekeeper.] The blues drew together the descendants of once-disparate tribal people who had suffered sickening humiliations in a foreign land.

[i]Flash of the Spirit: African &and Afro-American Art &and Philosophy, by Robert Farris Thompson, p. 37 (New York: Random House, 1983).

[ii] The Roots of the Blues: An African Search, by Samuel Charters, p. 123 (New Hampshire: Da Capo Press, 1981).

[iii]Ibid, p. 119.

[iv] Lomax, p. 354.

[v]Ibid.

[vi]Ibid.

—————-

(Excerpted from The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu by Debra DeSalvo. Published 2006 by Billboard Books, an imprint of Watson-Guptill Publications, a division of VNU Business Media. Reprinted with permission. ISBN: 0823083896)

Acknowledge-Me

Saturday Dec 1st. 8PM-2AM. Scoot Inn (1308 E. 4th Street) www.acknowledge-me.com
Join Raji World and iLoveMikeLitt for a celebration of all things indie in the ATX. (Austin, Texas).

Festivities include:

• a d.i.y. Crafts Market
• Zine Fair
• free Vegan Fare
• Documentary Screenings: D.I.Y. or Die: How To Survive as an Independent Artist, and Handcraft Nation
• Local Music: the Mysterious H, Canopy, Screamin Baby Heads, Billy Harvey, Brazos, Toko-Ri Get High, Omega Monster Patrol

$5 cover benefits Habitat on Wheels, a local non-profit project that helps homeless people in Austin get on payment plans for RVs.

Every month we pull out our couches and vacuum under them.

These photos show what awaited us yesterday…..A cornucopia of cat toys, both store bought and improvised.

Wife: “I’ve been LOOKING for that bobbin!”

Interview for Verbicide Magazine I did with Alan FallOfAutumn (guy who made the YouTube emo commercial).

My interview was printed in small excerpt in the magazine, along with bits from three other indie filmmakers. But the link above is my full interview.

Covers a lot of where I’m at in my life right now. Sort of a mission statement. It begins:

I always wanted to reach the world from my bedroom. When I was a kid growing up in a small, boring town in Upstate New York, I sent lots of letters to magazines, had pen pals, and worked on science projects that I thought would plug me into an endless historic brotherhood of thinkers. And I practically lived at the local library, because I loved information.

Whenever you’re dealing with the “biz” or a “mogul”, and they say something like “I really like your demo, I think we could do business”….Ask them, “Which song do you like best, and what do you like about it?”

(Or if you’re a writer, ask them which character they like, or if you’re a filmmaker, which scene they like.)

The reason is this: Businesspeople often sign bands they don’t understand. This isn’t always a bad thing…Sometimes the person who gives you a good deal but looks at your art simply as “units shipped” can do a better job marketing it then then well-intended person who loves art but doesn’t understand business. But it’s good to be able to tell if the person you’re dealing with really “gets” you. It will help you make better decisions.

When Bomb was getting courted by the majors, a guy from Atlantic records told us he really liked our music. When we asked, “Which song do you like?”, He said “You know, the one about….um…..girls.”

MWD

The only shows I watch are “Cops” and “The Colbert Show”. “Cops” doesn’t have writers, so it’s still airing. But I needed my daily dose of the man who will lead our Nation to victory, so I bought his book I Am America, and So Can You!

It’s pretty damn funny.

I especially liked the line “Upper-middle class is a meaningless term created by the Upperclass to keep the Middle class from joining with the Lower class when the revolution comes.”

And for you Chinaphiles in StinkFight land, the disclaimer on the back of the book reads:

WANING! Several reportages of illegal produced issues of this book from Glorious Peoples Republic of China stealing into bookstores. Do not! Buy only likely copies only authorized STEPHEN COLBER’S I AM AMERICA AND SO ARE YOU books like this one itself!
-Yours, U.S.A. Publisher

…..And I’m damn happy. It stands to get hundreds of thousands of downloads.

Here are two screenshots:

It’s in the top-four video podcast picks on Zune Marketplace, alongside “Ask A Ninja”, Diggnation, and Peter Tong’s (from the BBC) cast.

(Download the free Zune software here. No Zune needed.)

Yay!

DIRECTOR’S GIVEAWAY OF AN ENTIRE COMMERCIAL FILM,
ENCODED IN HIGH QUALITY, WITH NO DRM

“D.I.Y. OR DIE: How to Survive as an Independent Artist”
Free on Zune Marketplace and Zune.net

Microsoft’s Zune Marketplace launches Tuesday, November 13, 2007, and Zune.net launches the week after. Both are giving a high-placement feature to the documentary film “D.I.Y. OR DIE: How to Survive as an Independent Artist“. Film info: http://www.diyordie.org

(Download the free Zune software on Tuesday. No Zune needed.)

Director Michael W. Dean is giving away the entire film as eight episodic chapters over eight weeks’ time, one per week as free video downloads, in the “podcasts” section of Zune Marketplace and Zune.net.

These free downloads