The Great and Secret Thing is on hiatus for the time being. Not sure when we’ll be back, but we will.

Bigger and better than ever. Promise.

For the meantime though, submissions are closed..

Thanks again for all your support.

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All images © Brandon Dill Photography
Please don’t steal them. That’s a jerk thing to do.

The concept was that people could pitch any kind of music or business music idea to the other participants. Then, 8 pitches would be picked to have groups work on that idea for 48 hours, presenting at the end of the weekend. From there only four groups would move forward to a showcase show at the New Daisy in July, with the winner getting a record deal and other awesome prizes.

Laurel did a lot of the collateral design work for the project at Archer, and thought that it might be something fun for us to do. You know, do some design work, maybe build a website for a band that needed work.

Like all of our Bad Ideas, this ballooned into something much bigger than we expected.

We ended up working with a group of 8 musicians who were strangers on Friday, and by Sunday were making music that I really feel represents the modern diversity of Memphis and America as a whole. We named them The Delta Collective, and ended up taking over all of their marketing/legal/business research while they got to the business of writing and recording.

And my God did they knock that part of it out of the park.

At then end of the weekend, we presented the band, their music and all of the planning we’d done. I took over the business end of the presentation, and from the audience feedback, we were the best of the bunch.

I’ll never forget when the judges came back after their deliberations.

“Now, here are the winners in no particular order…
The Delta Collective…”

So, they’re moving on to the showcase in July, with L and I acting as publicists/shepherds/managers/enablers.

You can check out the final product at the website we built:
http://thedeltacollective.com/

And stream our first track right here!

That’ll also lead you all of our social media stuff, too.

We’ve got 90 days to do as much as we can with these guys, who were, just 48 hours ago, total strangers.

No idea what’ll happen in that or beyond that, but at least for the weekend, those six people and the two of us had our lives changed for the better.

I just wish I could have a weekend after that weekend. Our yard needs to be cut badly, ha.

Loneliness sneaks,
succeeds only
when full
on blood and berries -
the feast of the lonely
on a Saturday evening.
On a Sunday,
no one answers.
Framed in suntan
and a problem: there
it is – the lonely.
Every other is another
I used to know fully.

In the deer clean,
the ladybugs
were all dead dry shells.
Here is where one deer hung.
was asked a question:
What will you bring?

Early spring – my favorite South-
aching dolor, glorious green.
Ambition robs my bones
of meat, leaves them
like tiny antlered skulls
bleachwhite, deer clean.
Hungry meat – sad thing.
Sorry about our fight-
Sunday might
grow berries over our
tired bones, clean
sheets. Stay with me.

Ambition is a funny thing.
Will I succeed? I scrape
each poem of meat. My blood
is so far away from me.
I can no longer tangle
those veins. And it
leaves a lonely feeling.
Green ruin and rotting.

The building was obviously alive, the way it sighed and shuddered and sometimes even shrieked. Which was yet another thing he could never get used to about the future.

They’d given him counseling sessions when he came out of cryo-sleep. It was legally required they’d told him. That, and they weren’t going to let him out until he signed a sheaf of non-disclosure agreements and waivers against future lawsuits.

Looking back on it, the litigious nature of society was probably the only thing he could go to as a comforting constant if he was so inclined.

In the future, people moved about in nano-active clouds of advertisement and social media, speaking a digitized shorthand of a half-dozen world languages with a mixture of programming code.

Fashion, architecture, even social policy and law were constantly being crowd-sourced and restructured on the fly to better suit the desire of the masses.

One morning he left his looming, hard-edged dark green government-funded housing. When he came home, it was bright pink and like something out of a Guadi nightmare.

Streets rearranged themselves as people walked on them. Songs changed genres as they played, hoping to stay current with the times.

Permanence was dead, dashed on the rocks by the oncoming tide of progress.

The only friend he’d made was a girl, frozen a century after him. They’d taken to each other, probably two of the only people in a hundred miles who didn’t use some form of electronic aid to speak to each other.

They were strangers in a strange land, but together in that strangeness.

That is until they’d tried to make love one night. When they’d taken off their adaptive-polymer coveralls, she’d begun to cry. And he had thrown up.

They weren’t compatible.

Another of the 300 word bits from Lindsey’s Opening Lines prompts.