I've been thinking for a while about trying to make some money off all the pictures I've taken over the last few years. I'm not fooling myself; I know I'm not a great photographer, but I think I've got a few images that would look cool on certain products.
Out of the blue two weeks ago Zazzle sent me an email letting me know that I'd sold three shirts. I have no idea who bought them, but it put the idea back into my head that I should sell other stuff.
I'd uploaded some images a while ago but let them linger without doing anything. So today I started matching images to products. The process is very easy, but finding the right picture to go with the right product takes a bit of time.
The first one I made was a note card featuring a picture I'd taken on Cape Cod two years ago:
The next one I did was a coaster featuring a shot of my electric blue guitar and amplifier. Check it out.
I've got no shortage of images to select from, but I have to be careful not to upload pictures with potential copyright issues. I tried to post one of an MBTA subway station, but it got bounced.
For now I'm just testing things out, but in the near future I'll add more images to more products, and see what works and what doesn't.
Now, for your viewing pleasure, the Butthole Surfers.
Ray Davies based the transvestite in The Kinks' song "Lola" on a black cross-dresser whom his band's manager danced with one night in a drunken stupor. It's quite possible that Davies used the name Lola in tribute to the woman who also inspired Barry Manilow in his song, "Copacabana."
If you're under 40, there's a good chance you've never heard of her. I can't say I know a lot about her, but I remember her popping up on TV here and there during my childhood. And I could never forget her name, with its poetic sexiness.
She started dancing professionally after dropping out of high school, and was discovered by the immortal Sammy Davis Jr. Sammy cast Falana (who just turned 70 last month) in Broadway musicals and films, and brought her along on tour as a backup singer and dancer through the '60s.
She also recorded albums, posed for Playboy and in the late '70s became the toast of Las Vegas doing shows 20 weeks a year.
She appeared on talk shows and variety shows, including "The New Bill Cosby Show," during the '70s, which is when I caught on to her. Her name also popped up on "Sanford & Son" on a regular basis, as Fred pined for her.
You can see why, in this clip from Sha Na Na's variety show:
Her name pops into my head at random times, and in an unfinished novel I started five years ago, one of the characters used her name as an epithet of sorts, crying out "Lola Falana!" when something went wrong.
I also used "Rula Lenska!" as an epithet in the book, based solely on this commercial from my youth:
Anyway, back to Ms. Falana, who unfortunately suffers from multiple sclerosis. A particularly bad relapse in the late '80s kept her out of the public eye for quite some time, according to Wikipedia. She spent a lot of that time praying, evidently, and since that time has turned away from her previous life and spends time working with her ministry.
In this video from 2009, she talks about her career and her spirituality:
One more thing: she was also incredibly popular in Italy during her heyday. She starred in Italian movies, learned the language, and was celebrated on TV shows. Here's a great '70s clip:
Regular readers know I love music, and that the Flaming Lips are my favorite band. "But how did that come about?" you ask. Well, I'm gonna tell you.
I'm a long-time subscriber to SPIN magazine, so long in fact that they actually pay me to read the thing, and every year on my birthday they throw me a giant party complete with food, beer, live music and a 12-month supply of Geritol.
I've stuck with the magazine through their new wave years, punk rock years, hip-hop years, indie rock years, the years where they wrote A LOT about AIDS, the years when they almost went out of business, the years when they've changed their look and format, desperately hoping to make it all work.
During the summer of 1988, after I'd returned from my four-month road trip from Connecticut to New Mexico and back, I read an issue of SPIN in which they mentioned a band called the Flaming Lips.
I don't recall specifics about the short article, but the writer must have mentioned psychedelia, punk rock, weirdness and possibly even Oklahoma. Something about the piece, and the band's name, struck a chord in my brain and I decided to buy one of their albums (read: cassette tapes).
In 1987, the band had released Oh My Gawd!!!...The Flaming Lips. By the time I learned about the band, I'd moved to Dover, NH, with my buddy and fellow road-tripper Pete, and his friend Joe. I went to a record store in Portsmouth and bought the tape. The band's only other album at that time was their first, Hear It Is, which I subsequently bought, along with almost everything they've produced.
Oh My Gawd!!! was unlike anything I'd ever heard, because I was never into the Beatles or '60s psychedelic rock. The only psychedelic band I liked was the Butthole Surfers. My friend Ric, who I met when we worked at Webnoize together back in the Mesozoic Era, was baffled that I wasn't a Beatles fan, but that I seemed to have pretty good taste in music. Blame it on my older brother and sister, I said.
Until I started researching and writing this post, I didn't know that the spoken-word sample that starts the first track on Oh My Gawd!!! ("Take this brother, may it serve you well.") was from the Beatles' "Revolution 9." The final track, "Love Yer Brain," ends with a looped sample of "turn off your mind, relax" from the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows." To my credit, I did recognize that sample.
The first track on Oh My Gawd!!! is "Everthing's Explodin'," which comes out roaring and never relents:
I was hooked. I remember listening to the song in my apartment, perhaps during a small party, and this girl who was dating one of the cool guys in town, a guy was in a band I liked called The Dorks, asked me, "How do you dance to this band?" She was used to slamming, I guess, and probably New Wave dancing.
I promptly demonstrated by doing some really awkward, goofy, herky-jerky moves around the living room. She was puzzled, but found it humorous.
The second song, "One Million Billionth of a Millisecond on a Sunday Morning," is far more epic. Building slowly with mellow guitars, light drumming and gently sung lyrics, the song clocks in at nine and a half minutes. This one is great with headphones. If you smoke pot, this is the time where you spark up.
The rest of the songs follow the pattern of odd samples, spoken word parts, raging psychedelia, ripsnortin' punk rock. And there are parts where the music is played backwards, yet another obvious tip of the hat to the Beatles.
Another of my favorite tracks is "Can't Stop the Spring":
As much as I loved the music, I was also into the lyrics, written and sung by Wayne Coyne, the band's co-founder and lead weirdo. On "Ode to C.C. Pt. 2," Coyne, over a simple acoustic guitar riff, sings:
This man came up to me, just the other day / asked me if I'd been born again
I told him I didn't think I had
That I had been rejected
But I think
Hell's got all the good bands, anyway
The album's closer, "Love Yer Brain," is another epic. It starts out with Wayne singing in his lovably scratchy voice over simple piano chords. About a minute and a half in, the drums kick in but the pace is still slow.
The final two and half minutes of the song are comprised of the sounds of the band smashing things and throwing things around, yelling a bit, and then the aforementioned Beatles sample comes in and things quiet down, with just a few random voices and things being slapped around.
Over the past 24 years, I've bought just about everything the band has put out. Most of it I love, especially the more hard-rockin' psychedelic punk rock from the first 10 years of their career.
There have been points in recent years where I've questioned what the Lips are doing initially, such as The Soft Bulletin, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and At War with the Mystics, but for the most part I came around on those albums after several listenings.
As for the more recent Embryonic, I haven't gotten into it that much. And I didn't bother to buy the band's collaboration with Stardeath and White Dwarfs with Henry Rollins doing Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.
As for their most recent album, The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends, on which the band and guests including Erykah Badu, Kesha, Lightning Bolt and Prefuse 73 do both covers and originals, well I guess I should at least give it a listen.
I've seen the band live five times. The first time was in 1992 at a small club called TT the Bear's Place in Cambridge, Mass. The band filled the place with their smoke machine while they sawed away at songs from their most recent album at the time, Hit to Death In the Future Head, as well as the above-mentioned albums, and Telepathic Surgery.
I saw them a few years later at an outdoor venue in Gardner, Mass., during the day. The played on a bill with the Stone Temple Pilots (boo!) and the Butthole Surfers (yay!). Great show.
In more recent years, the Lips have toured regularly with quite a bombastic, colorful and wildly entertaining show. Here's a sample:
I've seen them do this schtick three times. And while I love it and always have a great time at these shows, I'm ready for them to move on and show me something different.
The band has sometimes confounded me (Zaireeka, which consists of four CD's designed to be played at the same time), and other times disappointed me (scattered tracks across their discography), but they've always given me hope that whatever they do will be adventurous, fun, challenging and, ultimately, uplifting.
I'm not sure what the Lips have in store for the future, but I'm sure it will make me say, "Oh my gawd!!!"
Like all writers, I struggle. And of course I wage those battles alone. I can't blame my boss or coworkers if I don't like an idea. And if I forget what a character did or said 20 pages earlier, I can't digitize an intern and send him into my laptop to figure it out.
And when reading works that go back years, even decades, I have no one but myself to blame for shoddy workmanship and blatant stylistic rip-offs. I was reminded of this when I recently stumbled across a copy of Frog Spit, a 'zine I published back in the '80s.
I wrote two stream-of-consciousness stories that were such obvious efforts to emulate Hunter S. Thompson (R.I.P.) that I found it embarrassing. And I was the only one in the room.
I do a lot of writing these days, between this blog and my other one (The Backside of America), and various book projects that I'll describe below. While none of my writing is perfect, I think that I've honed my craft in recent years simply by doing more work.
I also managed to refine my writing during my time at the late, great Webnoize (R.I.P.), and while writing my first book, which I published nearly two years ago.
I have a hard time editing on a computer, so I printed out the stories and went through them with a red pen, deleting, copy editing, writing new chunks of plot or character development.
Because the stories were related, and featured recurring characters, I needed to keep straight in my head who had done what, in order to make sure there was continuity. I had a hard time with this, and realized near the end of the process that I should have used two or three pairs of eyes to review and edit the book.
But I was reluctant to ask friends or family, because I wasn't confident in the stories and my abilities, and thought that if these reviewers questioned things too much I'd crumble and never finish the book. So I kept all the responsibility to myself, which wasn't smart.
I was happy with the published version of the book, but know that it could have been better if I'd been willing to put myself out there and let people judge it and critique it.
I learned my lesson, and since trying over the past few years to enter the children's book market, I've allowed friends and family to see drafts of stories. I haven't published a book yet, but I'm working with an illustrator on my latest, and feel confident that the book will hit the market eventually.
I'm excited about children's books. If my illustrator and I can get the first one published, I have a series planned. The books are very basic, but would fill a niche that I believe is under-served: easy, fun-to-read stories about subways.
While children's books and short story collections are obviously not easy to write, I find them much easier to do than novels.
I've begun three or four novels, but haven't finished one. The first was about a group of college friends going away for a weekend together, and that's about all I remember. Another effort surrounded a college band, based very heavily on my own such group.
My latest effort, which I began during National Novel Writing Month nearly five years ago, was about UFO's, road trips, government conspiracies, anti-corporate action and, of course, love.
I had a grand vision to write the novel and sell it packaged with a concept album that had actually spurred the novel. I haven't gotten very far on either account, and have come to realize in recent years that I may just not be a novelist.
I'm not giving up, so much as realizing that my brain just doesn't operate the way it needs to in order to keep track of all that goes into a novel: great character development, plot twists, strong descriptive language, recurring themes that move the story forward, and so much more.
I write best with a strong framework. I thought I'd established such a thing with my last attempt at writing a novel. Unlike with previous attempts, I'd made an outline based on the concept album.
But once I started writing, I just took the story off in all sorts of unexpected directions, which is OK, but I had a hard time reeling it all back in and pounding it into shape.
For now, I don't need to trouble myself with thoughts about writing the Great American Novel.
I continue to plug away on my road trip memoir, which I've mentioned before (see May 25, 2012, "Inspiration"). The linear narrative of the book is done, and I've got a plan for filling in details by getting in touch with the guys with whom I traveled.
There are other elements I'm adding, however, that need work. I write a lot about my childhood, and my life since the trip, especially the more recent years since my kids were born.
But all that information exists, so I know I can coax it out of my brain and onto the page. And I realize that I'll need people to read the book ahead of time and guide me to making it the best possible book it can be.
I just hope that in 10 years I don't look back on my books and think that they're total crap.
