Bun Schlaff

The Cherry Lane theater is closing. It's most famous for being down the street from Milk & Cookies. Which is unfortunate because now I want a cookie.
The Economist says life gets better after the age of 46. I think they're just saying that for my benefit. They also explain why their articles don't have bylines. Another reason is because many of them work in intelligence for a couple of the bigger governments.

Amp Notes

These are important and sexy notes from Scott Fitzpatrick about my new Celtic Edana amplifier:
Regarding the Sovtek inverter tube and the difference between it and the JJ which the amp came with (and unfortunately which showed up DOA):

It's really hard to get a picture of a band in performance which includes everyone.

"Check your bias. Should be between 36-40. Adjust by ear in small difference. Bias test points under chassis. Set multimeter to dc volts."

I also went gushing on and on about how great an amp it is and his response was:

"It's one of the most incredible circuits ever.  True definition of classic.  Best part is, you can drop 6L6, 5881 or EL34 tubes in there with a rebias.  (FYI, el34's change the speaker out ohms...email me if you decide to ever do that)."


These are important notes for me to retain. Keywords are "bias", "rebias", "Edana", "tube".

This Close to Christmas

You'd think I'd be smart and have all my holiday shopping done. I could be like my partner Blair and have my office stuffed with boxes from Amazon.
But I don't.
A trip to a liquor store and I'm about finished with Christmas shopping.
I simply cannot stand Christmas shopping. Especially the incessantly happy Christmas music they pipe into the stores. I always think the Russian Chamber Chorus of New York as like an antidote to "Jingle Bell Rock".
I look forward to talking politics with my family. We're a fun gang. I'm going to be testing my "end of Monroe Doctrine" theories against the wisdom of my brother-in-law. At some point this will happen during the conversation:
"The invasion of Nicaragua"'
"No, I mean the other invasion of Nicaragua."
"No, sorry, the other "other" invasion.'"
"I believe we're referring to the one after that."
Are we talking about just the 20th Century?
"Yes, so it's the one after that."
"Oh. I see."
Wap. Aren't we still IN Nicaragua. Aren't they like the 51st State?

I don't think legally. Not anymore.
The last invasion was Grenada. No, then Panama. How is Lulu President?

Yup, this is how the conversation will go.

I'm not a bettin man but I see South America in the next 40 years.

Yep. With intermittent petting of cats, drunkenly. If you're not talkin' politics and religion, you're talkin' about cats.

Completeness

Something I learned a while ago from Melissa Riker back when we were shooting the movie Apostasy was the idea of "completing a phrase". Specifically I learned it because she was critiquing herself for not completing her phrases as she danced in a particular scene in that movie.
That was rather eye-opening to me. One of those moments where suddenly everything made sense. Like I should have seen it all this time. Ahh yes, completing a phrase -- in dance or music -- is very important. And it's one of the very few times you can really use a dance analogy to discuss music.
As we'll starting to move through the overdubs on the Tyrannosaurus Mouse album I've been doing a lot of close listening and one thing I appreciate is how Ethan makes full and complete phrases as a bass player. Ethan is a very conservative player -- never plays too many notes. When he does play a "fill" though, it's going to be complete and thought out.

This actually has the effect of making me a more conservative player. Which is a good thing. You want the guitar player to be conservative. He doesn't have to make swoops and dives and what-have-you every 8 bars. Having the turn-arounds on the bass and the drums is just sexier. And, nowadays, rare.

I'm very fortunate that I'm still really enjoying listening to our groovy little album. And we certainly do have a compete album of material if for no other reason than we can't seem to play a pop song for less than 9 minutes. My plan is to have most of the electric guitars finished by sometime around the beginning of the new year. Then we bring in Arie to finish up some keyboard overdubs!

+++++

This little fellow is apparently named "Tyrannosaurus".

Trois Meydl

Or: "Innocent Tongue Thinks" which I think should be a secret spy code for something. I ordered up some pictures of cats from my photographic sister Jeanne, this is what she provided.

Innocent

Tongue

Thinks

People I Look Like

I've been told I look like professional drummer Keith Carlock. It turns out I do. Via.

I always think I resemble Alex Lifeson.

Islamic Insurance for a New Generation

No, I have no idea what this site is about but apparently if you aren't afraid of what sort of cyber STD your computer can catch, you can download Clonehunter from it. Bizarrely, I think the site itself actually is about Islamic Insurance.* Why it has links to torrent sites is beyond me.

In any case, it might explain why the only reviews for Clonehunter on IMDB are from countries that do not have a licensing deal for the picture (as of this writing, the UK and the Netherlands.)

In Japanese the name of Clonehunter is

ターミネーター2525

Which I believe is "Terminator 2525"**. I can't find any Japanese reviews online but honestly I wouldn't know where to look. If you happen to read Japanese and find any, hit me up! I've found a lot of places to buy the picture in Japan but no reviews.
+++++
*You know that many Christian sects were opposed to insurance at the turn of the last century. It's because buying insurance meant you didn't believe in Providence or some such.
**In my browser that text is seriously messed up. In my editor on Blogger it seems fine. Yeah, I have no idea how my computer handles Japanese text.

Things That Amuse Me Volume II

Via Chance Shirley (I think), a really smart article about the music business in the Wall Street Journal by the lead singer for OK, Go.
I love this post on how to tour with a band. Especially point #13:

• 13- Driver picks the music.

Ha!

Actually, I've never done a truck-and-bus tour. I've only toured as a sound mixer for theater (and corporate broadcast) and except for some very ad-hoc situations where there was carpooling to out-of-town, I've only flown and then stayed in single rooms in nice hotels. I know, very luxurious, but that's the only stuff I've done.

A Blast from the Past

Pat DuBois, the bass player for Pavlov and the Drooling Dogs send me a picture taken by Sean Dineen of an ancient demo tape of ours (probably these copies were used to send to clubs in order for us to get gigs.) You'll notice the "201" area code which makes this tape about 28 years old or so. Man, tapes were so expensive we had to send these out on "normal" bias cassettes. Plus I love how our old home phone number is hand written by me on the label. 

Here's a funny fact: Tyrannosaurus Mouse does a song that is on this tape. I must have been 18 or maybe 19 when I wrote it. The song is Jabberwocky (using the Lewis Carrol words) and when we do "One two One two through and through" we think about Pat who insisted (rightly) that the whole band accented the quarter notes right there.

Tidying Some Pencils

Via.
There are 378 comments on "Tidying Some Pencils" on The Dullest Blog in the World (and you thought this was the dullest blog in the world.)
Here's an interesting article on updating and auditing your passwords. I just use "123456" -- that's good, right? Well, that and "password". In any case, I'm going to look into LastPass.

Jackets and Amplifiers

I wrote a review of the Celtic Amps Edana on Harmony Central.
Today I spent some time playing it (and my Lil' Dawg Mutt) fairly loud. Not knock-over-the-furniture loud. But fairly loud.
The clean sound on that amp is very nice.

Now that I have a psychedelic jacket, what is the rest of the band going to wear? This is going to be a very difficult conversation when we come to it.

Hot Chicks With Stormtroopers

This is pretty much why the Internet exists, right? Christy Marie is like a professional slave Leia.

Less IMDB

IMDB is just generally a pain in my chops. I've got two movies, with distribution, which I'm not going to be able to get on IMDB unless we submit to one of their "partner festivals" via Withoutabox. Those are Day 2 and Earthkiller. Grrr...

Less IMDB is a John August script which makes some browsers show IMDB pages in a way that... well in the way they should be shown in the first place.

Somehow I've managed to not see both Chopping Mall and The Keep. I don't know how I did that but I did.

Day 2 Deliverables

We have a definite delivery date for Day 2. Well, we have a definite delivery month and that is January of 2011. I guess we should have a screening in January too. I refuse to try to schedule any sort of get-together between now and, say, January 3rd. Because nobody has a reasonable schedule between now and then.

Act 7 fell out of sync. Either I didn't tell Maduka that it was locked and I was mixing it, or he (understandably) wasn't paying any attention to me. Or something else entirely. Something weird and unexplainable. Because honestly, that happens more than you'd like to think it does. UPDATE: of course, it turns out to be weirder than that because the act is in sync but the upload to Vimeo was not. Meh.

You know, you think that you have plenty o'time to finish picture before delivery, but there's always some damned thing that can go wrong. And we haven't even run a QC check on the movie, much less made a dialog continuity script (with all the English dialog and its location in time-code so that the movie can be dubbed or subtitled.) But we can have drive failures, failures at the lab, stupid mistakes in the audio, and missing or weird color-correction. We have, in the past, noticed that we were about to send a movie out with missing scenes. Sheesh.

And I guess we should do a commentary track. We could just bring everyone over and set up a couple microphones and watch the movie. That would be the cheap, dirty way to do it.