The Smashing Pumpkins are one of my three most favorite bands ever. You may have heard some people in the music business describe seeing The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show as the moment they knew they had to be in the music business. For me it was The Smashing Pumpkins.

In January of 2010 (man, was it so cold!), we brought in director Robby Starbuck from Los Angeles to shoot the music video for the Mother/Father song, “Order”. You will notice that Robby is the director of the above embedded short film from The Smashing Pumpkins, Owata.

I Thought because of this connection, because I’m stoked for Robby, and because of my affinity for all things SP, it was fitting to share the film.

Congrats, Robby… Great work…

Cheers

//stinson
My blog: www.producernotes.com
Twitter: @stsn

So it’s been more than quite a while since anyone has posted on the Radical Notion blog. And how appropriate that I break the silence with a post on this topic (keep reading).

When I was a sophomore in high school I started a band called Borrowed Talent. Ninety-nine percent of the time we were a Smashing Pumpkins cover band. But one time we covered a song by K’s Choice. We played four times total.

Then, when I was a senior in high school, I started a band called Seventeen Seconds-a reference to The Cure and The Smashing Pumpkins. We played original songs, but we never finished writing any of the songs we started. We never played any shows, and we never even rehearsed. In fact, there was no “we” at all because I never even asked anyone to join the band. It was just me!

Introducing Austin
One of my dearest friends has just self published his first book titled Melting Chocolate Kettles. For literally my entire life, I’ve watched Austin develop as a writer and person of extremely excellent intellect and integrity. Austin has an extremely unique and inspiring view of the world. It’s beautiful. You need to pay attention to him.

Post-high school Austin and I have spent less time in each other’s physical presence than we did in our teenage years, but when we’re lucky enough to grab coffee, our conversations kindle an intense fire in my heart. Austin and I have a shared interest in all things creative, and in recent years specifically, we’ve both become fascinated with how creativity and art bleed into marketing. We’ve spent hours upon hours around the campfire preaching the gospel of direct-to-fan marketing and the lessons of Seth Godin to each other. We both became fascinated and excited by the idea that social media, when used properly, can be an incredibly powerful tool for artists of all types to build a fan base, distribute their work, and even generate an income. Right now, more than any other time in the history of the creative field, artists can play in an arena of world distribution that was once available only to those select few who somehow reached an elite status-U2, Coldplay, Michael Bublé. How incredible, that WE can now become our own media outlets! Our voices, through-and-through, shape the communities of fans. We are An “Army Of Davids.”

Melting Chocolate Kettles
And that leads us to the point of this post. As I mentioned earlier, Austin wrote and published an ebook called Melting Chocolate Kettles. The book is all about meeting your creative goals, and Austin’s main point is that artist types love to talk a lot about creating but many of us never seem to actually get around to creating. That’s exactly the crux of the little anecdote I included as the lead-in to this post. Seventeen Seconds was all talk and no walk. Melting Chocolate Kettles is that fire you need held to your feet so that you finally become fully engaged in your art-so that you’ll become engaged kinetically.

The book’s 59 pages contain a series of blunt motivational tips, sprinkled with direct-to-fan marketing pointers, and candied with Austin’s entertaining quips and stories. It’s all designed to be the force you need to stimulate that creative frame of mind, to practice your art, and to get it out there to the world. Melting Chocolate Kettles is kinda like a motivational self-help book for artists, but with Austin’s thumbprints all over it.

An example of one of those thumbprints is “The 769 Rule” (page 36). “The 769 Rule” is Austin’s minimum daily quota for how many words he must write in order to stay on track to meet his bigger writing goals. And in my own way I’m adopting it.

Download it now
Melting Chocolate Kettles is available as a free download from Austin’s blog, gu.e. Yes, totally free, not $0 but with the exchange of your email address “free”, or “free” only if you tweet the link-totally and completely free in the sense that no strings are attached whatsoever.

At a whopping 59 pages total, you can probably read it in 90 minutes or less. If you’re an artist that creates art of any kind (and if you’re reading this blog you are), and if you’re an artist who is stuck, struggling to muster the kinetic creative frame of mind to ship your ideas, you need to download and read this book right now. Let’s be honest. We’re all stuck, one way or another. So let’s start melting our chocolate kettles, making a mess, and take pleasure in the delicious outcome. It’s available in .pdf, .mobi, and .ePub formats. Enjoy. And tell your friends.

Download and read Melting Chocolate Kettles now

Can’t wait to hear what resonated with you the most-please share in the comments.

//stinson

[Austin Church is a writer and marketer from Nashville, TN, who is currently living with his wife Megan in Knoxville. He is the author of several blogs, one of which is called gu.e: what's left out. I highly recommend you add it to your Google reader. www.whatsleftout.com]

Sonic Youth has been coming up on conversation amongst my friends a lot lately. One of my favorite bands. Went to a great show last nite, and met some new friends (incidentally, The Wine Loft in Nashville is a really cool hang), and again Sonic Youth came up in conversation. We spent about an hour or so discussing the Daydream Nation record, which got me all excited to go home and bust out the small collection of Sonic Youth records I own (I need to buy more of their records), and jam.

Here’s a video of Sonic Youth performing “The Sprawl” live from their 1988 hit record Daydream Nation:

//stinson
Blog: www.producernotes.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/stnsn
Twitter: @stsn

This one blipped a little while ago, but it just hit my radar nonetheless. Was poking around on Stereogum this morning, and came across a link to the video for “Despicable Dogs” by the band Small Black. Could the name perhaps be some kind of reference to Steve Albini’s band, Big Black?

In any case the music really struck me. Got a lot of My Bloody Valentine-esque qualities, and since MBV is one of my most favorite bands ever, naturally I was immediately into Small Black.

Small Black: Despicable Dogs from Yoonha Park on Vimeo.

Small Black has a 12″ EP available now via Insound. Purchase includes an mp3 version.

Check out the Small Black blog here: http://smallblackblog.blogspot.com/
Listen to more Small Black tunes on Myspace here: http://www.myspace.com/smallblacksounds
Download “Despicable Dogs” from JAGJAGUWAR, their label: http://www.jagjaguwar.com/onesheet.php?cat=JAG173

//stinson (check out my scribblings on record making and such www.producernotes.com; follow me on Twitter @stsn; find me on Facebook www.facebook.com/stnsn)

I‘m a fairly regular reader of Hypebot, and today I came across post there, Skybox Offers Their Fans An Alternative to Filesharing, which covers a dialogue Skybox opened with their fans offering a win/win proposal to those who download their record from filesharing sites.

They suggest that anyone who likes the album pick a favorite song, and email it to 10 friends. On their website Skybox supports this request by including share buttons on all the music players on the site. Here’s the original post on the Skybox website: http://skyboxmusic.com/2010/04/filesharing-ok-cool-but-do-us-a-favor-too/

I had never heard of Skybox, but any band who understands fan engagement and puts their fans first (which Skybox is clearly doing), always gets me intrigued. So I popped over to their site to listen to some music. The first track I came across was In a Dream, which they were offering as a download in exchange for an email address. I did, in fact, like the song, so right then-as I was completely inspired by what the band is doing on a fan engagement level, as well as backing that up with good music-I decided that I needed to take them up on their offer and help them share their music. At the bottom of this post you will find the music player embedded.

And please understand that Radical Notion (independent media) has nothing to do with the band Skybox in any way. The band did not ask me to write this post, and we don’t have any business of any kind set up with them. Again, I had never even heard of the band before today. I simply am inspired by the way Skybox are focusing on their fans, and think that more of this type of interaction needs to be highlighted. And any band doing so deserves the attention.

So I’ll go ahead and say the same thing to our fans, and to the fans of Mother/Father-if you download any of our music off the filesharing sites (or even directly from us, for that matter) and like it, please pick your favorite song and share it with your friends. There are plenty of sharing tools on our store, Radical Notion Digital: store.radicalnotion.net

And I’ll end this post with a quote from Don Bartlette, the manager of Skybox, “Regardless of your moral stance on filesharing, I think it’s important to always be working to bring fans into the fold rather than marginalizing them.”

And here’s the Skybox player:

//stinson (my other blog: www.producernotes.com my Twitter profile: @stsn)

What controls you? Do you wake up each morning with a burning desire to get things done, with a thirst for progress, with goals? Do you immediately act on them? Does your passion guide you? Do you hold the keys to your success, and your destiny?

Or are you a victim?

Are you always sidetracked by things you can’t control? Do people barge in on your ability to think, to function? Are you unable to really get anything done?

One of the keys to any kind of success is the ability to have a sense of self-control, or self-motivation, that takes no prisoners, that shoots first, that gets things done and that refuses to take “no” for an answer. If someone tells a person with this type of attitude “no”, then they will just go to a different person until they finally get what they want.

The world doesn’t happen to a person like this- the person happens to the world. Sure, sometimes we encounter obstacles. Sometimes we get sidetracked and delayed. Sometimes plans fall through. There are no guarantees. But to a go-getter like this, there is a higher chance of success.

For someone who has a victim mentality, who allows him or herself to be inappropriately guided by outside controls, who shuts down when they encounter resistance, unless someone more powerful is in charge, and helping them- to that person, the world will be a locked door 99% of the time. The 1% who manage to find a big brother or big sister to do their work for them usually squander any rewards that come from the fruits of someone else’s labor.

What controls Chuck Norris? It’s simple: when Chuck Norris jumps into a river, he doesn’t get wet. THE WATER GETS CHUCK NORRIS.

How can I become like Chuck Norris? Get positive, and get to work!

-Ernest
illuminati enterprises
http://teamilluminati.com