Really Big Sheets of Paper

Oh. hey.

2009-07-14T22:29:00.000-07:00

As I've said, the busiest times are the most interesting, but then there's no time to document it. I've waffled between slaughtered-with-projects and sleeping-over-ten-hours-daily for a while, with a fairly regular work schedule. Then the Survivor season ended and we finished that other show and things have been a little spotty and less consistent lately. Episodes deliver late, I cancel dinner plans, etc. etc.

But for as busy as I felt there, for a while, I can't think of much that happened. Predictable and boring heartache aside, the main thing that sticks out for me the last few months is that I realized that in American English, at the end of Zs and hard Ss, there's a short section of a soft S. I don't know why I never noticed before, but it kind of blew me away.

As you know, in addition to the more creative work of designing and editing sound effects, I (much more often) edit dialog. Sometimes this means cleaning up production sound in noisy environments, sometimes this means pacing out the sentences in interviews that have had content removed for more concise storytelling (removing ums or stutters, replacing pronouns with proper nouns, shifting sentences from the past tense into the present, etc), and sometimes this means editing voiceover to fit and play over action.

I was working on a 'wacky' series with two commentators who talked over each other fairly often and for the most part, fading one out as the other started speaking worked just fine, but in cases where they did a few takes of a section and changed up timing, sometimes a whole word or just a syllable at the end of one commentator's sentence would be masked by the other in one take, but not in another. i.e. you can hear Tom talking over the end of Jerry's line in Jerry's mic, but since the producers wanted to use a different take of the next line, we don't want to hear Tom start to talk, but we want Jerry to finish his line. Make sense? So in order to execute that, I have to find an acceptable substitute for the last few letters that Jerry was saying so his sentence ends cleanly. In the particular instance that I am talking about, the line ended with a hard S and I was having a difficult time finding a clean one in that episode. But as I mentioned, it turns out that in a hard S or a Z, after the vocalized part, there's a short voiceless part. Pure S. I figured I would try stealing a soft S (Ok let's get picky: a voiceless alveolar sibilant) and pasting it at the end. It sounded seamless and I added another tool to my toolbox!

And I do this stuff all the time. After a while you get notice that you can put in a long fade across a W and you won't hear it, you should always drop a short fade into the center-loudest point in a short I, etc, etc. You know that you can crossfade different Ss together and not hear it, paste a SH right before "He" and make it say "She" easily with some finessing, copy and paste "and" or "but" from somewhere else in the show etc, etc. But it was really nice to add another nugget of knowledge to that database and I was quite pleased.

Early Signs

2009-03-31T17:34:00.000-07:00

I know that I am starting to get old because I now have to take off my glasses when I solder teeny electronics up close.

SOAP

2009-02-25T16:13:00.000-08:00

Possibly due to the current global economic climate, the management of the office/studio building where I work has seen fit to water down the liquid soap in the bathroom.

Repair Saga

2009-01-27T21:55:00.000-08:00

A little while ago I started having some motorcycle problems. I was rolling home in stop-and-go traffic when my headlight dimmed and started to tremble some. I noticed the turn signals were blinking rapidly but weakly and the whole bike was sluggish, barely being able to get out of second gear, and dumping more gas just made it backfire, so uncombusted gas was making it out into the exhaust. It definitely wasn't safe on the road. I limped along to a parking lot and it seemed to fix itself. It seemed like an intermittent electrical connection was causing weak spark, so I figured I'd check it out further once i made it back home near my tools. I took side streets and the behavior came back, but I made it home.

Being busy with work and projects and the greatest piece of media I have ever been involved with, I decided to leave the motorcycle on the street and get to it on the weekend. So I spent Sunday fostering a certain amount of masculine energy, pulling the thing apart, stashing the gas tank and seat somewhere for a few hours, disconnecting and reconnecting every multipin connector on the entire bike and putting dielectric grease on damn near every one of them. Hand in hand with that was getting dirty, scowling and cursing. I even bummed a cigarette and kept it dangling from my lips (unlit) just to complete the picture. There was one connection that I had an extra hard time getting apart, and after a lot of prying and more cursing, I figured that since it was connected to the main fuse box, if there was any problem in there, I'd have complete electrical failure and not on-again off-again weak spark. I decided to leave that one alone and get on with my life. I reassembled the bike, took a trip to the grocery store and discovered that I still had the problem. Then, when I turned the bike off and tried to turn it on again, I had no power at all. No headlight. Nothing. I juggled a bunch of connectors but nothing helped, and while I was sitting there thinking about what the problem could possibly be, not touching anything, the lights came back on again. What?

At this point I figured that the problem was most likely the battery and decided to deal with it the next day. It had been low on water (me being lazy) and had gone without a reconditioning in a long time (me being lazy), so I figured it was time to replace it. I walked down to Autozone and traded the old one in, had them put the acid in the new one for me and went home (the kid there failed to take the pressure release cap off before adding the acid, so when I discovered this and removed it, I managed to get a spray of battery acid on my arm and face, which was awesome). After a long charge, I put the battery back in the bike and started it up. It started fine, but I didn't have time to drive it to check for the problem, so I put it off another day.

I then took a trip to the grocery store (I kept using the grocery store as my destination on these test drives because it's uphill, so I figured it would be easier to push and/or coast the bike back downhill if the thing completely failed on me). The problem was back. This time, though, I had a multimeter with me and when I tested the voltage of the battery in this ailing system, it was...13 volts, totally fine. Maybe a little off, but totally fine. At this point I figured that it was possibly a problem with the charging system, the regulator, or something i didn't understand. In any of those cases, while my background in electrical engineering made me conscious of the theory and the concepts, I thought it might be better to turn it over to a technician who actually had some training in the specifics of motorcycle electronics and common failures. The disconnect between engineers and technicians is broad and lamentable in many fields, but I think this is particularly true in electronics.

So I decided to take it to the shop. But I didn't have time right away, and besides, I was feeling bad about my lack of ability and still holding out hope that something in the Haynes manual would point me in the right direction so I could fix it myself. I didn't mind being forced to ride my bike to work and the track for a while. God knows I can use the exercise.

Today I had the day off so I finally decided to take the thing down there, and guess what? The bike started acting up and when I pulled it over, it wouldn't start up again and then died completely. No power at all. So I'm between my home and the shop and I figure oh, what the hell. I pull off the sidecover and start working really hard at getting that one multipin connector apart and opening the fuse box.

What I found was this: the connector had some corrosion on it, but probably not enough to keep current from flowing, and the fuse had a tiny bit of corrosion around a tiny fissure in the middle. I believe this crack was so small that the pieces of metal were still touching, so the fuse would still pass current, for the most part, but small vibrations or changes in temperature would cause the two ends to reseat, sometimes causing non-ohmic (nonlinear) contact and thus poor current flow, and sometimes no connection at all. Honda gives you a spare in that little box, so I walked home, grabbed a screwdriver and replaced it. It seems to be running fine now, though if there was some underlying problem that caused the fuse failure in the first place (other than the rain we'd been having), I'll have to sort that out in the future.

The main lesson here is this: don't let your brain defeat you, Bryan. Don't assume that because you're smart and can think a few layers into everything that you can cut corners. Be thorough, even if you can come up with a rational reason why you can skip a step. All that disconnecting and reconnecting and inspecting was worthless, since the one part that failed got overlooked. It's worth it to cover everything and be sure.

Home to Home

2008-12-22T17:35:00.000-08:00

Now with extra links!
-----------

I had some broad plans for this trip, I guess, but the way the chips fell, I just stayed in the Kent / Cleveland area the whole time. I was too tired to jet off for New York the day after I arrived, so I didn't go see Ahmed on Letterman. It was alright; his sister was there for him, and he said that he met Will Smith on the show and gave him a Sinkane CD. Awesome! Though I really would have liked to see him. and Kate as well.

The next planned destination was Pittsburgh, to visit Greg and Emily. I intended to leave Friday morning, but there was freezing rain and the roads were very slick. I used to be a pretty good winter driver, but didn't really want to test it after not driving on four wheels much at all for a couple of years. I spoke to Greg about it, and we were both pretty let down, I think. We agreed, though, that instead, as a Christmas/birthday gift to him, I have to get around to recording the handful of post-ohio-exodus songs I've written that he likes and send him a CD or a tape or something. I intend to polish off one or two per month until April 19th. Here's a taste, Greg : http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=28949228

After cancelling the Pitsburgh trip, I decided to take a walk in the woods with my mom, since that's about the only thing that is actually made better by a little freezing rain. All the small branches and twigs were encased in an icy shell about 1/4" thick, and against the grey sky backdrop, when the light catches it right, it's truly beautiful. My mom's morning walks in the woods haven't been the same for her since our dog Levi died, and I know she was grateful for the company. It's odd; he's been gone for a long while now, but I still expect him to be there at the top of the stairs every time I come back to my parents' house. The absence is still jarring. Though I do catch myself now before accidentally asking my mom where he is.

As I was falling asleep the first night here, I noticed a smell that I had forgotten about, right after the furnace kicked on: the subtle scent of heating vents, processed warmth, modern comfort. I don't think I ever registered it as a smell before, just as the feeling of warmth, but since I've been away from it for a while, it jumped out at me. There's so much comfort here. Easy, domestic coziness. I was having dinner with the Laniers, family friends since forever, and Phil showed his son, Sam, a napkin with Santa Claus on it, and said, "Who does that look like?"
Sam, being 2.5 years old, naturally responded, "Cat Stevens."

Sam kills me.

He has this game he plays while eating his food: he takes a bite in a well-strategized place, and says, "What does this look like?"

"An airplane!"

Then another bite. "Now what does this look like?"

"An anteater?"

Another bite. "What does this look like?"

and so on. It's perfect.

Phil plays a number of roles for me, but one of them is as a parallel universe for what could have been my life if I had quit music early, stayed in Ohio, and married someone while young.
I mean, plenty of people stay in their hometowns, especially when it's a college town that makes it easy to extend your stay after highschool. But Phil is one of the very few people I know that is actually happy in Kent. Most people who stay here end up either alcoholic or Christian-by-default. yikes.
I spent most of this trip at about and 80/20 split: 80% dread and 20% hope that I would run into someone I know, in the mall, downtown, or at the grocery store in the middle of the night. Some poor drunk or Protestant to whom I either specifically or generally don't have anything to say.

So for the most part I've stayed in the house, baking, hanging out with the family and watching movies after they've gone to bed. The few excursions I have made have been pretty good, though. Breakfast with the Stines, watching the West Wing with Michaelanne and Jim, and skating with Mila. Everywhere I go I drive my mom's or sister's car and sing along to music loudly. I may end up heading back to LA with a sore throat.

Party Prep

2008-12-14T12:33:00.000-08:00

I'm spread a little thin lately, but I did enjoy feeling busily domestic yesterday. Because we're having a holiday party at the apartment tonight, I baked a pumpkin pie, then did a blue load of laundry, then baked a cherry pie, then washed my browns. This is in addition to the apple pie and the other pumpkin pie that I prepped earlier in the week and froze for baking today. I cleaned up a little (still a long way to go) and coordinated with margaret about party plans. The other day our friends Elizabeth and Rajeev came over for dinner while I was making the apple pie and they were both impressed with the fact that I make my own pie crusts, and with the apple turnovers that I made with the leftover dough. I think tonight is going to be a success.

Tum

2008-12-11T14:38:00.000-08:00

The update here is that I'm doing much better, thank you, and even though it felt like something much more severe for a couple of days, now I think I just pulled a muscle while jumping out of a scissor lift.

Maybe I am getting old.

Kind of a Mess

2008-12-10T07:11:00.000-08:00

Things were going well for a while, and I expect they will continue to do so, but this week has been a wreck. Yesterday I went to an urgent care facility because I had been having some pains in my lower abdomen for a few days. Dr. Cho groped around and told me it wasn't a hernia, and I told her about my history of appendectomies as well (forgot to tell her about colon cancer risk), but she pretty much just said that if it keeps up for a week we could run an ultrasound or CT scan. I got the impression that she maybe thought I was just trying to scam for a prescription for pain meds. The pain I can handle. Not having any idea what's going on, that's more difficult to deal with.

Also, it turns out that I don't get any sick days at work. I hadn't thought to ask about it when I first took the "promotion", because I don't really get sick and don't generally need sick days, but this business got me thinking about it. I'm pretty much ready to tell them that if they don't want to let me have a week of sick days, I'm going to go back to just editing shows and they can find someone else to do the supervisory stuff. With no compensation, it's not worth the stress and responsibility.

After a few days of getting 10-13 hours of sleep a night, I realized that I think I might be depressed. Lately I've been feeling more socially incompetent that usual and I feel like I am trying too hard. But it's just as likely that I'm sleeping that much because it gets dark so early and laying down doesn't hurt.

Margaret and I are having a party at the apartment this weekend and the plan is for me to make a pie every day this week to serve on Sunday, but so far I haven't really had the motivation. I've assembled most of the ingredients, and that's about it.

The Survivor season is over, and I think I'm going to miss the steady, consistent work.

But I know that things will turn around soon. I'm going to Ohio, I'm going to see my family and old friends, I've decided to start playing music again and I'm going to jumpstart that in the new year.

ATTN: EST

2008-12-04T21:57:00.000-08:00

It seems I will be making it Back East sooner than I thought. I stumbled across a cheap ticket and so I will be in Eastern Standard from the 17th to the 23rd. I will be seeing Kent Folk, probably Columbus Folk, I may be going to New York and I will most likely swing by Pittsburgh.

Please make your reservations now, or look for me at

Blue Nile
Luigi's
Adriatico's
Mad Mex
Foodswings
Kate's Joint
the Zephyr
Towner's Woods
and Dancing Goats early in the morning with Phil.

b

Udpates all around.

2008-12-02T18:02:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving: Successful.
Prepared food. Cut thumb. Ate. Socialized. Made people laugh.

Los Angeles: Weirdly hazy for the last few days. I'm not yet sure what's normal around here (nothing) but the fog in the evening seems really odd, since it's not actually that cold out. The evening fog is dense enough that it collects on the face shield of my helmet and makes operating the motorcycle kind of difficult. I drive anyway. But calm down; I'm sure it will be fine.

Still not sure if I am going to go to Ohio for Christmas this year. I mean, in terms of raw numbers, I can probably afford the plane ticket, and I can afford to miss some work, but it's really difficult to justify paying 600 dollars for a few days' worth of Ohio hangouts. I may end up skipping the busy season again this year in favor of going for my mom's birthday at the end of January. That may end up being our new family tradition.

Lately I've been feeling guilty about not taking advantage of everything that LA has to offer in terms of arts and culture, so I'm going to make a serious attempt to embrace more of it. Last night I went to this event at the CalArts theater and thoroughly enjoyed it. I do get a little frustrated at events with Q & A sessions, for two reasons:

1. I usually have questions, but I never ask them because they are always technical in nature and I'm sure they and the answers they drew would bore most attending audience members, since I would allow myself to get really mired in the technical details of any approach toward making real art from audio/visual media.

2. I absolutely hate 90% of questions I have ever heard at these events, whether it's at a straightforward film screening with David Lynch, or this avant-garde presentation with the artist last night. It just seems like most people who are willing to pipe up and ask a question (in front of a couple hundred people) crave the attention, and thus load up the interrogative with a dense exposition that attempts to clearly demostrate their full mastery of the weight and symbolism of the event at hand. AKA you're a second-year film school student who loves the sound of his/her own voice. Please stop.

In brief, I would love Q&A sessions if the Q's were different. And shorter than the A's.

We had that little weight loss competition and I won. It was nothing monumental, but I dropped about 10 pounds and 1.5% body fat. In the interest of continuing with that momentum, I am going to take the $250 I won and use it to join a boxing gym, to further the quest to get back down to a reasonable weight.

Let's see, what else? Oh. I'm writing this now while I'm waiting for Survivor to show up. It's extremely late, but we have to finish it by the end of this week, so I have to start on it as soon as it arrives at 9pm. At the moment I am considering going straight from work (I'll leave at 6am) to my bootcamp class. I wonder if running a few miles and doing pushups after staying up all night working would make me pass out, right in the middle of lunges or squats or something.

Also, if anyone knows any (well-grounded) musicians in LA, please send them my way. This whole not-making-music thing is bullshit.

LA smells like a bonfire.

2008-11-15T21:37:00.001-08:00

Had to go into work today. Trying to stay ahead on this show before it gets mixed on tuesday. Tons of computer problems. So the combination of being nervous about being behind on work, about computer problems/virus problems, about the fires that are raging to the northwest and also the east, and also about being in a little tiny edit bay with no windows while all this is going on made me really want to get out of there. So I put my session on a hard drive I happened to have with me and headed home. as soon as I got out into the lobby i noticed that the smell was for real. it honestly smells like wood and smoke, all the way from Studio City to Los Feliz. And I also noticed that in the headlight of my motorcycle there was visible ash falling all that way as well.

Why do we live here again? Was it the fires or the earthquakes? And how dumb am I that I haven't bought renter's insurance yet?

====
Life's good. Spread a little thin. But still truckin'.

For those keeping up with my media projects, this is my most ambitious derby video so far:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Yo1CAyMHU0

Media Headaches

2008-10-18T20:21:00.000-07:00

It doesn't seem like 6 or 7 minutes is that long to wait for a video to recompress into a different codec, but it really starts to add up if you have to try 8 or 9 different configurations before it

1.) works
2.) looks decent
3.) has Audio
4.) sounds decent
5.) stays in sync
and
6.) ports well to YouTube and has all of the above characteristics there.

Due to an inability on my part or on Apple Compressor's, I just burned about an hour of my life trying to figure out how to include uncompressed audio with an MPEG-2 video in a format that Quicktime could read and thus that I could upload to YouTube. Fail. And the the MPEG-4 version looked great on my machine and completely AWFUL once uploaded.

Instead, I'm going to go home and use Vegas to make a 640x480 MPEG-2 that will (hopefully) not lose sync when Youtube converts it to Flash video. I guess maybe I'm dwelling on this issue too much; there aren't any really hard sync points in this video, but I would like the music beats to coincide with the visual hits.

This is the latest headache after dealing with this promo video for most of the last 2 or 3 days. Bouncing textless/texted versions back from Sean (the latest addition to our media team), outputting the audio to get it into a platform I can actually use (Pro Tools) and mixing it here at the workplace on a Saturday night, adding last minute text for a little reinforcement of the website address.

I'm tired. I sure hope this thing makes a difference in ticket sales.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHjb8fgPdyI

(Please click on the "watch in high quality" link. Do it for me.)

Mixed Signal to Noise Ratio

2008-09-15T16:07:00.000-07:00

The job situation.

The lead mixer at my workplace is picky. He mixes most of the network shows that we do, and a fair amount of the feature films as well. He demands a level of quality in the editorial that is sometimes difficult to meet in the time allotted for our shows. We are, after all, in a low-margin, high-volume, fast-turnaround niche at my workplace.
The dialog editor that was working on his shows before was moved into mixing, and I took his place. I did American Gladiators and a show called Wipeout for him, and both those seasons are over, so at the moment I have a more steady operation going, two days of editing dialog for Survivor and two days on a show called Thirteen (hasn't aired yet).
But here is where things get tricky: my supervisor and friend Vince was given a new set of responsibilities, pulling him more into technical operations and supervising the bigger picture of workflow in the facility and less direct supervision of our editorial staff. So someone needed to fill in that role. Guess who? They asked me if I was interested and, knowing that for a couple of specific reasons, money is pretty tight around there, I entered into a meeting with the CFO with three (3) ideas of incentives that they could offer me to compensate for more responsibility:

1.) More money (makes the most sense, but due to some troubles with the Employment Development Department of California, not that viable right now for my employer)
2.) Guaranteed 40 hours per week
3.) And official job title of some sort, i.e. Supervising Sound Editor, to bolster the resume.

I somehow found myself in this conversation where the CFO would speak about how it was "more responsi-" and then catch himself and say "different responsibility", where he flat out said that I deserved more money but that they couldn't afford it right now, he shrugged off the notion that a job title could be important, since we're all just getting the job done, and he said that he can't make guarantees in this business. What I didn't understand was why he wasn't willing be straight up with me about the more/different responsibility issue, but he was willing to flat out say that I deserved more money. If I had managed to come up with a good-natured way of saying "So, you are saying that you want me to do extra supervisory work with no incentive or compensation whatsoever?", I would have. As it stands, I am apparently a spineless pushover, because what I said was "Alright, let's give it a shot", in part because I didn't want to make it seem like I'm not a Team Player, willing to rise to the occasion and settle up on compensation later. The claim is that in around 60 days they will have paid off some retroactive fees to EDD and will be able to give some modest raises to the handful of people who have been asking for them for months. As long as I'm on that list, I guess it'll work out.

Except there is still the issue that I have 9 hours of editing to do 4 days a week, and my new responsibilities keep me tied up talking to clients and coordinating with our editors during many portions of the day so I almost always have to stay late to finish my work. And the overtime is NOT smiled upon. I'm not totally sure what to do. At least Survivor looks like it's going to be pretty good again this season.

===

I have been making an effort to overcome social anxiety and go hang out even when it makes me kind of nervous. There was a fundraising event last night for one of the roller derby teams to get new uniforms, so I figured I would go throw them a few bucks. A great local band, Jail Weddings, played. I managed to mingle some and socialize. But the best part may have been the ride there and back. The event was way north of downtown, pretty much a straight shot down Riverside from my new apartment, and that's a great ride on a bicycle, but since the event was late and I had an early-morning Boot Camp to get to, I took the motorcycle. Hell Yes. Riverside has curves, long stretches of uninterrupted road, decent views, and this one bridge where ivy is hanging down about 40 feet from an overpass. Perfect. Then on the way home I made a wrong turn and had to go downtown and then take Sunset, which is usually irritating because of traffic lights, but in this case I hit every green light from Broadway to Hillhurst. Somehow.

It's really those small things.

Headfirst

2008-09-10T09:21:00.000-07:00

Oh, hey there.

Of the list of important activities I had in mind for summer, I accomplished very few. I managed to ride my bike a whole lot, but no aquarium, no picnics, and actually, no beach. Yikes.

But what didn't make the list was a whole lot of great and/or varied things that fell into my lap. Here goes:

I was riding home one night and just felt winded and hot and couldn't believe how sweaty I was for an evening ride. I carried my bike up the stairs and felt sweat on my face, trickling through my beard and decided, "That's it. This beard is over. It is too hot this summer."

It's been five years since I'd seen my face, so I had pretty much forgotten what it looks like, so I was curious. Here's a hint: young, chubby, and awful. As soon as it starts to cool down, I'm growing the beard back.

Aside from the heat and the curiosity, I had a couple of other reasons. Vince was giving me a hard time one night about something entirely unrelated (refusal to own a car, I think) and out of nowhere he brought up that the reason I consistently don't get any interest from women had a lot to do with my beard. I told him that was nonsense, that people aren't that shallow, that the real reason is because I am socially uncomfortable, emotionally distant, and have bad skin. Duh. Also, I'm the worst possible mixture of uptight and apathetic. So a small amount of scientific curiosity/proving Vince wrong factored in to the Shave Decision.

Also, I sorta chickened out and was just going to give myself a trim and then I slipped and screwed it all up and the only way to fix it was to shave it off and start over.

Rest assured, I look twelve.

Other major life changes include a move from my downtown loft with well-intentioned bro-dude fuckups to an adorable Los Feliz Village apartment with my longtime friend from Ohio, Margaret Winnen. Things are going well now that we have had a long "discussion" over the merits of modern vs. 'shabby chic' furniture and that while a classic Guinness poster may be well-framed and a gift from a sister, it's still a beer poster and thus is not allowed in a common space.

The two-wheeled adventure we call life continues: while I can't justify driving anything with four wheels, skateboards included, I now let my bicycles rest 2 or 3 days a week and I take a different form of transportation. I acquired a motorcycle.

I miss my last motorcycle, with all its necessary tinkering and battery charging, but this one is much more reliable and convenient. It has saddlebags so I can take it grocery shopping. I had sort of forgotten that the last time I lived in LA, before France, riding that old Suzuki late at night was probably the most fulfilling part of my life here, getting off work at 5 in the morning and going over Cahuenga Pass, taking Mulholland Drive and going howling down the canyons.

This is significantly less fun during the day with traffic, but there are a few morsels of open road around now and then.

At my facility, we used to do audio post for a show called the Biggest Loser, where contestants enter into a competition to see who can lose the most weight. Recently, someone at the studio decided that we who work there should start a similar competition as a motivator for some of us to shed some unnecessary pounds. Fifty-dollar buy-in, winner take all. Sure, why not. Though it's sort of hard to go on a diet when you eat 98% plants already. My main approach has been to go for salads instead of sandwiches, soy yogurt instead of peanut butter in the morning, and to drink more caffeine than usual. The first 2 ounces of weight that I lost was my beard. Also, I joined a workout class.

I know, I know, I'm so SoCal. Fine. We meet in the morning at Griffith Park three days a week and run laps, use resistance bands, do crunches, whatever. Though some midwestern friends have seen fit to give me a hard time about being totally LA now, it's really not that big a deal, I just paid a little money for some extra motivation. And our instructor, Ricardo, is helpful and has us do plenty of exercises that I would never have known to exist.

It turns out that while I used to consider myself a pretty strong guy, always able to lift whatever needed to be lifted in a given situation because of a steady exercise regimen of moving heavy amps every day on tour and stacking boxes in a warehouse between tours, at this point my upper body strength is pathetic, probably because I don't do either of those things any more and all of my physical activity is now on a bike. As a result, I do pretty well with all the leg-based exercises and stamina, I'm weak as hell with the arm exercises right now. So I think I need this class right now.

Also, as a final push to cheat and lose a couple of pounds right before the final weigh-in on September 30, I am considering getting a hydrocolonic. Who's totally LA now?

Oh yeah, I made this, too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njJE76eXYFI

Oh So Summer

2008-05-19T21:43:00.000-07:00

It's summer. God, it's fuckin summer.

The sunlight came like a thunderclap a couple of days ago, jolting me out of bed. Most years I wait eagerly for the summer sun to come so I'm anticipating it each week, each day, but this year I was completely blindsided, enveloped in rosy gold before I even started to yearn for it. The sweat that's now perpetually on my brow is equally annoying and rejuvenating, like plum juice on my chin while I'm lying on my stomach, feet swaying up in the air, reading you a passage from the book I'm reading.

It's funny that I'm so pumped about it this year, since I now live in a place that has very little difference between spring and summer (and fall, for that matter). But I am; I couldn't be more excited about the semi-arbitrary freedom that a summer mindset lends, warm night bike rides, summer fruit, more tomfoolery than debauchery, and sun. I don't always like the warmth, but god, do I drink up the sun. I'm too pale to tan but I love to burn. I can't wait for the freckles, the farmer's tan, the tops of my feet red and stinging in the shower. I'm going to bike to Santa Monica every week until I see dolphins. I'm going to have a picnic in Griffith Park. I'm going to visit the Aquarium in Long Beach. I'm going to as many outdoor concerts as I possibly can. I'm going to drink white wine even though I usually prefer red. I'm going to go rollerskating and chew gum and drink rootbeer floats. I'm going to have flowers at the apartment, the only living things as fueled by the sun as I will be in the next three months. I will find a way to make it far enough away from the city to look at stars. I will stay up too late. I will ride too far by myself. I will actually go out of my apartment. I will meet people. I will ignore those people and lie on grass by myself anyway. I will ride my bike with no hands, no helmet, and no health insurance. This one is entirely my own.

General Update; Low on introspection.

2008-05-04T01:45:00.000-07:00

As I was getting ready to leave my apartment for yet another derby event, I realized that there was no way in hell I'd fit everything I needed in my shoulder bag. I needed a laptop for some last-minute editing of backup audio material, the audio interface for that, some microphone cables from my personal stash, an extra microphone, blah blah blah, the brownies I baked for the skaters, and my whiskey flask. So I put the fixed-gear away and lowered my blue touring bike down from the hoist on the ceiling. I loaded all my bags onto the rack and put all of my necessary effects in there and rolled out. Since I hadn't ridden that bike in several months, it was immediately striking how differently it handled than my other bike, especially with a fair amount of gear attached. It's such a heavier ride and the center of mass is so much further back that the turns and even straightaways when standing up feel more... substantial. It's a slower ride, for sure, than my yellow bike, but also somewhat smoother. At any rate, I started thinking about bike tours and I think I'm going to try to go back to France this summer for a couple of weeks, or maybe to Spain. I think my Spanish is at a point where I could use a little immersion to help it along. Sometimes when I'm on the metro and I have forgotten my book, I play a little Scrabble mini-game on my phone (it's not really Scrabble, unfortunately; it's more like Boggle) and I regularly see words in French and Spanish that I of course can't use. It's a small reminder that I need to put my language skills to use more often than I do.

As the readership knows, I do a lot of media work for LADD I am most proud of the latest highlight video. I get more and more comments from skaters and fans that these really help get everyone pumped and ready for the game. Last night a skater even told me that sometimes when watching the videos she starts to tear up! This one is a collaboration between Vince (the media clip montage) and myself (the music portion):

There were some skaters from the local flat-track league, Angel City Derby Girls who saw our media presentation and were impressed, so they asked about the possibility of us cutting together a promo reel to get some press attention. I'm going to talk to them this week about it.

After much unnecessary nervousness and anticipation, I did a test edit for American Gladiators and showed it to the mixer and he liked it. It's a higher profile show and the mixer is very particular about the edit. So I had to sort of prove myself to him, and now I'm editing dialog for that show this season, and I might still be doing the same graphic sound effects placement that I did last season as well. I started the dialog today and I'll be working on that first episode for the next couple of days. It's going to be as busy as ever.

Everything is fine all the time.

2008-04-17T09:24:00.000-07:00

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

Pros and Cons

2008-03-25T01:31:00.001-07:00

The LA Metro system is a part of my life. Actually, it might be one of the biggest parts of my life right now, since I ride the subway every day. I go to work most days, and I ride my bike most days, and I sleep most days, but taking the metro is probably the only thing I do every single day.

To give out-of-towners an idea what it's like here, I have am compiling a list of things I do and do not like about the metro. My idea is to try to avoid making this list comparative. I'd rather define the absolutes about the things I do or don't like than reference other forms of transportation. Hopefully this will be at least mildly entertaining, too.

I like that I can be only passively involved in my own transportation. This way, I am guaranteed about 30-45 minutes per day of reading time, or sometimes audio spanish lessons. If it weren't for the metro, I am sure that I would make less time for each of these things.

I don't like that eating and drinking aren't permitted in the subway. It would be possible to save even more time by eating on the way to work if it were allowed.

I like that the seats next to the Elderly Priority Seating have a little ledge where you can put up your knee, so when I take the first morning train back home at 4:38am after a long night at work, I can put my knee and elbow up and rest my head. Unless I have my bike with me, which is usually, because then I have to stand.

I don't like that the trains stop running between 12:58am and 4:38am, because this means that if I finish editing a show at 1am, I have to wait for over three hours to get home.

I like seeing all kinds of different people with all kinds of different objects and companions. I hear different accents and I wonder where they come from and I look at what they are carrying and speculate what is the backstory with that crazy hat. I enjoy it when there is a young couple and one of them sits on the other's lap, not because I particularly like or don't like public displays of affection, but because it usually makes a middle-aged woman across the aisle smile knowingly and then stare off nostalgically. That I do love to see. Also, the metro is pretty much the only place where I see little kids these days.

I don't usually like it when people in the metro talk to me. Most often, a person will see that I am reading a book, comment on the book or the author, or perhaps books in general, and then try to twist that into some general interest we have in common in an effort to talk about something else, like a moneymaking scheme or his highschool football career. This should be against the law, because it certainly defies logic. If you liked a book that you see someone reading, let that person read the book in peace.

Occasionally a good, honest, working person will want to talk to me about my bike. I refuse to talk to bike-people about bikes, but if a normal person without one of those silly bike hats wants to talk about my Super Flashy home-stenciled paint job or my Tough Cookies sticker or my special whiskey flask holder in place of a water bottle, I'll do that. A couple of times, this has taken tangents to talk about the state of transportation in LA, jobs, getting to work, colleges, tech schools, starting over, and that kind of thing. This is really pretty rare. And usually the practical matters of the situation make it kind of awkward, because there isn't a concrete etiquette laid out for whether you're supposed to continue talking once the train comes and you'll almost definitely be split up since there are rarely two free seats next to each other, and even if there were, are we really ready to commit like that?

I don't like that the ticket machines are slow to respond. When I press the buttons to buy a ticket, sometimes it takes 4 or 5 seconds for it to wake up and display the menus for all of the button presses I entered, and then another 4 seconds to print out the ticket. Who has that kind of time? During off-peak hours, there are twenty minutes between trains, and those 8 seconds waiting for my little card could easily mean the difference between just catching a train and just missing it.

I like that the tickets are fairly cheap at $1.25 per one-way and $5.00 per day pass. If I weren't such a stingy bastard, I might even spring for the monthly pass at $60-something, but it's hard to fork over that much money at one time. If I were smarter, I would realize that having a monthly pass would save me all those 8-second waits, and that might be worth the money.

I DO NOT like this certain look I sometimes get from other white folks in the subway stations. It's sort of an acknowledgment, a recognition that we're kind of rare in public transportation in LA at certain times of the day. Class issues and race issues abound. Great. Don't nod at me.

I like the stairs. I have a rule that I only take the stairs, in part because I would be crazy to turn down free exercise and in part because the thought of standing and waiting in the middle of a long pack of people on the escalator makes me really anxious. Even when I have my bike on my shoulder I would still rather bound up the stairs two at a time than be stuck in a herd like that.

I like the constant hum-and-whoosh sound in the subway trains. It serves as a good foundation for starting random thoughts from scratch, especially when you're really tired. Last night's was pretty good: the next time someone breaks up with me and starts dating my roommate, I'm going to print a life-size picture of myself and wheat-paste it on the inside of their door. Not in a malicious way, sort of in a just-sayin' way.

There are probably more things that belong on this list, though I'm sure they are very small and hard to describe. If I think of it, I'll add them as they come up. Overall it's clear that the cons don't even come close to the pros on all of this, and seeing it laid out like this now, I just decided to pony up and buy the monthly pass. Go Metro!

Inversely Proportional

2008-03-14T00:04:00.000-07:00

It's got to stay funny or it's kind of heartbreaking. Every small misstep and every functional hiccup must find its place in the mosaic of ridiculum that is being built around us all the time. I have to call my work a day or two ahead of time to get the latest changes in the schedule and ask permission to go to sleep. A show delivers late and the shockwave ripples through the schedule and simultaneously damages my paycheck and my ability to spend time with Margaret. Somehow. The only way to fight back against this kind of accidental tyranny is to laugh it off; the client wants to send us a TV show one act at a time, maybe get us the last 2 acts at 4am?

Um, OK. In this particular instance, I'm already in overtime and I'm going to hit double time at 3am, so bring it on.

This blog is a funny medium. Trying to stay on top of a daily (or at least regular) record of events is necessarily a difficult balance, because when all the really interesting stuff is happening, it means that I don't have time to write about it. And on the days that I have some downtime, I feel unproductive and think there's nothing interesting to write about. Right now it happens that I am stranded at work, waiting for the last 4 acts of this terrible show so I can edit it and go to bed. But this production company has such a terrible track record of getting us material on time that I'm sure I'll have enough time to get some writing done.

So anyway, lately, it's been incredibly busy. Between work, derby projects, and writing music, I haven't really had any time to myself at all. I took inventory and realized that I have had time for exactly 4 hours of passive media consumption (read: 2 movies) in the last 2 months. And that's how I like it. Busy > Bored. I've stayed above 35 hours at work, edited together new highlight videos for the Derby Dolls (i.e. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOzz3zrcSXg, cut together a number of skateout songs for the teams and wrote some sneaky music for a client request that turned out rather well (I'll send you a copy if you ask for it).

(By the way, the table that I refinished looks great, with the exception of a few spots that I'm trying not to let bother me until the next time I refinish it again.)

Right now the Derby work in progress is getting the new PA system up and running. We have been renting a stacked sound system for the bout each month and in an effort to improve coverage and reduce monthly costs, Vince and I recommended that the league buy speakers to hang from the ceiling all around the track, which we are powering with some amplifiers that Vince had lying around. In order to find the best approach for hanging the speakers, we consulted with speaker manufacturers, rigging hardware manufacturers, riggers, rigging companies, and finally got the assistance of a couple of very nice union grips, available mostly because of the writers' strike. Speakers are now hung, and I ordered speaker cable and built junction boxes this week and Vince hung most of the cable last night (I hate heights and I hate scissor lifts). We're going to scrape by and have the system finished tomorrow, one day before the game on Saturday. Whew!

As usual, my work schedule promises to conflict directly and exactly with my extracurricular activities, so at the moment it's in question whether I will have to work Saturday, or whether I will be able to actually go to the bout and enjoy the fruits of my own labor.

So I'm staying very busy and meeting a lot of project goals that I have set for myself. The only thing I don't like about being this busy is that it keeps me from attaining certain other goals, broader goals, like meeting people and making friends, and going to the farmers' market each week. Oh, and writing this thing.

Oh yeah, another thing: there may be something special brewing, for which I may be going Back East for a couple of days in late April. A chance to exchange some stories in person with some of you EST folks.

Kids' Table

2008-01-15T19:32:00.000-08:00

I managed to talk my weirdo roommates out of getting a pool table in favor of a dining room table, like grownups. We went to the thrift store (St. Vincent's) and looked at some chintzy crap until I saw the perfect specimen. It has two retractable leaf extensions (way more convenient than the kind with the leaf that removes from the center and then you have to store it somewhere), and most importantly, it has diagonal cross-braces between the legs. Unfortunately, the finish was a little too orange and a little too glossy. Also, one leg is a little wobbly (easiest fix ever). So I decided to go for it, strip off the awful finish and stain it a dark walnut or something.

Right now I am about halfway through that process, having applied stripper (environmentally friendly citrus hippie shit, duh), peeled it off with a putty knife and then used an abrasive pad and mineral spirits (not so eco-friendly) to get down to the bare wood. Next up is some minor sanding, a thorough cleaning to remove all the dust, then apply the stain and one or two coats of polyurethane.

Important facts of interest:
1. Mineral spirits will tear right through latex gloves.
2. The can says to avoid 'prolonged contact with skin', but doesn't specify if that's a few seconds or a few hours.
3. My hands still feel kinda funny.
4. This table is going to be awesome. Especially after I buy a runner and a candelabra.
5. Dinner at my house is very soon going to be like this:

Late last night, during a much needed break from the movie I was working on, I called my mom. That extra 3 hours between EST and PST means that my unreasonably late schedule is compatible with my mom's unforgivably early one. We talked a little about family and her friends and somehow started talking about the dining room table that we had when my sister and I were young. It's a little clunky, with large legs and a slate-ish finish that gave it an overall rustic look that my parents traded in for a cleaner, more modern table with white legs a few years ago. The old one is still in the family, though; my sister Beth is using it for a craft table or something for Ethan (age 8, still awesome). Anyway, I began to realize how similar that old one is to the one I just bought. My mom was saying how she would never let hers go out of the family, that she still has plans to get it back someday when she is old and doesn't care anymore and she'll put her feet up on the diagonal crossbars, even though they get all dirty and don't look very good. I can tell you with authority that this is true; I just peeled off a thick layer of crud and grime with the finish from the crossbars on mine, right after I peeled off some crayon and what looked to be glittery puffy paint on one of the leaves. Maybe mine has already been someone else's craft table. Maybe Saint Vincent's is a space-time wormhole, although I'm not sure if my table came from the past or the future.

Anyway, the point of all this is that when I finished work at about 6 in the morning, as I stumbled back toward the metro, that conversation with my mom was bouncing around in my head. And in that state that happens in the early morning after bad daytime-sleep and then an 11-hour shift (a state that I sometimes like to call Beyond Tired, because the fog of exhaustion seems to lift and you really think everything becomes clear again), I was thinking about my mom putting her feet up and the nostalgia of objects and kids and glitter. And all that acted as a spark and I started thinking about (pause) having kids. This happens every now and again. This is one of the weirder causes for such a feeling, though.

The last time was pretty straightforward; I was a private English tutor for an 11-year-old named Valentine while I was in Brittany (just as illegal as my main teaching job). Valentine was great. She was adorable and shy and obviously bright but had some difficulty with English only because she didn't like to make mistakes so she didn't ever talk in class. And learning a language is a process that requires making a lot of out-loud mistakes. I enjoyed working with her a lot, because it was good to have a one-on-one interaction and tailor the lessons to her strengths and weaknesses. Each time we met for a lesson I would give her a new sentence to practice pronouncing at home that would emphasize some particular phonym in English.

The French don't have an 'H' sound in their language so they have a really hard time hearing it and a very, very hard time pronouncing it correctly. They also don't make a distinction between a long 'E' and a short 'I' sound, so the words 'sit' and 'seat' sound exactly the same to them. I want you to take a minute and think about all the swear words that use a short 'I' and picture my freshman students trying to say 'beach', 'sheet', etc. Now picture me trying not to laugh in front of a room of 14-year-olds.

To avoid such issues down the road, I wanted to train Valentine's ear a little bit so I gave her sentences like, "The hall in his house is hot", "Really, we rarely watch westerns" and "This is the thirteenth floor of this building." That last one is supergreat. They have no 'TH' sound either so they want to substitute S's and Z's and the notion of making their tongues visible between their teeth is a really silly one for them.

On a marginally related note, reports indicate that the most difficult word in English is "squirrel". If you have friends (close enough friends that it's OK to laugh at them) who speak English as a second language, write it down and ask them to pronounce it. It's usually pretty entertaining.

Anyway, the lessons with Valentine were good; I helped her with her homework and made her talk more than she wanted to and I think her grade improved quite a bit. It was good to help someone learn in a really tangible way. But really I wanted to play kick the can and tickle her. I pictured us spreading Legos out on a floor and lying on our stomachs, building nonsense and comparing our work. But I felt that was a little outside the scope of our business relationship.

Someday it's going to be great to sit at the dining room table and help my kids with their homework. And if they get crayon or glittery paint all over it, I'll just refinish it again.

Good Days.

2008-01-07T22:42:00.001-08:00

Went Hi-Tech Shopping with Vince today. It was fun. I've been archiving video of Roller Derby footage and highlight clips and I ran out of space on my 250GB drive, so I picked up a 750. woohoo! It's copying over right now. It's going to take the rest of my natural life.

I saw a commercial that made me crave biscuits and gravy, and Vince expressed doubt that I could pull it off in the vegan fashion. I took this as a challenge and went home immediately. I called my mom for a refresher on her biscuit recipe (it's amazing, but she is number-averse, so for me it involves a lot of difficult decoding of vague terms into concrete measurements) and decided to get to work.

On the metro ride home, it was quiet until we all heard a voice saying, "Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen." Now, normally when someone breaks the silence on the metro, everyone stiffens up, and this was no exception. I personally find it a grave offense when someone asks for petition signatures from every person on the train, or hands out religious tracts, or tries to sell a radio or something. I feel like there is something a little sacred about the silence on the train, that everyone gets this time before or after work for preparation or decompression, with only the clunking of the train and the rushing sound of the tunnel. It can actually be quite relaxing. So when some kid asks me and every other person if we're registered California voters, I resent the intrusion in that captive space, and I resent the interruption of our communal quiet time.
So today, we braced ourselves for whatever this guy was trying to push on us, and then the most amazing thing happened: he pulled out a Rubik's Cube. He continued, "Pardon the interruption, but I have Rubik's Cubes for sale for one dollar. If you have been in the toy store lately, you know that these go for 10 or 11 dollars, so you can save 9 or 10 dollars right now. Rubik's Cube. One Dollar." It took me (and, I think, everyone else) a couple of seconds to let our guard down, but then I'm pretty sure I saw a wave of smiles ripple through the train car as everyone remembered the last time they played with one, myself included. One woman close to him pulled a dollar from her pocket, and then the flood gates were open. Our smiles grew bigger as we saw more and more of us pull out wallets and purses. I coughed up the last dollar in my wallet, gladly. I mean, hey, it's a dollar. And it beats the hell out of someone just asking for it. I'll support that king of entrepreneurship. As we all pulled the plastic off (they were actually Cubos de Colores, Hecho en China), we kept smiling, glancing around at each other, almost giddy. He must have sold at least eight right there, within three minutes. I hope the rest of his day went as well. I know he made some of us happy.

The biscuits turned out pretty well, as did the gravy. I'm going to write this down here so I don't forget it:

Vegeable-mushroom gravy.

1 tablespoon olive oil
3/4 cup chopped onion
2 cloves garlic

2cups veg stock
3/4 cup soymilk
1/2 cup dried porcini mushrooms, chopped into small pieces.
2 tablespoons soysauce
1 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon cornstarch
2 tablespoons flour

sauté the onions in the olive oil until clear, then add the garlic and cook until browned.
while that's cooking, warm up the veg stock and the soymilk together and add the dried mushrooms. Cook for a few minutes to soften up the mushrooms. add the rest of the ingredients, then the onions and garlic when they are good and dark, making sure to put the oil into the gravy mixture as well. stir continuously over low-medium heat until the flour and cornstarch do their job and thicken it all up. Gravy!

The mom-to-reasonable-person translation for the biscuits goes something like this:
"Grab a bunch of flour and put it in a pretty big bowl. Like, a lot of flour" (I'm going to say 2 cups)
"You're using self-rising, aren't you?" (Ok, so a little over 2 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon of salt)
"Dad says 1 teaspoon of salt, but what does he know? His mom always made them for him". (Ok, fine. 1 teaspoon of salt.)
"Then take like a really big spoonful of shortening." (Um, what size spoon?)
"I don't know, really big." (Ok, let's say between 1/4 and 1/3 cup?) "Sure."
"Then add milk until, you know, it has the right consistency." (I am only able to fill in this one because I lived with this woman and made this recipe with her. I kept track today on my own and it's about 7/8 cup of soymilk)
"Then you put a big pile of flour on the counter and roll it out." (For the record, you should fold the dough over onto itself many times, then roll it out to about 1/2" thick, then use a cup or a circular cookie cutter if you have it, put the biscuits on a greased cookie sheet, and put in the oven at about 400F. For how long, mom?)
"I don't know. I just wait there. You'll know because it will smell like they are done. Then look and make sure they are just a little brown and they're ready." (Sigh. It's about 16-18 minutes.)

No More Holidays

2008-01-06T12:12:00.000-08:00

I'm glad we wrapped up the 'holiday season'. The stretch from Thanksgiving to New Year's Day feels like you can't get anything done, really, and is usually distracting and alienating in all the ways that is is 'supposed' to be refreshing and fulfilling.

That being said, I had a great New Year's Eve this year, which is pretty rare. My friends Remy and Åsne came into town from Las Vegas for a few days and we condensed our activities to bikes, ethiopian food, booze, photo booth, baking cinnamon rolls, scarf shopping, and some New Year's Eve show It was great.

Remy is a pretty old friend, first from Cleveland punk crew, then from the craziest punkrock warehouse ever, where many strong friendships were born. Åsne introduced me to what is now My Absolute Favorite Thing On The Internet, a title sure to last at least 2 or 3 days. Here you go:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfU-4Y4_akY

Anyway, now that all of that is over, I feel like I can use the complete weeks to get back to work. Not only at my actual work, but also in terms of writing music, continuing to learn Spanish, all that sort of thing. The baking may go on a back burner now that everyone has taken inventory of holiday food consumption.

Oh wait, maybe I'm not out of the woods on the holiday mindset just yet. I'm flying back to Ohio for my mother's birthday at the beginning of February. But I'm bringing back my fixed gear! A whole new set of bearings to clean and grease, new/old projects to work on!

Writers' Strike

2007-12-26T22:08:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-16T23:17:00.000-08:00

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?

2007-12-11T19:01:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-10T15:52:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-03T07:53:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-30T06:14:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-29T13:02:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-27T16:58:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-11-26T13:43:00.000-08:00

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?