One way to make a living in a box is to write interviews with famous people. Although I knew the boys well and saw them pretty much every day for a couple of years, the Monkees were nowhere around when I interviewed their instruments.
The rumor was that they didn’t actually play their own instruments, and in fact, they didn’t. Most of the tracks were laid down in Nashville and they were on tour totally elsewhere.
All they added were the vocals, and it was that way for a long time. They actually finally got to play at concerts without double-up backups behind stage, but not for long and not until the very end, long after the series had ended.
So I set about to interview their instruments — what better witnesses could you get? The novel idea caught on, and from then on, that was my style of output, and I never did a live interview of a rock star again, although I produced hundreds of articles and interviews.
Just spell the name right, and they’ll let you publish anything.
If you collect autographs, you can’t go wrong. I ended up with hundreds of autographed photos from my celebrity friends — I wouldn’t sell those, but I WOULD sell the hundreds more I collected to sell in the gallery years ago.
Celebrity autographs are easy to obtain, and if you’re clever with them, you can really make some megabucks.
One way to do this is to find 3″x5″ index cards signed by your target celebrity, and MOUNT that card in a cutout matboard to fit into an 8″x10″ or 11″x14″ frame.
When you do the framing, make sure it’s the frame EVERYBODY wants, not something you just threw on there hoping it would be ok.
How you do this without spending money is a matter of learning Adobe Photoshop, and that’s all there is to say about that — framing is where the money is, just as in the restaurant business, you lose money on the food, but you make money on the beverages.
It’s all a question of balance, and learning to work digitally where before you worked organically. Change your perspective, your attitudes and your behavior, and you’ll do all right.
One of the things I did in Second Life was to work on someone’s property. They bough the land from Linden Labs, and I decorated it to the nth degree with this Roman villa, complete with a working kitchen and of course dining service.
Everything here works, and the sounds are tailored to fit.
Total time it took me from start to finish on this project? A little over a week, and that was working every night about five to seven hours per work session.
It’s easy to put up the shell, but the finish work is Hell.
That’s true of almost any endeavor and that goes for musical composition and fish-fries equally well.
Speaking of musical composition, you might consider writing some songs and getting them performed, perhaps on a ZOOM or SKYPE or some other live broadcast video connection, a “personal” concert, from some celebrity’s home, which I predict will happen very soon, to satisfy the fans.
How about holding a Didge Healing Ceremony?
It’s not just live broadcasts — I’ve made a LOT of healing videos, and they’re all available for use anytime you want to put them to use.
I can also arrange something in the Ashram, but the way it’s set up now, these are videos and they’re available from GatewaysBooksAndTapes.com or ask any staffer about them.
This is the new norm. Get used to it, learn to work with it, learn to do electronically what you used to do physically, and you’ll get along just fine in this Brave New World — hey, good idea for a book title!
Keep it simple, always keep it simple. Use social media to sell the CD, and make sure you get into the wholesale loop of selling our products!
You don’t need to OWN it in order to SELL it, and you can easily earn — well, not so fast — we don’t know what anyone will be able to earn, with everybody out of a job!
That means there are no buyers, only sellers. Okay, so where does that leave us?
“My Life as a Boy” has not yet been translated into Spanish and, yes, I realize there are a zillion translation programs on all sorts of browsers, but it would be nice to have a controlled version out there without the vagaries of the translating machines and their understandings of nuance.
So as long as your country is in total lockdown “Shelter-in-Place” mode, maybe you can NOW spare the time to do the translation, along with a translation for “Trump is a Four-Letter Word”, which is gonna be a tough translation due to an abundance of Angloid puns.
Think about the situation in a new and different way.
It’s not that you CAN’T do the things you used to have to do to earn a living — you aren’t allowed to do those things right now, and you’ve been ordered to stay at home and send out for food.
Okay, so now what?
Forget about what’s going to happen six months from now — you have no control over that. What you DO control is what you do with the time you have now, right now, this very moment, this very day, not tomorrow, not later, right now.
So don’t just stand there like a dummy, lamenting the loss of your old way of life. It was a piece of shit anyway.
What you really miss is the familiarity, the ability to take certain things for granted, and now you can’t take ANYTHING for granted.
Handpainted Angel Dresses are my specialty — I have a painting dummy set up in my back studio for just such items, and I’m happy to make them.
I use a special fabric paint that is very expensive, but there’s nothing else like it in the world, and what’s more, I have a lot of it stored away.
That’s fortunate, because it’s no longer available — the components are made in China.
I can make about a thousand dresses before I have to worry about where I’m going to get more fabric paint — it doesn’t feel heavy, doesn’t bind, doesn’t crack or crinkle, but it DOES cost a pretty penny.
The Angel Dress retails for $225 and I hand-paint and sign it.
The wholesale price is only $112.50 but you have to buy two of them to get that price, so it comes out to be a BOGO. You can request a different design on the second dress.
So that’s two handpainted dresses for the price of one, allowing you to put the dress on and take a selfie and sell the dress for full retail, which means “whatever the market will bear”.
Keep in mind that a very successful designer gets a fortune for a dress and the same dress will hardly fetch $12.50 brand new, if it’s sold in the wrong outlet. The Fashion Industry is all about attitude.
Do you happen to have a museum lying around in your garage? What a coincidence — so do I, and from this moment on for the rest of our lives, a museum won’t be a great place to set up a business, let me tell you.
So what do you do with all the mummies and other ancient and modern stuff you’ve got crammed into all those glass cases that are now in storage?
Hundreds of exhibits? No problem.
Photograph each and every item — front, back, both sides, top and bottom, and make the item into a 3-D model, which is not a trivial task.
When you’re done processing all your exhibits, build a museum, either in the Godd™ Engine or in Second Life or wherever you’d like to exhibit it, and open for business, making damn sure you have a first-class museum gift shop.
No matter what the museum is or looks like, the gift shop is the target, just as in television, it’s not the program, it’s the commercials. “Cherchez le Loot” is, I think, the expression we want here.
You know, if you wanted to try your hand at being a DJ, you could get a showtime in the Ashram, or broadcast on your own in any of several communication venues.
One fun thing could be to have a LIVE audience, and that means you need a space for the Avatars to hang out during the broadcast.
Another idea is to encourage call-ins, and if your program is relevant to Corona Virus actions and information, or anything people need to know RIGHT NOW, then you definitely want to have call-ins, and the best place for that would be Second Life, where mic comm is very easy to use.
Just press the hot key to talk. You can set the hotkey any way you like.
Can it go out over the airwaves? Sure it can, and you can preserve the show in archives, if you know how, and knowing how is what we do, so stop in at our workshops and get smarter.
I’m sure most of you have done the Victorian Mission Pak training, but just in case you haven’t, or you weren’t on our list and didn’t get the word — “New Releases” is what you want to get — why not do it now, while you have the chance?
If there’s something you have to do that’s better than examining a Past Life and learning how to disarm it so it doesn’t impinge on your present life, go ahead and do it.
But if you want to clear some past karma, this is going to work for you, and work well, and besides that, it’s fun, especially if the alternative is daytime TV programming or the news networks.
Always click to anther channel when a commercial comes on — that’ll keep you busy, and that’s what it’s all about, taking up the awful slack, eating up the time remaining.
I’m taking advantage of the situation to go on a new diet — I don’t eat between snacks.
Sure, you can publish an e-book. It’s totally easy, and if you want to go pro, you can do what I do — publish both hard-copy paperbacks and e-books, and I’d go a step further and offer voice books, either read by a human actor or by text-to-speech, which is uncommonly good these days.
I especially like the Australian accent and the Parisian voice is fun, too.
You know, that “Beetlejuice” floor behind me is a very popular design for many Roman villas, and did you know that I design Roman Villas?
Oh, yes, I mentioned it not that long ago, didn’t I?
Well, don’t forget that I can build one for you at a fraction of the cost of the same thing in “actual” reality, and you won’t get any more use out of that one than you did out of your TimeShare apartment in the Bahamas that you never visited even once, but paid for many times over.
Jack the Ripper Chocolates is my favorite idea for my “Ripper” series of screenshots. Like my “Zombie Family” hot sauce products, I had the idea that we could somehow fashion Jack the Ripper into a family restaurant, perhaps with five or six pilot locations to set up a worldwide … what am I saying?
There are no more restaurants, and you’re crazy to start one now, under these bizarre and impossible circumstances.
On the other hand, restaurants will be for sale like never before, at prices you won’t believe possible.
It’s a bargain for those with time to wait to collect the profits.
Of course, that’s the same with the stock market and a lot of other things. Nothing will be going back the way it was before, not for a very long time.
In the meanwhile, we can market some great Jack the Ripper collectibles and chocolate treats!
Relax, you’ll get the chocolate packaged and the company that makes it drop ships, so you never have to even touch it once!
Safety is always an issue in a Plague World environment. Did you learn nothing from Diablo 2 Bardo Safaris?
Diary of a Teenage Vampire was my biggest hit. We filmed it in Super-8 on a windup camera, and faked the soundtrack totally.
Now, I can make the same film in machinima, and so can you.
What I’m advocating is a complete film, shot scene by scene, which can be exhibited not only on youtube, but in film competitions around the world.
They won’t stop competing, although the film audiences will be isolated, each in their own space, for the duration, which we can’t predict ahead of time.
Now, AFTER the fact, I can predict almost anything with about 80% accuracy.
You can actually make money on youtube by having a viral — you should pardon the expression — video.
Getting a video to go viral is the trick which nobody really knows. Some do, some don’t.
Make a video. Put it up. See the results. Make another video. Put it up and measure the results, analyze it, see what went wrong.
Do this many, many times until you get a viral video.
Now make another one.
When you CAN remember your Past Lives, one of them will have been in ancient Babylon, and it will be easy to tell and easy to remember.
You can give a lecture, or conduct a walk-through of the ancient kingdom as you speak of your Past Life in Babylon and invite others to do the same.
This can all be recorded as a video and put up on youtube.
You can offer workshops in Past Life memory recovery, or you can encourage others to do the same, or both.
Things going badly? We don’t need a crystal ball to tell us that we’re in the shit right up to our necks, and that there’s no easy way out.
In short, we’re screwed up the yin-yang, and there’s nothing we can do about it, except — hmmm … how about a little spellcasting?
If you’re good at it, you can offer some help along these lines, and you can conduct a spirit reading or a seance or a life reading over ZOOM, as Zoltara is doing here.
You can use Second Life or ZOOM or any other communication system to get the reading across, but do spend some time getting familiar with all of the ones you’re likely to use, because services can go down unexpectedly and forever under these circumstances.
That’s a lot to digest, and I hope you get it somewhat processed before proceeding to the next chapter …
See You At The Top!!!
gorby