Everything is fine all the time.

Whew! What a crazy couple of weeks it has been!

Ahmed was asked to fill in as a replacement drummer in the band Caribou, and they are coming through California soon (LA this Thursday!). For as hardworking a musician as he is, he deserves this opportunity, and it will be good to see him on drums again. Hell, it will be good to see him in a tour van again. Thus far on the tour, he's already had a couple of networking conversations that might very well benefit him and his own band even more. Pitchfork recently spread some love his way as well.

Ghengis Tron came through town, so I was able to spend some time with Jimmy. They stayed at the apartment and in the morning I showed them M de Chaya. And Baroness is on the tour with them, and it was good to hang out with those guys again. The show itself was dubbed "Murderfest", so you can predict the kind of 19-year-old metalcore audience that was present. I felt out of touch, but also like I was revisiting a past life.

One of my library songs was picked up by Trading Spaces (Episode 7). I won't see any money from BMI for months, but it's nice to know that my stuff as been on a national show of that caliber. If only I had found out before the air date.

It's worth mentioning that I provided nearly all the media (except for the DJ's mix) at the last Roller Derby bout, and felt pretty good about it. I edited together the highlight video that we use to start the show, I cut down the skateout song for the Fight Crew and added the airplane FX and rumble that I designed for a previous game, and since the Tough Cookies won the bout, during their victory lap I took the opportunity to play a hiphop remix that I wrote of the Sesame Street song "C is for Cookie", featuring a vocoded cookie monster and layered synths. It took several days of work, but I think it turned out pretty well. It was nice to play some music I made in front of 1700 people.

The approach that we have taken lately is that music should be loud when it's appropriate, and nonexistent when it's not. So when the DJ has something good ready for referee timeouts, we crank it up to the point that it plays a little above the announcers. When a player gets ejected for penalties, I play a 20-second edit of an appropriate song ("Bad Girl" by Usher and "Ridin' Dirty" by Chamillionaire were the two I used on Saturday) and play it loud for those 20 seconds, and then it gets out of the way during game play. I think this helps break up the game a little bit for the audience and heighten the pace of the game. Certainly more than a constant level of announcers with some quiet music underneath the whole time, as it used to be.

In other news, I got my California Driver's license (with motorcycle endorsement, of course) and I have been looking at motorcycles on craigslist religiously for the last week. I went and met with a guy last night about buying a '78 Suzuki, but the deal sort of fell apart when it had some trouble starting and he didn't have the necessary paperwork. I'll keep looking.

Also, this is kind of hypnotic: http://www.puppypetite.com/maltese.html