Our band is currently seeking an intern, who would be assisting us with the following tasks:
- Contacting our clients and marketing partners
- Performing computer and database duties, keeping track of schedules and recording and client info
- Maintaining and updating social networking profiles and assisting in further expanding our fan/customer bases
- Preparing and submitting promotional materials to music stores, labels, booking agencies and publishing companies
- Helping set up radio campaigns
Our intern needs to be fluent and experienced with Apple computers and have solid Microsoft Word skills.
Also, we are looking for someone who is a social networking wizard, very very very experienced with facebook, youtube, twitter, reverb nation, etc. and can school us in viral marketing.
This job is ideal for a music industry student, or a musician who wants to become pro at doing this for themselves.
BONUS: really friendly and cool environment and fun people to be around!
We are looking for a time commitment of 3 days per week (3 hours per day), and we can pay $10 per hour.
We would like our intern to work here at our home studio in Echo Park for 2 of those days, and 1 day from your home, for a total of 9 hours per week.
So, there’s the pain in the ass of moving. Then, there’s moving in torrential, record-setting rain. Then, there’s moving in torrential, record setting rain with appendicitis.
During the week before New Year’s, we were working like mad to haul our fortress of musical gear and all the stuff and trappings of life from our large, flashy rented home in the Hollywood Hills to a more modest, yet charming house in Glassell Park (if you haven’t heard of it, you’ve probably seen it in episodes of Cops. But the neighborhood is up and coming, really).
We liked our flashy hills house, but we had admittedly overreached. The rent was high and so was unemployment, and at our peak, we had seven people living there to try to offset the cost. We had hired a contractor friend to divide big rooms into smaller rooms. When the 2010 Census takers came along, they marked down our house as a new congressional district.
So, we all had to move – myself, Dave and Aaron to Glassell Park, and our original roomies Brian and Teri (and Cutie Kitty) into storage while they keep looking for a place.
We were at the old house, just hours away from the deadline to vacate on New Year’s Day 2011. It was still almost fully furnished. We had assembled a rag tag team of our boldest bundled-up buddies, and we slaved away in the relentless, freezing drizzle, hauling furniture and cleaning all day and all night.
You just don’t appreciate the size of your home until you have to make every naked inch of it spotless for scrutiny. And you really don’t appreciate your gorgeous hilltop view when you have to move four (plus) people’s whole lives down 47 steps from the front door to the street. Dammit.
We were determined to get as much of our (colossal!) deposit back as possible, so we were striving like hell to restore the original beauty of the hardwood floors and marble tile. Fresh out of surgery, my main job was kneeling on the floors in the kitchen and bathrooms, scrubbing at grout with bleach and a toothbrush. This turned out to be Dave’s main duty as well. If I wasn’t high from the morphine and Vicodin still coursing through my saturated system, I surely was from the fumes.
To make things extra miserable, we had to have the doors and windows open for ventilation while we waged chemical warfare on ourselves, so we were freezing and wet the whole time. At one point I went down to the car to pull an extra men’s shirt and pair of pants from Dave’s Goodwill pile to put over the clothes I was already wearing, for warmth and for bleach protection. With our masks and gloves, I have to say we were looking very sci-fi sexy.
But I should back up. Two days before this, I had started to have flu-like symptoms in the afternoon…stomach ache, a little queasy, sort of light-headed. I was supposed to be making trips back and forth from the old house to the new house, but I had to lie down for a while and let the boys slave away. They probably thought I was faking it to get out of moving…
Towards the night, it got worse and worse. I started to think I had food poisoning, even though we’d all had the same takeout Thai and no one else was sick. My whole stomach was in agony, and I probably threw up about 15 times, just dry heaving…this is gross, but I’m giving you the details as a cautionary tale, yo.
Hot sweats, cold sweats, rolling around just trying to find a position that was less painful, meditating, embracing and accepting the pain, giving up on that, cursing, throwing up again…try lying in a different room that doesn’t have moving boxes all over the bed, maybe the vibe will be better in here…listen to some chill music, maybe it will help you relax until this is over…sometimes it was more like having a bad trip than having the flu.
I was obsessed with the idea that my spleen was going to rupture. I have a friend who had this happen not too long ago, and I couldn’t get it out of my head that I had an internal organ that was going to explode. Logic told me that the pain was making me paranoid, and that paranoia was making me anxious, and that anxiety was making the pain worse, and I needed to just accept that I had some kind of stomach virus and relax about the whole life-threatening thing.
Dave was my spirit guide during this touching, transformational experience. He took care of me, set the most comfortable scene possible, and assuaged my fears in the beginning…then as the night wore on, he started googling symptoms for me. After a while, we were keeping an eye on kidney stones and appendicitis, but still thought it was most likely a virus.
I tried to sleep. It was a cruel joke. I heaved, tossed, twisted, torqued, begged, bargained, and prayed – yes, I even hit that crisis moment you hear about, when people become momentarily religious because they are willing to believe in anything to just get out of this situation. I prayed to the Lord God Jesus Christ, Buddah, Jaweh, Ganesh and Tom Cruise.
I finally drifted off to sleep for a while, and when I woke up, I felt like I was out of the woods. No more racking, full-body pain, and no more nausea. I felt relieved, and wouldn’t you know, less religious after all. Or did one of those deities come through for me? I started walking around and thought maybe I could get back into the swing of moving boxes again.
However…my cursory inventory of the senses missed what a prodding of my abdomen revealed…the horrendous pain was still there, but it had isolated itself to the right side of my stomach, and was really sensitive to the touch. At this point, we were pretty convinced it was appendicitis, so Dave and I took off for the emergency room.
This is where life really started to get better. We rolled into the E.R. at Glendale Memorial Hospital at 9am, where they took amazing care of us until I was discharged at 9pm. We explained our google diagnosis to a doctor, who said “good job, we need all the help we can get! I think you’re right, let’s get you into a CAT scan. Want something for the pain?” YES, and the morphine drip was delicious. Just say yes to drugs. After the scan and a blood test, they concluded that the appendix had to come out right away, and luckily, there was an operating room available.
The anesthesiologist was the sweetest guy, who explained everything that was going to happen. I asked him if I could see the suicidal organ after it was out…he said they had to send it off to the lab, but they’d try to take a picture for me. The surgeon Dr. Perez was fabulous, and even called me the next day to see how I was, which is more than you can say for a lot of guys in this city.
The surgery itself was orthoscopic and no bid deal, just three small incisions, so I might even still have a shot at being a teen model! And I’ve had almost no pain, so I didn’t end up needing the pain meds they gave me. All in all, it was best-case scenario treatment for a worst-case scenario diagnosis. Go Glendale Memorial!
So on 12/30/10, we welcomed an unhealthy 6 inch appendix named Satan, who the doctors proudly said was the biggest they’d delivered all year. Seriously, it was about 3 times the size an appendix should be, not because it was sick, but because it was just huge in its natural state. You know what they say about girls with big hands…
So I’m traveling a little lighter these days. They gave us the photo, which I’ll spare you here, but it pretty much looks like the gnarled syphilitic penis of the devil.
So anyway, back to the moving. our roommate Brian was in hell, trying to weed out his stuff. He explained that the reason he has trouble throwing things away is because each object contains a memory, and losing it means losing the memory…so throwing things out is emotional. It was taking a toll on him as he weighed the value of a pink plastic bike basket, a life-size cutout of the main cast of the Wizard of Oz, an afro wig, a broken hot tub, a black onyx mannequin head, oversized heart-shaped glasses, a trampoline…each one had a story, an emotional tie…at one point he looked at me while I was sweeping and said, “that shirt that you’re wearing…it was handmade for me, in India, by my friend Corrine’s friend…” and he gazed off into the middle distance.
“Bri, I’m so sorry! All I knew was it was Dave’s, and it was in the Goodwill pile!” He said he didn’t care, that he’d given it away…but the fact that he had a story for everything, even what I was wearing, became fairly metaphoric for me about the whole situation. It was brutal for him.
In the end, we made it out OK. Brian had to get rid of his really cool organ, which was a shame. I lost an organ myself, so I guess we ended up even there. Dave, Aaron and I are in the new place, Brian and Teri (and Cutie Kitty) are staying with friends and lining up a new house. Bri got a chance to rest, and is back to his awesome self. He already came over to rock out a new studio design for the garage, so we will start construction on that next week. It’s going to be amazing!
We can’t wait for the next incarnation of the Icky’s Ego creative space on the east side, 2011! Housewarming party details to come.
The place to Rock’n'Roll! Mr. T’s has introduced thousands of new bands over the past 42 years. It has become a legend in the entertainment industry, featured in L.A. Weekly as the place to Go! Go! Go! Highlighted in Rolling Stone Magazine and written about on the front page of the L.A. Times.
Thank you to Truth-Action Productions, Chris Lyman, Eve Lyman, Ryan Patterson, DeAnn Dallas, Robyn Newmark, Newmark Beauty, and everyone who contributed to making this video.
Peter is a filmlover and filmmakeroriginally from the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan. Now in LA a total of 7+ years, Mr. Monro has started his own film production company, Film Habit, Inc. His first feature, Days Together, which he wrote, directed, produced, and edited, is currently being finished in post-production and will be submitted to film festivals the world round!
While you wait for the film, you can see Peter’s web TV series The Bedheadshere,and watch the trailer below:
Not only does he possess incredible talent as a film director, but he has also played his first live musical performance with yours truly, Icky’s Ego. It was really out of sheer determination that he accomplished this. Most people would say “Oh, no! I can’t perform in front of an actual live audience!” But Peter grabbed the horns by the bull and did it. It was one of the most satisfying experiences of his life and he will never forget the night that he became a rockstar. He thanks Icky’s Ego for that.
Now, he wants to digress and talk about religion. While Mr. Monro respects religion deeply, he finds himself aligned with Mr. Marx in that he believes religion is the opiate of the masses. He would like to quote a GZA track in saying that “Religion has done nothing but divide.” Damn right!
He remembers the first day he approached his father and asked “Dad, do you believe in God?”
“No,” his father replied, “there’s no proof.”
“Well, I don’t have any proof China exists,” Peter replied.
“Yeah, but that’s different. People come back from China,” his father retorted…
Peter is now an Agnostic and maintains a great deal of pride in his ignorance towards all things metaphysical.
Moving on to Hip-Hop. Mr. Monro also loves Hip-Hop and has been known to freestyle when having smoked enough weed and/or drank enough whiskey.
The great misconception that people have about hip-hop is that it’s all about gangtas, bitches, hoes, killing, shiny rims, ice, and the like. But if you look up some of the deeper, more poetic of Hip-Hop artists (ie Mr. Lif, Mestizo, Qwel, Aesop Rock) you’ll find that some of these “rappers” are true poets of the modern day.
Recommended film viewings:
Hunger, Directed by Steve McQueen (no, not that Steve McQueen.)
