My last.fm Top 3 Artists, 11/22/2009
The usual stuff, but I love it so much!
I admit, I'm always a little puzzled when on/off line acquaintances tell me that they are surprised to find out that I do write, sing and perform music. I mean, seriously. Do a search on Google for my name, and you'll see links of my work to music sites I've never heard of. I then look have a look over my Twitter stream, my FriendFeed stream, and even over on my Myspace accounts. Lots of pimping of other people's work. Hardly a peep about mine.
I've now gotten to a point where all that is going to have to change. As with many women, I'm scared of coming across as boastful, arrogant, or even spammy when I try to encourage eyes and ears to my music. In my 16+ years as an online addict, I've seen many an attempt to show off their wares be meet with ridicule, sarcasm and, in some cases, out and out anger. There was once a massive subculture that didn't take too kindly to being "sold to" on their respective BBSs, and the like. These days, there is really no room for that kind of thinking. Promoting oneself on the internet (or anywhere else for that matter) has always been a fierce business, but, especially in this economy, everyone's out for their own. To this end, you cannot be afraid to put yourself out there, make yourself heard, and reap the resulting rewards (or scorn). Sure, you run the risk of annoying your friends. But if they didn't support what you are doing, would they be your friends? Anyway, to that end, I've decided to work harder (and hopefully a little smarter) to sell my CDs online. I've decided that, rather than spam the hell out of some of these music sites, I'd do the right thing and participate in some of these music site ad campaigns. I'd start small, try to extend the time, and work it out from there. A lot of these sites will allow you to promote either a page or a song. I opted for song promotion and picked the first "single" off of my last album, "Incident at Motel 6". Granted, this album was released over a year and a half ago, and I've kind of sat on it without saying anything until now, when I'm in the middle of another project. But, what the hey? It's been good to me, and I want to share it. So, last night, I paid about $75 for an iLike ad that was to run for 150 clicks, and be seen in all countries accessing iLike in the electronic music genre. Small audience, right? Should take a few days to come to fruition, right? It was over in 2 hours. $75 bucks for a two hour campaign. Serves me right for thinking the iLike site had such a small following: Checking my stats the next morning, I saw that the campaign landed me five more fans and 4 more "Likes". I always appreciate more fans, but I'm not sure I can afford $75 every time I need a two hour spike in iLike traffic. Here's to hoping the word of mouth from the fans works... I also signed up for Last.fm's powercampaign. This time, it's USD $25.00 for 100 clicks, and you can target it toward people who like certain bands. I initially had Radiohead and the Chemical Brothers' fans in my sights as well as the usual Kate Bush/Bjork/Alanis combo. But then I decided that targeting those bands' followers was a bit dicey. So, I chose these, instead:
Reporting from New York - "Kandinsky," the big exhibition of 95 oil paintings made between 1902 and 1942 by the visionary pioneer of abstraction, Vasily Kandinsky, is a show that looks like it was made expressly for the spiral ramp of the Guggenheim Museum. That's because in a sense it was.Solomon R. Guggenheim, the museum's founder, was a major collector of Kandinsky's art, amassing no fewer than 150 canvases in his lifetime. (He died in 1949, five years after the artist.) The work was perhaps the most profound influence on the collector's thinking about nonobjective painting, which shed direct relationships to the visible world. Kandinsky instead explored the emotive possibilities of color and form, study central to avant-garde art for the next half a century.
Astronaut Robert Satcher uses a digital still camera to expose take a self-portrait during the STS-129 mission's first spacewalk.
Taken @ Spanish Springs Sushi, Sparks, NV
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

The Large Hadron Collider is by no means the last of the particle smashers. A group at CERN recently explored the various scenarios that might emerge from the atomic debris in Geneva – and how they would shape what colliders we build next.
A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.
- Jessamyn West
The original “Master and Servant” features the members of Depeche Mode in their musical prime, partway between their awkward early teen idols years and on the road to fulfilling their destiny as gloomy stadium gods. It’s also a song that shouldn’t be toned down into some easy listening version. After all, this is a tune explicitly about BDSM, a topic the group addresses both lyrically and sonically with full gusto. It’s no wonder that when Depeche Mode was creating this record, its chief inspiration was “Relax”, the innuendo-laced smash hit by Frankie Goes to Hollywood.