the IDIOT

great news (mixed with some bad). my sweetie christina amphlett, ultra guitar badass mark mcentee, and “the others” (including, of course, chrissy’s husband charley [rawk!] — sadly, last name of drayton, not hardman — on drums) are together and touring. yes, i know i’m behind the times hearing about this, but hey.

get the latest inforsmacionel and watch their new cartoon video at divinyls.com.au. new album in 2008, bitch!

[thanks as usual to riotgrrl.] (more…)

i wrote last month of discovering that my sweetie chrissy amphlett (of divinyls) had published a book. zowie! just picked it up from the post office today, and it’s been an enjoyable afternoon eating pizza and this luscious book.

it’s a much better looking paperback than i figured from the publicity pic. assumed it was a low budget, local release. it may be sold primarily in australia, but they didn’t fuck around on the quality. it’s nicely bound, with multiple photo sections that are quite enjoyable. the photos are printed well, black and white on glossy paper, and most come with personal descriptions from the prime lass. learned that her given name is christine, not christina. she says that ‘christina’ came out “when Mum and Dad were cross with me.”

such a personal book. i’m only up to page 34, but it’s obvious from the start that she’s writing from the heart. love hearing about how she grew up. the descriptions of her parents, sister, and forming events are straight and true. what a soul this woman has. it’s funny to think that famous people still recall by name the average numbnutz types who terrorized them in childhood. her take on it had me laughing during dinner: (more…)

looks like the woman of my dreams, christina amphlett, regularly calls herself chrissy publicly now. i’ve missed some major news on the ms. amphlett wave (just found courtesy of riotgrrl’s new chrissieamphlett.com):

she has a website! (yayyyyy!)

she wrote a book! (yayyyyy!)

(more…)

somebody just sent me a live 90s divinyls show on DVD. wow! hard to believe, but i’m actually seeing christina amphlett (my honey) moving around on video (though i have seen her a little in the movie monkey grip). the girl had serious ass. was a little plumper than when i saw her live in the 80s. me like. legs? don’t get me started. as usual, she tore it up with her little yodel whirbles and throaty invitations.

marry me, christina; sex will keep us together. i adore you. do anything for you. bless my soul, it’s rock ‘n roll, etc.

she loves rock and roll. obvious.

i’ve been thinking about the christina amphlett traffic at this blog, and the neat market principles it demonstrates. out of all the popular women featured here since june 2004 (start date), why has christina amphlett, by far, been the reason for the most hits from search engines? the former name of the blog, “girls jumping on trampolines”, got more hits for the time it was in use, but both examples are valuable for similar reasons.

here are the women who, because they are named in links on most of the blog pages, make up the pool:

of those names, only one meets the criteria for a comparatively easy marketing opportunity: christina amphlett.

most of the women in the list are actresses, a category popular enough to be listed among few others on the google zeitgeist page. many of the top search sites list and analyze their top searches, and there are probably many brute-force type marketers who look at those regularly for opportunities to make money. i think the best, most interesting, opportunities lie outside of mega-popularity lists.

if i have angelina jolie, elisabeth shue, rose mcgowan, katie holmes, and catherine zeta-jones listed, why aren’t they generating hits to this site? the answer is obvious if you think about it, but google gives it too.

“angelina jolie” returns 1,250,000 result pages. i don’t feel like looking, but it’s likely that saltypig.com is buried toward the middle or end of those. same with the others:

“catherine zeta-jones” — 603,000

“katie holmes” — 302,000

“rose mcgowan” — 148,000 (probably many misspelling issues for her)

“elisabeth shue” — 116,000 (plus 36,900 more under “elizabeth shue”)

but “christina amphlett” returns only 2,530, and this blog is listed in the first 10 results. for a prospective entrepreneur, the hot thing about christina amphlett is that she’s no longer hot! perhaps more important, far as the web goes, she was never hot, since her popularity waned considerably in the early 90s.

and yet, for a new, unpopular site, i’m bombed with hits for her because of this one blog post (with its associated link on every page, of course). if i were a shingle-hoisting marketing poseur sort, i’d probably be screwed trying to understand this completely. i understand what’s going on though, because i’m also one of the people searching for her. if i had the time and inclination right now, i’d be comfortable setting up a business focused on christina amphlett and her group divinyls (with cofounder/guitarist mark mcentee), based only on blog hits and my habits regarding her and the group. here’s why:

• since the late 80s, i’ve looked for divinyls videos in every major video store i’ve walked into. haven’t found one. though they made music videos, i’ve only seen one or two. though they performed on TV outside of music videos, i only saw one appearance. any tape or DVD releases are out of print
• i’ve looked for divinyls and christina amphlett on the web since ’96, but i don’t look regulary. probably take a stab once a year or so. if representative, that trickle approach could provide a solid year or two of steady sales before saturation.
• rolling stone magazine ran a small picture of christina amphlett with mark mcentee in the late 80s that got my attention enough to go buy one of their albums without ever having heard them. it was worth buying just for the cover, so who cared, right? i have not seen that picture anywhere since. are there more like it? would it have the same effect now?
• the best divinyls site is a labor of love by a passionate fan. most of it was assembled when hard drive space was expensive, and access speeds much slower. though the pictures and selection are wonderful, they are usually low resolution. (i haven’t confirmed those as the reasons, but it’s a safe assumption.)

a dedicated soul could compile high-quality photos, track down video masters, and work probably 3 or 4 months to corner the market on christina amphlett materials. legal problems would be the normal drag there. the “rights holders” to some material would rather piss on people as holdouts than make money off of it now. those are problems that have been solved before. it’s not complete fantasy that christina would meet and perhaps participate with somebody who put together an artful plan and showed ability to handle the material logistics.

the market is small, but with a trickling sort of staying power. i hope somebody will try, if only for history. she’s a unique woman, and classic photo negatives and other original materials are probably being thrown away every year. there must be enough footage from many sources to make 2 or 3 respectable DVD releases on top of the released videos that are out of print. a coffee table book could be considered if sales warranted. (just the thought makes me weak in the knees.)

web marketing strategies are still not tapped completely. old approaches don’t always cover things that didn’t exist. the advertising expense for cashing in fully on the lingering christina amphlett seekers could be as low as $500/yr, not including time.

obviously, she’s not the only possibility like that. the market vacuum for dedicated “girls jumping on trampolines” material is even bigger. is any of this news? hardly. meet the original masters of getting buyers and sellers of obscure materials together on the web. the seller who makes it possible for buyers to get together with christina/divinyls products can gloat, “i’ll make you happy — just like your mommy said.” they’d get my money.

here’s a block of raw search terms from one resolved google address so far this month by people who found their way to this site. (some of the terms represent 2-4 hits each, presumably from different people who had similar google settings.):

the lesson here is that if you want to artificially boost traffic to your site, write something about christina amphlett.

is that the weirdest or what? the woman’s been mostly unheard from for years, and there are pathetic dweebs (like me) combing the web nonstop, presumably for pictures of the australian terror. sadly, for all christina dweebs, the best site is now gon… ALERT! i take it back! it’s back up! whoohooo! i don’t get it. i just emailed her (riotgrrl) a couple of months ago, but it didn’t sound like the site would return. this is great news for all music-loving pervs!

well, here it is: the best diVINYLS site: riotgrrl’s d I V I N Y L S Australian Website

riotgrrl, you rock, ma’am. it’s just an amazing site. glad you brought it back. no other divinyls site comes anywhere close.

btw, good quote about amphlett here: “Few Aussie rock bands defined the era better than the Divinyls. Fewer still did it with a lead singer who was a woman, and a very assertive and menacing one at that…” ha! that was true. i was scared when i saw divinyls — afraid that she might reach into the audience, grab me, and perform some unheard of sexual act that would take my life.

the sweet dreams of youth.

forget their silly hit. christina and the boys from divinyls (essentially the terribly unappreciated musical genius mark mcentee) rocked the house for several albums in the 80s before becoming “one hit wonders” with their masturbatory 90s romp. she looked as sexy as i’ve ever seen a woman look, but when it came to singing, christina dropped everything and zoned in on the task with her weirding angle — intense, and so very musical. saw them with a small crowd at DC’s 9:30 club in the 80s. the old cliché of “she was looking straight at me” was laughably true that night. bopping along with her, a few rows back in the sparse crowd, i like to think that if i’d gone backstage and proposed she would’ve been all mine. well, we all have our stories, don’t we? what a gig that was, after a full day of quarry diving with my buds.

(click for pics and links)

[040823 update: riotgrrl's d I V I N Y L S Australian Website is back up, and it's the place to go. you're gonna make out all right, or break out all right.]