#REVIEW: Public Enemy: Inside the Terrordome, by Tim Grierson

On December 7, 2015December 7, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Music, ReviewsLeave a comment

51ZdWPgD4KL._SX326_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg You may have noticed that while I talk about music and link to videos a fair amount around here (okay, more of the latter than the former, but still) I rarely do anything like an album review. The reason is pretty simple: while I enjoy reading music reviews, I almost never have any idea what the hell any given music reviewer is talking about at any given time and I absolutely cannot replicate the format myself. I can tell you why I liked or did not like a book. I can definitely tell you why I liked or did not like a movie. But the vocabulary of music reviews frequently eludes me completely; I’m inarticulate when talking about music in a way that I’m just not when discussing other subjects. I could make a living as a movie reviewer. I’d be fired after my first article if I tried to get a job at Rolling Stone, or wherever the hell people go to find music reviews nowadays.

Talk about music, though? Talk about, oh, late eighties-early nineties hiphop?

All day, every day. I think that it’s possible that my wife wouldn’t have married me had she realized my ability to turn any conversation into a short lecture about the history of hiphop. She made the mistake of watching a VH1 special about the hundred greatest rap songs of all time with me once. It was an experiment not repeated.

Tim Grierson wrote a book about Public Enemy, the greatest rap group of all time. Now, interesting fact: it’s an unauthorized book, so he didn’t have direct access to anyone in the band other than Terminator X, who left the group a while back and who he appears to have exchanged emails with. So he’s relying on a lot of third-party sources here, and tons of interviews that band members have done with other people or books that they’ve written themselves. Ordinarily that’s a red flag that indicates some sort of nefarious agenda, but in this case I think the guy is remarkably even-handed other than the hilarious (and entirely appropriate) disdain he holds for everything Flavor Flav has done with his life in the last ten years or so.

Loosely described, the book devotes a chapter or so to each of PE’s albums, starting prior to the release of Yo! Bum Rush the Show in 1987 and ending with the “double album” release of Most of My Heroes Still Don’t Appear on No Stamp and The Evil Empire of Everything in 2012. The book was released in February of this year, so there’s not much more recent stuff than that; it closes with the band’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which seems as good a place as any. Along the way he discusses the group’s rise and fall fairly, documenting the period of time where PE ruled the world (It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Fear of a Black Planet, and Apocalypse 91: The Enemy Strikes Black) but not skimping on everything that’s happened since. PE’s released thirteen studio albums and a host of other stuff, too, and Chuck D, Flavor, and Terminator X all have solo albums as well, although Chuck’s last two solo albums (one of which may have come out too late to discuss) go unmentioned. There’s a lot here, and I respect that the book doesn’t go quiet after the mess that was Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age in 1994. In fact, the foreword directly calls out a bunch of other “authorized” PE books for doing just that– the band never saw remotely the level of success they had in the early nineties again, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t doing a lot of interesting shit. Specifically, I like Grierson’s emphasis on Chuck D as an innovator, a guy who refuses to ever do the same thing twice, and I’m giving a lot of the latter albums another listen-through today to pick up on some of the details he discusses.

He also correctly assesses Rebirth of a Nation as the band’s best release since Apocalypse. It was important for me that he get that right. 🙂

It should probably go without saying that I loved the book, devouring the thing whole in basically a day. This is my shit here, y’all. If I hadn’t liked the book, there’d probably still be a post about it tearing it to pieces.

You will probably hear a bit more about this book in a couple of weeks. For now, go read it.

November Wankery 2: Blogs ‘n Books

On December 6, 2015December 6, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking4 Comments

We’ll start with books, since there are fewer graphs. As always, you’ll have to click to make this giant sumbeesh legible:

Screen Shot 2015-12-06 at 8.38.38 AM

So: 533 downloads or print purchases, making November the second-best month of the year, behind only September’s 553. 37 sales over Starbase Indy, which was nice. Now, granted, most of those were free downloads, not paid, but I think by this point I have ample evidence that the giveaways are bumping print sales, too– and as I’ve demonstrated several times, my books sell better on KDP Select than they do when I spread them out. (As always: want one of my books in a format other than Kindle? Email me. We’ll figure something out.) On top of that, I had close to 3000 KENP pages, which don’t make me much money– that’s probably another 15-17 bucks– but it ain’t nothing, either. I still don’t much like the KENP model, but I do like being able to look at that graph and go “Man, somebody’s reading my book right now.” That’s kinda cool.

So yeah. I’d prefer for a much higher percentage of my books to be paid sales, but for the moment we’re focusing more on getting my name out there, and since the giveaways are helping sales, I’m going to call this a win.

Now. Let’s talk about that Syria post. Which I’m starting to refer to as “the goddamn Syria post” in conversation. It’s been hugely successful, at least by my standards, and it has done so by utterly screwing my data collection efforts. Remember when I was saying I was hoping for 100K hits this year? Yeah:

Screen Shot 2015-12-06 at 8.40.38 AM

200K this year looks pretty likely at this point. I’ve had well over 100K unique visitors, although, weirdly, Likes and comments aren’t close to where they were last year.

Screen Shot 2015-12-06 at 8.40.54 AM

My monthly graphs have become trendless.

Screen Shot 2015-12-06 at 8.40.13 AM

And look at this bullshit. I was doing around 300 pageviews a day, 450 on a good day, before that post was written. My best day was just over 1000 views, on one of my Freshly Pressed days. Now I’m waking up (I’m writing this at 8:55 in the morning) to just under 1000 hits depending on the day and the post is sine waving. It’ll be interesting to see if it rebounds again; that previous dip corresponds nicely with Thanksgiving and Black Friday. The high day? Just north of 12,500 pageviews, and at one point I was getting 797 hits an hour.

The overall total, which includes December:

Screen Shot 2015-12-06 at 8.40.42 AM

So I solved my “I’d like to have 100K views this year” problem by writing a post that will have 100K views all by itself by the end of the week. Also:

Screen Shot 2015-12-06 at 8.58.01 AM.png

The big driver of all the traffic continues to be Facebook; Twitter doesn’t seem to be too shabby either from the number of notifications I get each day but it’s nowhere close to 34K and that number stopped loading for me a while ago. I got a brief burst of interest from Reddit one day but that went away (just a couple hundred hits) and Google+ is actually proving it exists.

I shut comments off at 122, at which point people started emailing me. Emails have ranged from short and supportive to multi-page copy and paste monsters with multiple fonts and multiple colors. Hitting Delete in Gmail is so easy, guys. Don’t bother, please. Oh, and my Likes on my Facebook page have soared, from 150 to close to 200 since the post was written.

Now I just need to find a way to make this replicable.

Anything else anybody wants to know about? 🙂

#WeekendCoffeeShare: Relevant

On December 5, 2015December 5, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories6 Comments

(10 minutes later)

I actually wasn’t going to comment on this initially, but something just hit me: there are a ton of sales jobs available in the area, and I’ve applied for none of them despite a suspicion that I might actually be pretty good at such work. I just accidentally figured out why: after fifteen years of teaching and twelve years of NCLB, one thing I really want is a job where, as much as possible, my evaluation as an employee is based on what I do and not on what other people do. Teachers are probably the best example of that, where just about all that matters to our evaluations now is how people who are not us and who we have no real control over do on tests that we can’t see beforehand and didn’t write. But sales is not far behind– if somebody doesn’t have the money to buy something, chances are that person just isn’t gonna buy it, and talking them into buying it anyway is unethical as hell. Sales is also a little too beholden to the vagaries of the economy than I’d prefer. I hadn’t really made that connection prior to putting this video up, but that’s definitely part of my reticence here.

#WeekendCoffeeShare: I’ve Done Nothing edition

On December 5, 2015December 5, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories26 Comments

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If we were having coffee, it’s pretty likely that my inner misanthrope (who is not always as “inner” as he should be, let’s be honest here) would be on full display. This has been a flatulent, flabby nothing of a week for me, and I’ve either been lazy as hell after an extremely busy Thanksgiving week and Black Friday weekend or showing symptoms of clinical depression or very possibly both. There’s been a panic attack or two, and oh, I managed to get turned down for like seven different jobs this week. One job turned me down twice! One of the two “nope, not you” emails specifically referenced that they were looking for candidates who more closely fit the job requirements.

The job: mortgage closing agent. The requirements: no experience, associate’s degree. I am deep into a trap here, kids; I am not (on paper) qualified to do anything other than teach, despite being a versatile motherfucker with a ton of different skills who would be perfectly cromulent at a wide variety of different jobs. So most jobs that are roughly equivalent to my current level of responsibility and pay require years of experience doing shit that I know how to do and I am capable of doing but do not have because I’ve been teaching instead. For other jobs, they look at my resume and see someone who is clearly pushing forty if not there already and highly educated to boot (I have two Master’s degrees) and refuse to even talk to me because they assume, hell, I don’t know what they assume, but I’m unclear on the reason why someone would think I couldn’t do a job that asks for no experience and an associate’s degree. The pay was even good! What the hell?

So, yeah. I’m at the point where I really need someone I know to go “hire this guy.” The problem is everyone I know in town is a teacher, and I love y’all but teaching jobs is not what I need right now. I did have one guy recommend me to his boss, and I applied for an open job, and he emailed me about salary requirements, but upon seeing what he was offering and realizing that there was absolutely no way I was going to make it through an interview where I’d need to pretend to be enthusiastic about training people to use insurance software we sort of both mutually declined to interview.

Which is probably desperately stupid on my part, because broke. But that really was a job that I would be likely to flee at the earliest opportunity.

And I haven’t figured out how I get through the part of the job-search process where they contact my current employer and he says “Oh, that guy? We forgot he existed, he hasn’t been at work since September.” And, believe me, I had a couple reminders this week about why.

Sigh.

True fact: Neither of my eyes are actually closed in this picture.

I might change the conversation to beards after a while. I’m growing my winter beard in at the moment, and it entertains me how every time I shave a beard off the next one grows in different. This one– also something that won’t help me during a job interview, I suspect– is coming in Full Hobo, and my current look is not one that’s going to make “no, he’s not diagnosable with depression at all” be a thing people say about me.

It actually looks a lot cleaner than it is in that photo. I’d get the camera closer but then WordPress would probably shut the blog down for obscenity and this is really my only lifeline at the moment. I can’t pull off that mid-twenties pretty guy 5 o’clock shadow look, so my only hope is to let it grow until it’s long enough to not look shabby, and we are in Utter Shabby at the moment.

After all that fun shit if you were still bothering to sit near me I might start discussing stories. I had this weird half-hallucinatory falling asleep process last night– not drug-induced, I promise; this was created by comfy— and I came up with like a dozen new stories to write, several of which I still remember and have dutifully dumped into my Loose Ideas folder in Wunderlist. Other than the #FridayFictioneers piece I got no fiction of any kind written last week, and I’ve legitimately got more on my plate than I can handle at the moment, so it was kind of weird that my brain spent a couple hours tossing “This! And this! And THIS!” at me. Maybe, brain, when I’m sitting in front of a computer websurfing for hours and pretending to write, you let me work on one of those several stories?

Crazy. I know.

No one’s ever having coffee with me again, are they?

Also: I love you guys, but do me a favor and refrain from trying to cheer me up/offering messages of support in comments. My brain is weird. Venting about this shit on my blog is how I deal with it, and heartfelt “It’s going to get better, we promise!” types of messages, for some reason, frequently somehow actually make the depression and anxiety worse, for reasons that are not at all clear to me. Make fun of me. Yell at me for being whiny. Believe it or not, the way my brain works, that’ll actually be BETTER.

Oh, and if you happen to be in northern Indiana and need an employee, maybe tell me that too.

REBLOG: Being A Girl: A Brief Personal History of Violence

On December 4, 2015December 4, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

I’m not in the mood to write today, and this is more important than anything I’d have to say anyway.

The Belle Jar

I am six. My babysitter’s son, who is five but a whole head taller than me, likes to show me his penis. He does it when his mother isn’t looking. One time when I tell him not to, he holds me down and puts penis on my arm. I bite his shoulder, hard. He starts crying, pulls up his pants and runs upstairs to tell his mother that I bit him. I’m too embarrassed to tell anyone about the penis part, so they all just think I bit him for no reason.

I get in trouble first at the babysitter’s house, then later at home.

The next time the babysitter’s son tries to show me his penis, I don’t fight back because I don’t want to get in trouble.

One day I tell the babysitter what her son does, she tells me that he’s just a little boy, he doesn’t know…

View original post 1,402 more words

#Fridayfictioneers: The City of Lights

On December 3, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories9 Comments

“Too easy.”

“This is the place. Through there. The City of Lights has a back door.”

“It practically says TRAP on the front. It’s too easy.”

“Fine. You stay out here. Dark’s coming.”

Kchik yanked at the handle. The door screeched open, rust flaking off the hinges, breaking off dry stalks of dead grass. The dark inside was absolute.

“You don’t enter the City of Lights by sneaking through the dark, Kchik. It’s wrong.”

He never hesitated. “I won’t forget, Faa. Take care of the girls.”

Kchik entered the dark. The door fell closed. Faa waited.

It never reopened.

Word Count: 99

Friday Fictioneers is a weekly blog hop hosted by Rochelle. She posts a photo prompt then challenges readers to write a 100 word story inspired by the prompt. It’s a fun challenge. Give it a try! Check here for the info then write your story and post it, link up and enjoy the other stories!

November Wankery 1: Starbase Indy

On December 3, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, UncategorizedLeave a comment

CU_q2-iXAAA0IOv.jpg-large.jpeg — Darth Moses. Click to read the commandments.

Why November Wankery 1? Because chances are there’s going to be another one, maybe later today, maybe not, about sales and traffic. Because the great thing about getting 12K pageviews in a day is that I am under no obligation whatsoever to be interesting to anyone other than me.

So. Yeah. Starbase Indy.

That went… well?

Much like InConJunction, what is not in question is whether I had a good time. I definitely did. I enjoy these things, although the fact that for the second con in a row I was sitting near some very fun people definitely didn’t hurt. I sold a lot more books this time, 36 in total, which unfortunately still wasn’t quite enough to pay for both the hotel room and the table. I think in the future I need to focus on conventions in towns where I can stay with friends, or when I’m back in Indianapolis I need to drop the idea of staying at the convention hotel and find the nearest cheap La Quinta Inn or something like that. There’s only so many times I can go to these things and lose money; exposure’s fun, but you can die from it.

But. That exposure.

The following things happened: did I tell the story at InCon about giving my very last customer a free copy of Sanctum, and telling him that if he liked it, to find me at the next con and buy something? Well, if I didn’t, that happened.

He wasn’t the first person at my table, but he was probably second or third. Sadly, that’s as good as the story gets– he had a terribly apologetic look on his face and told me that Sanctum was literally the next book on his TBR shelf and he hadn’t gotten to it yet. Which, dude, I’m a reader, that’s fine. I’ve got a book by Salman Rushdie on my shelf that’s been waiting at least that long. If I can make Salman Rushdie wait, you can make me wait. Point is, he came over and talked to me about my books some more.

More fun? This happened. Not only did these folks begin the conversation with “I follow you on Twitter” and not only did they buy a book, they took my picture and blogged about it. Like I’m some sort of interesting person or something like that. Which was insanely awesome.

Also insanely awesome: getting interviewed by these folks on Day 3. As far as I know the podcast/video with the interview in it isn’t up yet, but I will of course link to it immediately once it is. And I’ve got a card from another guy who wants to do an interview at some point but didn’t have recording equipment with him.

None of these things happened at InCon. Which is not a slam on InCon, as it was my first convention, but holy hell did I feel more like an author and less like some sort of poseur at this one.

So, yeah. The con went well. Next up is C2E2, which despite my earlier griping I managed to find a way to send money to (and which I will almost certainly lose more money at) and the next one is either PenguiCon, which is right by my aunt’s house, or IndyPopCon in June. We’ll see.