Writers' Strike

A few people have asked me how the writers' strike is going to affect my work, so I figured I would take a stab at answering this question in public (while restarting Pro Tools after it crapped out on me).

Since our facility works mostly on reality TV, most of us editors and mixers are not directly affected by the strike at all. We do have a few feature films in here at the moment, but I don't think we get more than a handful of those per year, though we would like to.

As far as I can tell, the strike is going to affect us positively in the short term and, maybe, negatively in the long term, if it lasts that long. Since reality shows (theoretically) don't have scripts and thus don't have writers, production companies are focusing on producing more reality TV during this time. And networks are airing more of it to fill the airtime between commercials. This is, for example, why the most hyped thing on NBC is the new American Gladiators series that is starting up (sort of the 'less talk, more rock' approach to dealing with the strike). So we will end up getting more work from the production companies that already come to us, and hopefully we'll get new clients as production companies expand their reality departments or as new companies start up to generate content.

In the long term, it's likely that other post-production audio places in town will shift focus to work more on all the reality programming that is going to pop up, so they may try to take some of our business, and we could be negatively impacted by that. But it's more likely that they will be working on shows from production companies with which they already had a working relationship. So they are probably not going to take clients away from us.

There is also the pipe-dream hope that we'll get some new clients who start up to make reality TV, get some success, and then after the strike ends, they'll start producing some scripted shows and they'll continue working with us on those, so we'll have more of that type of work around the facility.

Comics

I guess I missed the boat on these, since they have all been around for a long time, but I just got into them:

http://pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF238-Capital_Punishment.jpg

http://spamusement.com/index.php/comics/view/284

http://alienlovespredator.com/?id=7

I'm dreaming of what?

Due to uncertainty in my work schedule and lack of planning ahead on plane ticket prices, I'm not going back east for Christmas this year. It's not a big deal, I guess. I was in France last year and I was in the South on tour the year before that. To be honest, I'm really not that big on Christmas to begin with; I think Thanksgiving is the best American holiday and Halloween is a distant second. But I have to say that I was looking forward to the snow. It's almost like the cold and the snow are a part of me, as much an aspect of my culture as local art or music. I feel like My People are, by default, dressed in layers ranging from hoodies to parkas, all the way from October to April. My People spend three months out of the year subsisting on hot chocolate and maybe warm apple cider. My People know how to drive in slippery conditions and know how to properly use the windshield defogger. Though My People are not necessarily MountainDewXtreme enough to go snowboarding, they all know at least three good spots to go sledding. My People love snow days. So I feel a little lost without any snow in the foreseeable future.

Come to think of it, I got just a taste of it in August, actually, up in Lake Tahoe.
...though maybe mountain snow is cheating.

Anyway, it's definitely the time of year when you know, beyond all possible doubt, that every reasonable person working in a retail store somewhere is already sick of Christmas music. Candy Canes abound. But it's still... Los Angeles. Do you have any idea how silly Christmas lights look on palm trees?

This time last year I was in Brittany, where it pours incredibly cold rain in the winter, but rarely snows. The science there escapes me, to be honest. In early December, when Emily and Jerome were still around, we went up to the coast near Plouha, stood huddled up on the rocky cliffs and peered over the sides at the thrashing water below while the winter wind combed through the long tufts of grass that grow there.

Later Emily went back to the States and winter vacation started and I was the only one left on the school campus. From the refectory to the dorms, all the classroom buildings and offices, everyone was gone for the break. And I was the only one without anywhere to go, the only one passing through that big metal gate at night, around the dark corners in the half-light. So they turned off the institutional oil heat and supplied me with a small electric heater, which worked out alright. I turned it off when I went out during the day, to the market or the library, so my room was always frigid when I returned. (Why is Inside-Cold so much colder than Outside-Cold?) Those twenty minutes waiting for the heater to warm up the room were always 'fun' in that at-least-it's-never-dull kind of way.
I spent a lot of time under blankets that winter. Under blankets, watching VHS movies (WTF, PAL speed-up?) from the local library with the amazing AV section, taking days to binge on one director at a time, Hitchcock (subtitled), Truffaut, Woody Allen (subtitled, poorly), Polanksi (st), Besson, Godard, Jarmusch (st, p), Tarkovsky(st), blah blah.
The school has these energy-saving light switches in the hallways that all run on a timer. There is a round button, illuminated by a thin orange circle, and when you push it, a soft grinding sound starts, and you get about two minutes to get where you're going, and then it turns off again, to prevent it being left on unnecessarily. A good idea for an institution. Hell, a good idea in general. But it does mean that at night, the hallway is always really dark in the time it takes to get from your room (or the kitchen, or wherever) to that little orange circle. That, combined with the fact that I was all alone in this big building, combined with the creaky, smooth hardwood floors, and the five-hundred-year-old stone stairs, so well-used that there is a scoop worn out of the center of them, made it pretty eerie to watch Hitchcock up in the living room and then creep back to my bedroom, dashing around corners to the next little button to illuminate the next (creaky) segment of the walk.

Actually, now that I think of it, one of the lights in the bathroom was on the same setup, so a couple of times I was surprised, two minutes into a shower (after manually turning on the electric water heater, also turned off during break) when I was left in darkness. Showering in the dark is actually kind of nice, it turns out.

Maybe it's just that I'm never satisfied. Always longing after whatever season it isn't. After winter break, in the middle of that winter that was heavy and dark, without giving the satisfaction of snow, I drove a borrowed car on the weekends to other places on the coast, mostly the beaches, bundled up against the wind and the rain, looking longingly at the sand and the waves crashing against rocks and even the German bunkers from the war. I remember picturing those same beaches in the summer, and picturing myself returning there, thinking, "Five months and forty degrees from now." I wanted to go and sit by myself on the beach and get sand in between the pages of all my favorite drunk authors, maybe make some new friendships that would only last twenty minutes, absorb a little sun, lie there and think about things. I remember thinking how much I wanted to eat summer food, bread and fruit, let the juice get all over my fingers and leave me sticky and preoccupied about it until I rinsed them off in the sea. Maybe that would leave them all salty, but that's probably better, anyway.

So maybe I always displace myself a few months or a few thousand miles ahead. In the meantime, there's good news: I just found out where to ice skate in Los Angeles. And I can drink warm apple cider even if it's not that cold out.

Quests and Discoveries

Went to the West Hollywood market today and then Grand Central Market, looking for shallots and dried porcini mushrooms and not finding either. So I've bumped the beet reduction sauce a little farther down on the menu for this week and threw together a curry with potatoes and cauliflower for tonight. Hopefully the market at 7th and Figueroa on Thursday will have what I need, cuz otherwise I'm going to give up and go to Ralph's.

I really need to get a camera to take some pictures of the markets I like and the dishes I make. But for now, believe me when I say that Grand Central Market is pretty amazing. I'm going to take some time and learn about the different chilies available, and all the Mexican spices and produce, including different varieties of dried mango, tamarind, and tomatillos. I also need to spend some time at the stand that specializes in mole and learn how to use that.

As a chronic dish-reuser, either from some sense of saving the water that it takes to wash them, or a fundamental laziness, or some combination of the two, I discovered something very interesting. I made myself a small PBJ sandwich and noticed that it had a little kick. I realized that this was because I had used the same spoon for the peanut butter and jelly as I had for the chili powder in the curry. It's really good! So I made another half-sandwich, this time with about 3/4 teaspoon chili powder. I recommend it highly.

No Sleep Schedule

Night before last, I stayed up late ruining a beet reduction sauce. I guess I thought that a fair amount of starch would strip out of the chopped-up beets and precipitate into the liquid, but that didn't really happen. The beets really kept their form and the liquid didn't thicken up much. So when I tried to reduce it, there was nothing left, really. Hard to explain. The water and wine and sautéed onions and carrots were all in there, but there was just shockingly little left after evaporating the water off. It smelled and tasted good and everything, but...
So I repeated a few cycles of this and then fell asleep in a chair at 4am, waiting. Thankfully the roommates turned off the burner. In the morning I decided to get some starch in there to thicken it up by any means necessary. So I cut off a little bit of potato and sliced in into the saucepan, with the idea being that potato disintegrates pretty well and the starch from that could lend some texture to the sauce. It was going pretty well at first, but then at some point I left it alone for 15 minutes (not a problem pre-potato) and when I checked on it, it was black and hardened and required steel wool.

sigh.

So I'm going to try it again, this time pressing juice out of the beets more before introducing it to the mix, and maybe trying xantham gum instead of potato. Consulting my new, trusty list of farmers' markets, at least six of which are within reasonable biking distance to me or the metro, I think I'm headed to West Hollywood today.

I kind of fell in love with beets in France, actually. Staying away from meat isn't that hard, but when trying to avoid dairy and eggs over there, it's easy to fall into eating only fruit and bread at home and salad and fries in restaurants. but the french are really big on beets, usually cut into little wriggly worm shapes, with a little vinaigrette, sometimes a little corn. Beets are astounding in that they kind of taste like dirt, but in the best possible way.

In other news, it might be a good time to visit me, because I am beta-testing a couple of recipes for dessert breads this week. I need to put in some work ahead of time, because there is a Roller Derby bout on Saturday, and I am baking a pumpkin bread and a zucchini-walnut bread for the Sirens, my friend Amber's team. Actually, two loaves would probably be enough for both teams. Maybe they'll share. Though actually, that's unlikely, since I baked the Sirens brownies for their scrimmage last week (I bake something or other for them every time) and left them at the track with a note and they never saw them! Which means that someone stole them! Which means that my brownies are worth committing crimes for!

For those of you who have asked questions about it, Roller Derby is kind of hard to explain. I mean the rules are simple enough, but the mood of the games and the culture that surrounds it is kind of hard to outline precisely. It's also easy to misunderstand, so please go here and read a little about the game, its role as an event somewhere between sport and spectacle, some of the practical difficulties in presenting a DIY sport to the public, being taken seriously as athletes, etc. It's articulate and has a good perspective.

One of the most alluring things about the Derby Dolls is ...they need a lot of help! It's a mostly-punkrock event that turns out 1200 people, so there is always a project to work on. Lately it's been acoustic treatment of the room, setting up the scoreboard, putting together a rented sound system and planning out a permanent one.
It's been over a year since I worked on live sound for an event, and once you've spent years working to be good at something, you naturally miss it. I don't mix the bands at Derby Dolls events, but still. Projects, projects, projects.

Slimy

It's raining in Los Angeles. It's not quite up to late-fall-in-the-midwest standards, with all their gloppy, loud, kinda painful glory. But it's a lot more that the usual drizzle. Pretty rare.
It's rare enough that it's kinda dangerous.

The rain mixes with the grime and filth on the roads and it makes them very slippery. In most normal cities, it rains often enough that the grime is regularly washed away, so we don't notice it much. In LA, it builds up for months, so the first few hours of a rain mix all that mostly-dry film on the roads into a nice sheen of slippery, gooey good times. It's something of which I became frighteningly aware the first time I lived in LA, when I rode a motorcycle. Note: Sliding around on a motorcycle is a lot less fun than in a car.

So I didn't even attempt to ride my bike. Especially since I just finished work and I'm tired enough from being up all night (note time of post) that my equilibrium is shot. I just took the metro and walked my bike from hollywood and highland.

I was working on a new show that we got recently. I'm not sure which network is going to air it, but it's about a highschool marching band and somehow, it's actually pretty good. I liked working on it, in part because it's not one of the frustrating pseudoscience ghost shows we do.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention, though, that the really good thing about the rain is that even a really light sprinkle pulls the smog out of the air and the views around town are WAY more clear. downtown, mountains, everything. Ok, maybe all those pollutants being pulled down into the water table isn't a really good thing, but, you know.

Anyway the view from the roof of my (14-story) apartment building is going to be amazing!

Ok, enough. I'm going to bed.

Gallic Scrapbook

I've been thinking a lot about France lately. Not just this past year and teaching English and all, but the bicycle tour I did the spring before, and the summer in school in Lyon. And I realized that I never really told people all the stories, and especially all the things that aren't exactly stories but were so much more important at the time. I think that I sort of wanted to keep them private, keep those memories for myself, only allowing bits and pieces out to anyone else, but recently I am kind of scared that I will start to lose the things that mattered most to me while I was there. I also feel like I owe it to friends in the Eastern Standard time zone, since I didn't really stay and hang out at all in between Brittany and LA, and only gave short, predictable answers to the question "How was France?"

I feel like I have forgotten a lot, not in a permanent loss kind of way, but in a temporary, just-need-to-jog-it-loose kind of way. Hopefully this will help.


I remember springtime in Brittany, unfolding on schedule the second week in March, but still taking everyone by surprise and lifting our spirits in spite of ourselves. I remember the first few days of sunshine, when we didn't dare hope it would continue because we didn't want to jinx it, so Silvia couldn't help but spill out a running commentary of the unexpected beauty of every small glinting thing we crossed, basking in the same sunlight but all seeming fresh and new and different, like the deep glowing green of ducks' necks on a pond or glimmering jewelry in a shop window. I remember the warmth, at long last, that let us take off our jackets, only to remember that we had to cover ourselves (due to Catholicism) before entering the basilica in Quintin, which was just as well because the dark inside of the chapel didn't yet know that winter was over and was thus still cold enough that we could see our breath, an extra treat in the few daring rays of colorful light trickling down from the handful of stained-glass windows depicting Our Lord and Saviour or Whatever. I remember whistling as quietly as possible to hear the sound reflected and carried up throughout the Gothic arches in the ceiling, out of my control after passing through my lips, but still my responsibility in case any sour-faced church personnel appeared. Fortunately they did not, and I was able to experiment some with different acoustic decay times from different locations in the chapel, as well as different intervals and pitch registers, even using the reverberation to harmonize a little. Silvia definitely frowned at me in that particularly Italian way and I felt compelled to explain that she shouldn't bother, that whistling in churches was one of my favorite things, so no amount of frowning would make me stop.

I recall how a few weeks later, it turned out that our apprehension was either well-founded or coincidentally accurate; this brief respite didn't last forever. I awoke one morning shivering and saw through the window that the whole world (or Brittany, at least) was bathed in white. There was a fog so thick that I couldn't see three rows deep into the cemetery across the way, but it wasn't grey. The light permeating through the fog was strange, almost eerie; it was as if there were no clouds actually blocking the sun and it would have been a bright, cheery day, if only I had been elevated sixty feet in the air. As it was, it made everything quite beautiful, since there was plenty of light, but the limited range of visibility forced everyone to focus on the nearby, perceptible objects more closely, isolating them for analysis. This was my impression, anyway.

And along with the fog came the Dutch, two boxy European vans' worth of exchange students, all buzzing in that Germanic, loud, fashion-forward way, prone to some combination of bangly bracelets, blond layered hair and tiny, round eyeglasses. Recognizable from at least sixty yards. Their French was awful. Negligible, even, so everyone spoke in English. I am proud to mention that my French kids' English was at least as good as theirs, even though I had always had the impression that Dutch people are born speaking seven languages fluently, with English chief among them. I ended up traveling with the group as a chaperone, and this somehow felt more adult, even, than teaching. I remember that the bus ride was the first time I truly cursed the existence of portable music and loudspeakers (read: modern cell phones), and in particular their popularity with youths in every industrialized country in the world.

People of Earth: Hip-hop sounds terrible through tiny speakers. Make a note of it.

Damn, did I feel old.


Much more to come! Old bars, the chapel at the school, weird american hangups! Poorly designed parking garages! Immigration issues!

Surrogate

Vince and Stephanie took the holiday opportunity to go Back East for a couple of weeks. So I have been staying at their place and taking care of their cats. That's actually most of the reason I started this blog; I'm in someone else's house without all my usual distractions and my friends are out of town.

Cooking in someone else's house is kind of interesting. I had to run home to get my pie tin, since apparently they don't place as high a priority on baking as I do. You get used to doing things certain ways with the tools that you have, and if the toolset changes a little, you have to, say, roll out a pie crust with a wine bottle. There's no shame in that.

Also, did you know that not everyone stocks sesame oil, nutritional yeast and tofu at all times, just in case? Weird, huh? Thanksgiving dinner turned out great, anyway. I wish I had a camera to take pictures of the tofurky, stuffing, sweet potato casserole, mashed potatoes, sautéed kale, cranberry sauce, and apple pie. After I finished off the apple pie a few days later, I made a pumpkin pie as well.

Later this week I think I am going to do 'butter'y-French style seitan with a red wine and beet reduction. I have a few especially toity recipes that I am going to try out. And if I find a camera in a drawer somewhere, I'll take pictures.

The cats are pretty great. Devo is enormous and friendly and behaves more like a dog than a cat. I think he is smart enough to figure out that being aloof only gets you cred temporarily. Duncan is a beautiful deep grey and he's legitimately shy. He spends most of his time under blankets, though as he gets used to you he'll come out more and warm up. In the presence of any guests, myself formerly included, he would always disappear somewhere. They are really very insistent about feeding time, though. In particular, they wake me up in the morning by knocking my glasses off the nightstand or putting their cold noses on me.



This housesitting venture also coincides with a dry spell at work; I haven't been to the studio/office in a week and a half, and this after working a full week and putting in at least 20-30 hours at the Roller Derby track to get sound and other production elements ready. So after being in high gear, these two weeks are a little disorienting. I've been reading, watching movies, and trying to write some music for the library, though it's a little slow-going since most of my gear is back at my apartment downtown, and I didn't feel like lugging all of it up to Hollywood.



In truth, the setup that I have cobbled together reminds me a lot of the portable composing rig that I put together when I was living in France: it's functional, every thing has its place, but it's just a little awkward everywhere and not at all ergonomic. Of course, in Brittany it was all arranged on a hundred-some-year-old desk, not an Ikea jerker. And the view from my window was a two-hundred-some-year-old cemetery, not the Hollywood Bowl. But still. it reminds me just the same. And I managed to get some writing done on that setup. We'll see.



In Vince's absence I have also been recruited to work on the finishing touches on the audio for the movie we have been working on for, uh, ever. We just had some sync issues so I pulled down all audio files for the whole movie and I am told by the video guy and the director that sync is solid now. It feels good to wrap up a project that big, and now I'm kind of anxious to start whatever is next. The screening is on Friday, though I just got an email saying that now I may have some work that evening. Perfect. Of course. It couldn't possibly work out any other way.

Roots, or at least an anchor.

Hey, look, I have a blog.

It seems like the job in Boston isn't going to pan out anytime soon. Still a possiblity, but it's a lot closer to the horizon than to me. I think I have internalized this fact and I'm ready to actually live in Los Angeles, commit to finding things here that I consider part of my life, instead of letting this feel like yet another temporary station.



So let's make a list of what I need to do:



-find a food co-op here and join it. (probably won't find one downtown)

-make a map with the local farmers' markets and mark a calendar.

-get a membership to second-run and older movie theaters.

-make friends. (yikes)

-go to shows.

-find a good bike shop.

-build a loft in my room.

-ship my records out here and buy a record player.

-learn Spanish.

Any other suggestions? What things make up a life?