Keeping true to my obsession with semi-obscure Canadian independent music, last week I was lucky enough to find myself on the guest list for one of my favorite alt-country/folk artists, Amy Millan, when she was in town at the Pike Room, a swanky dive upstairs from Pontiac’s Crofoot Ballroom. Now, it should be said that playing in the Ballroom downstairs that night was this angry-guy band that sounds like every angry-guy band — extremely loud, obnoxious, and with a cool sounding name like Five Finger Death Punch, which was was so loud that we could both feel and hear it over our nice, intimate, folky show of about 60 attendees.  Oddly enough, in my Harley Davidson jacket I could have easily slipped into the other show and not looked out of place, but any band whose name sounds more like a concoction prepared by a goth mom at a Halloween party and whose album is entitled “War is the Answer” can safely be assumed to be the very antithesis of the very Canadian, very folky music that I love and came to see.

Opening the show was an interesting fellow named Afie Jurvanen, who also goes by artist/band name Bahamas, for what reason I have no idea except to perhaps convey sheer irony in being a Finnish guy from Canada. I was pleasantly surprised, however, as he opened with a beautiful ballad called “Hockey Teeth” and instantly won me over. His drummer was missing, but his goofy demeanor and commanding stage presence made him make going solo look easy. His vocals are reminiscent of Jack Johnson but he can play a mean stratocaster.  Always one to support the opening act, I bought his CD, Pink Strat (affiliate link), and encourage you to check him out and support him, too. He’s really, really good.

Now, onto Amy Millan. The best way for me to describe her sound is the bastard child of musical Williamses – Dar Williams, Lucinda Williams, Victoria Williams, and Hank Williams – somewhat folky, somewhat breathy, somewhat twangy, somewhat depressing, but everything she plays sounds instantly classic. She opened with a strong “Losin’ You,” the lead song off her first solo record, Honey from the Tombs (affiliate link), followed by a steel guitar-infused cover of Death Cab for Cutie’s “I Will Follow You Into the Dark.” From there she played a mix of songs old and new, this tour to promote her latest album, Masters of the Burial (affiliate link), which has a slightly sad tone but is nonetheless beautiful. 

Any band who can play live with a steel guitar, an upright bass, a mandolin, a ukulele,  and a trombone and make it sound AWESOME earns MAD RESPECT in my book. (The only thing that could have made it better would have been a successful accordion accompaniment, but they can’t all be like Cowboy Junkies.)

Highlights of the show had to have been a spunky version of her Rolling Stone acclaimed hit “Skinny Boy,” and a bluesey, almost-jazzy “Bruised Ghosts,” which is her first single off the new album. For her encore, she played my request of the song that made me first fall in love with her music years ago, a very country-esque “He Brings Out the Whiskey in Me,” that rings like a classic country song a lá Hank Williams or Loretta Lynn.

Having been disappointed with my new iPod Nano video’s lack of ability to record well in loud, dark spaces, I decided to try shooting some video with my BlackBerry instead, and surprisingly, the quality wasn’t too bad, save for my obviously-shaky hand. Below is my shaky capture of “Bruised Ghosts” from Amy Millan at the Pike Room, October 15, and you can find a few more at my YouTube channel.

A while ago, I wrote a post about a side project I’m involved in called uwemp – you | we | me | empowered — which is an open-source, reader-directed magazine focusing on learning from the journeys of others and redefining journalism as we know it.

Moments ago, we released what I’d been biting my tongue about for a long time — an exclusive, one-on-one video  interview with uwemp founder Jordan Wolfe and none other than The Bald One himself, best-selling author/entrepeneur/marketing genius Seth Godin. (He’s also the guy who started this interesting little site called Squidoo, you may have heard of it.)

So, what are you waiting for? Why are you still here? Go watch the exclusive interview with Seth Godin now!

(And while you’re at uwemp, be sure to check out our uwemp/UPIU National Student Journalism Writing Contest. If you’re not studying journalism in college right now, you probably know somebody who does, so share it with them. Thanks!)

(Real men of genius!)

Tonight, I salute YOU, Mr. “I-Sync-My-Twitter-and-Facebook-Accounts”!

(Mr. I-Sync-My-Twitter-and-Facebook-Status!)

Yes, you sir, are oblivious that your Facebook friends really don’t care about your every move & your Twitter followers are a) mostly the same people, and b) annoyed as hell.

(Absolutely, completely oblivious!)

It’s imperative that you tell EVERYONE POSSIBLE about that ham sandwich you had for lunch, or that you are happy it’s football season, because you are just. that. important.

(I’m big on the internet! I’m big in Japan! Germany loves me!)

So go on and open a Ping.fm account, Mr. Twitter-Facebook-Syncer, because YOU are a REAL MAN OF GENIUS.

(Inspired by the Bud Light “Real Men of Genius” radio commercials, you can hear all of them here.)

Oh hai, it’s Reina again.

I was so excited when  I posted that last post about Yappy Hour with the Michigan Animal Rescue League that my drool got in the way of my weather iPhone app that told me how cold it was going to be on Thursday. But luckily, the folks at MARL were paying attention because apparently it’s supposed to be rainy and so cold you that if they held it, anyone that might have needed neutering wouldn’t need it anymore if you know what I mean.

Well, because the hoomins at MARL care about all our parts and don’t want any of them to freeze off, they’ve decided to postpone it until spring. It will still be held at the Royal Park Hotel and we’ll have a new date confirmed soon.  If you already donated and purchased tickets, be on the lookout for the MARL hoomins to contact you soon, you can either have your monies back or get a FREE VIP upgrade for the spring event plus a prize for your pooch. (I suggest the latter, and I’m not just saying that because I like new stuff to chew on.)

I was really looking forward to seeing everybody and having puptails but I appreciate them looking out for us, and now I’m so excited for springtime I could PEE!

But don’t wait until then to look into rescuing a four-legged friend. We need you TODAY, and if you can’t adopt somebody, at least think about volunteering some of your time to bonding with hoomins’ best friends. Go here for more information on how you can help save a life and make a new friend or family member, Michigan Animal Rescue League (and rescue dogs like me) love you for it.

kthxbai

Oh Hai!

So as you can guess, it’s not Stacy writing this post. This blog has gone to the dogs, maybe for just one time!

I’m Reina, (follow me on Twitter @reinathedoggy)  and I pawed by to tell you about this Thursday’s Yappy Hour to support the Michigan Animal Rescue League. See, I’m a rescue dog – and hoomins gave me a second life when I used to roam the streets.

I know what it’s like to find your new forever home and how much I love the noms and lovins, and of course, my favorite command, “Snuggles!”

I want every dog to have the same love I get… and in order to help make that happen, the hoomins at the MARL need your help Thursday in Rochester by attending.

But you just won’t help my friends, you can haz “Puptails” from Zodiac Vodka, hoomin treats (”Hound-d’oeuvres”) all on the vewwy nice Royal Park hotel lawn. It’s the nicest lawn I’ll ever have been on. Oh, and there’s dog treats too as well as music by Robin Horlock for the people.

I loves clothes, and I’ll be bringing my pink coat because there’s a best dressed competition, and I’m gonna get a picture with my hoomin. But of course, I’ll be the better looking of us

Follow this link to get your ticket for you and your best friend – it’s from 6p-9p Thursday in Rochester. I’m looking forward to wagging my tail when I see you there!

Reina is the dog-daughter of Jeremiah Staes, President and Chief Online Navigator of Portage Digital Media.

Since I took this new job at the chamber, it’s no secret that I’m exhausted all the time. There just aren’t enough hours in the day for me to do everything I want and need to do. And it sucks.

Aside from working full-time in Detroit, I also have a couple of my own clients. I knew it was going to be tough to juggle my own business and work for The Man, but I had no idea it was going to be this tough.

I love my clients too much to give them up, and it’s killing me that I haven’t been able to do as much as I normally would have for them had I not been driving 120+ miles a day every day and sleeping 4 hours a night.

So I’m looking for a little help in the form of a college intern or two. I’m currently structuring how the internship(s) will work, but know that this will be a for-college-credit internship, but possibly paid in the future, depending on performance.

Here are the criteria:

• must be a PR or related major
• preferably in Metro Detroit or Lansing area, but I will consider a remote intern
• internship will be minimum of one semester
• interested candidates please email me your résumé and links to your social profiles

I’ll give details about the actual clients and duties of the internship to candidates when they apply. It should be noted that both projects said intern(s) will be assisting me with are unlike anything they’d normally have a chance to work on, so this is a very unique and exciting opportunity.

So if you are interested, or know somebody who may be, please contact me by either leaving a comment, emailing me, or calling 248.667.8229.

Thanks!

Since I posted the last post announcing my new gig, I’ve been so busy I haven’t been able to keep my head on straight, let alone blog. People ask me how it’s going, and I won’t lie – the commute is kicking my ass.

My schedule is not one to be envied — I leave for work by 7:30 a.m., around the same time most of my coworkers are just waking up. Both morning and evening rush hours are a pain, and now BOTH expressways I could take to Detroit have major construction on them. I drive over 120 miles a day, and spend a total of at least two and a half hours on the road daily. I’ve found myself staying after work many times because it wouldn’t matter if I left at 5:30 or 6:30, because of rush hour traffic I’d get home at the same time either way.

When I get home (sometimes not until 9:30 or later), I am so exhausted from everything that I’m ready to collapse. In fact, many times I have. The ironic thing is that I haven’t even had a chance to look for a place in Metro Detroit because of all this.

When I told a friend of mine how much time I spend on the road, he replied with, “Wow, I’d be totally catching up on audiobooks.” I’m not much of an audiobook person, but I am a long-time podcast addict, and I told him that I’ve been listening to a lot of those. We then got in a discussion about our favorite podcasts, and I thought I’d share a few of my favorites here. I’m going to split this up into two posts, music podcasts and non-music podcasts. I’ll start with music since it’s Monday (or a pseudo-Monday because of the holiday).

Dave’s Lounge -  Podcasting the best in chillout, trip hop, and downtempo electronic music. For some reason, people are surprised when I tell them I’m a big fan of this kind of music. I have no idea why, as my musical tastes are as diverse as they come. I’ve been a loyal listener of Dave’s Lounge since 2006, and it’s through Dave that I discovered some really incredible artists, like Natalie Walker, All India Radio (they’re actually from Australia), Edison Gem, and the awesomeness that is The Atomica Project. I can’t say enough good things about Dave’s Lounge. Oh, and you can follow Dave on Twitter at @permanent4.

Idyllic Music -  In the same vein as Dave’s Lounge, Idyllic Music features songs by indie artists working outside the mainstream, likely people you’ve never heard of before but can’t get enough of once you do. It might be trip hop, ambient, jazz, dub, downtempo, or even something more in the “world” category. I highly recommend visiting the site not only for downloading back episodes, but they’ve got a great store and a nice list of links to other podcasts like this and Dave’s Lounge. You know, if you’re into this kind of thing.

The R3-30 - Weekly countdown of the best in independent Canadian music from CBC Radio 3. Another one I’ve been a loyal listener to for a few years. This is hosted by Craig Norris and Pedor Mendez, a duo of shenanigans not to be reckoned with. These guys are hilarious, and I look forward to it every week. Oh yeah, and the music’s great, too. In fact, it’s through listening to CBC Radio 3 that I discovered many artists that most people in the states don’t discover until I’ve been listening to them for at least a year or more. People like Tokyo Police Club, Amy Millan, Emily Haines & the Soft Skeleton, The Handsome Furs, Thunderheist, etc. One the one hand it’s been really cool to listen to a lot of this stuff years before most people have heard of them. On the other hand, it’s really annoying when friends are all ga-ga over “this new artist” that I’ve “got to hear” who is actually old news to me. All I can do is sigh.

NPR: Live Concerts from All Songs Considered - Contrary to popular belief, NPR isn’t all talk radio. Their music coverage is incredible.  There are few things I love more than live music, but since I don’t get a chance to go to many shows anymore, this is the next best thing. I’ve discovered a lot of new artists through NPR music, and relived some old times listening to some live shows of old favorites. A few favorites include Liz Phair’s “Exile in Guyville” Live, Björk, Cat Power, Tom Waits, and a couple mentioned above, like Emily Haines.

So there ya go. A few of my favorite music podcasts that keep me company on the road. In the next installment I’ll share my favorite non-musical podcasts, a.k.a. “the ones that talk to me.” If you’ve got any recommendations of music podcasts you think I should check out, please leave them in the comments. My ears are always on the lookout for new music!

Photo by akeg.

If you’ve noticed I haven’t been quite as prolific here, on Twitter, or elsewhere recently, it’s with good reason. In the beginning of this month, I started a new position as Interactive Marketing Coordinator with the Detroit Regional Chamber, and I’ve been commuting 60+ miles (an hour or more, depending on traffic) every morning and evening, running myself (and my car) ragged.

I’ve explicitly tried to keep the news offline until I got a little more settled into the job and until I told a few certain folks about it in person, but I guess it’s safe to “come out” and break the news to the web as a whole.

In July I mentioned in the post about graduating the FastTrac entrepreneurship program that I realized I’d rather not work for myself, and well — I still am, but now have a “big girl job” too. I’ve had to whittle down my clients and give referrals on projects I otherwise would have loved to tackle, but I need to sleep, too, ya know.

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind, to say the least, and I’m still getting acclimated — I grew up being involved in chambers of commerce but have been catapulted from my small, hometown chamber to the biggest one in the country in the blink of an eye. Needless to say, I’m a little overwhelmed, but I like it.

If you’re wondering how I found the gig, it shouldn’t surprise you that I found it via social media, specifically Twitter. A long time ago, I was followed by (and followed back) a certain Sarah Hubbard, who happens to be the Vice President of Government Relations for the Detroit Chamber. She and I had exchanged tweets periodically; in fact I think my first direct message to her was after she started following me and I said something like, “Hey, cool! I grew up in chambers!”

Fast forward to whenever it was (I don’t remember when, exactly, everything’s a blur) I almost signed off for the night but I saw her tweet that the chamber had a position open, so I followed the link, read the description, and thought, “Wow, I fit that description pretty well!” So I DM’d her and told her I was interested and to tell her people I was going to try to send them my résumé and stuff by the following Monday.

Well, things got in the way and they didn’t get my stuff until the following Thursday, and I thought I was too late. But Sarah told them she already gave them a head’s up and pointed them towards here and my other stuff online. Yada yada yada, long story short, I’m now four weeks into the job and I’m still going through orientation stuff, and I still have a lot to learn about the whole place before I get in turbo-mode, but I’m looking forward to the challenge.

Of course, this is the impetus for me moving back to Metro Detroit (where I belong), but it’s probably going to be a couple months before I make the move. I’ve got a lot on my plate right now with this, plus my own clients, plus things I’m keeping offline, but somehow I’ll find a way to balance it all. I’ve already gotten by with a little help from my friends, and for that I am grateful.

So there ya go. That’s why I’ve been tweeting at insane hours of the morning, about traffic jams and getting gas in the ghetto and sending pictures of Detroit landmarks from my phone, in case you hadn’t figured it out. I’m back in the Motor City, for the most part, and I couldn’t be happier. (Well, I could be happier, and I will be, once I’m officially relocated.)

This wonderful gem showed up in my Gmail box the other day:

What’s wrong with this picture?

Well, what isn’t?

For starters: “selukasavitz” is not my name. It’s my Gmail ID, which is the combination of my first two initials plus my last name.

Secondly, WHAT KIND OF A SUBJECT LINE IS THAT?! “Hello ___, buy some products” … um, what kind of products? Peanut products? Electronics? Rolex watches? Your subject line must not be a command (”buy my stuff” is equivalent to “click my junk“) and should be at least somewhat descriptive as to what you’re talking about. The only reason I opened it was because I thought, “Who has the audacity to send such a P.O.S. marketing piece?”

Thirdly, the copy made me suspicious that it was a phishing scam, malware, or something equally skeezy. The lack of punctuation, poor grammar and sentence structure, and lack of any real description or even graphics does not make me want to buy from them at all.  I was hesitant to even click the link but I took my chances, and yes, it looks like a legit company trying (desperately) to sell their hard drive disk recovery software. I don’t know if it is legit because I didn’t click anywhere on the site, which is why I just said it looks like it. That’s one reason why I’m not linking them here. The other is that they just don’t deserve the traffic. (If you want to check it out, type it in your address bar yourself.)

Fourthly, the signature. I can’t decide which is worse — that “peter miles” didn’t capitalize his own name, that there’s no real information about the company, or that it says he’s with the HR department. Is he trying to sell products or recruit employees? Maybe “peter miles” is attempting to be the e e cummings of the email marketing world, I have no idea. But this crap doesn’t work. None of it does. I’m surprised this didn’t fall in my spam folder, truthfully.

If your email marketing pieces look like this, it’s time for a real intervention. Chances are, they’re not being opened because they are falling in the spam folder. Even if they’re evading it, “Hi screenname, buy some products” is not a way to get people to open your messages.

I’m not really a “how to” blogger (enough people cover that kind of thing), but I do subscribe to a very informative newsletter from eMarketing and Commerce magazine that I highly recommend if you want to know more about that.

I can honestly say that this is one of the worst pieces of eMarketing I’ve ever seen. What I want to know is if you guys have seen worse. Do you get any gawd-awful attempts at eMarketing in your inbox that is just so bad you have to share? Air out that laundry in the comments, it’s time to play show and tell.