right on bro!

I am not finding the urge to update this site. There’s a lot of stuff going on which has been taking up a lot of my time and concentrations, and by the time I get home, I either have something else to work on, or I just want to veg out.

Recap: For the life of me, I can’t remember what I did this weekend. Weird. I’ve been helping an old friend write some songs for her movie; also, I started work on my own. I’ve been watching episodes of the first season of CSI: Miami. I went to Blink in K-town a couple of times.

It feels like everyone’s asking me to do shit and not giving me enough time to do it properly, and that’s stressing me out a little bit, but it beats doing nothing at all, I guess.

Oh, I remember now - I went to Wood Ranch this weekend. It was pretty tasty. Add that joint to your list of reliable-but-not-spectacular chain-BBQ places.

Doom 3 comes out in a week or two. Can’t hardly wait.

Wow, it’s been a week since I last wrote in this here blog. It doesn’t seem like a week has passed.

I saw Metallica: Some Kind of Monster at the Arclight last night. It was pretty dope, although I think I lost empathy with the band about halfway through the film, due to their constant need to express their feelings. But I guess there’s a lot of baggage in 20 years of being together as a band that needed to get worked out. I just didn’t expect it to be so…un-rock-and-roll. Maybe it was the giant tub of popcorn that I ate as “dinner,” or the drink I slammed down ten minutes before the show, or maybe I was just thinking, “Hey guys - just shut the hell up and play your guitars.” I’m not all that familiar with Metallica, beyond what’s been played on the radio, so I didn’t really come in with a fan’s perspective.

Also, I saw the Magnetic Fields at the Wilshire Ebell Theater this weekend. It was an amazing show, very quiet and relaxing. This time around, there was no percussion, just four of them with piano, guitar, cello, and ukelele. The songs from the new album sound so much better this way, and there were lots played from the 69 Love Songs albums as well, which, besides Get Lost, rank as my favorite albums from them.

Okay, so when I was on vacation, I ordered this WipeOut! CD repair cleaner thing to try to repair a couple of scratched and skipping discs. I was totally skeptical but figured that for $15 it was worth a try, and if it hosed my discs, they were already hosed to begin with. Well, it arrived, and I tried it out on a Mogwai CD that had a pretty deep scratch on it, and a couple of tracks were skipping badly. That shit actually worked! Apparently, there are two layers to a CD, one inside layer with a “wafer” of information, and an outside surface. If the wafer layer is scratched, you’re hosed. But if the scratch isn’t too deep, the cleaner “re-surfaces” the outside layer, and it’s fine. It doesn’t get the CD shiny and new, but it made two CDs playable now. So, if you’re in a jam with a scratched CD, this is recommended.

Part 5 of Yeti Sports has been released. It’s super fun.

I’ve been back from vacation for a couple of days now. My trip home was relaxing. The fishing was real good this year, especially the striped bass. Not very many keepers, but a lot of action, which is cool because you’re only allowed to keep one per person anyway. Other than fishing, it was sleeping, and working on a project I haven’t had a chance to work on yet. I really like Long Island - it’s quiet, rural, less traffic, and slower. Plus my parents have central air at their house.

The verdict on Southwest Airlines - I doubt I’d fly it again unless it were cheap and virtually the only option. However, Burbank Airport rocks - much less chaos than LAX. And I think next time I go to Vegas, I’m flying. Both trips stopped through there, and I learned that it’s a very short flight, and totally worth it.

So, now I’m back. The two documentaries I worked on screened tonight at a film festival on the East Coast. I was thinking about it all day, and pretty nervous that maybe there was like a giant screech on the soundtrack that I didn’t catch. Later tonight, I heard from the editor that the producer said that things went well, so I guess it’s good news.

Things at work are not as bad as I thought as they’d be when I returned, but worse in other ways. I’m prepping my resume this week and am going to start calling up old contacts soon. Wouldn’t hurt to see what’s out there.

Listening to:

• “Out of Hand” (extended mix), The Mighty Lemon Drops
• “Not Too Soon,” Throwing Muses
• “Grind,” the Gefkens
• “Sense,” Pete Yorn

Yup, it’s been a real pseudo-alternative rock mood this week. Viva throwaway pop songwriting and big-studio production.

While I’m on vacation, I’m trying out the new Mozilla Firefox browser as a replacement for Internet Explorer.

Despite the adolescent marketing tagline, Firefox is very nice. It’s way different from earlier versions of Mozilla/Netscape, which were basically piles of crap with AOL advertisements all over them.

With this new version, rendering seems faster than IE. System text is no longer jeetered like it was in earlier versions of Netscape. Switching overall font sizes actually works, unlike in IE. There’s automatic popup blocking. The GUI themes are kinda cool too.

Too bad Firefox is about four years too late. But I’ll probably still run it on at least one machine. Yay.

So I’m still awake at 5 A.M., doing laundry and waiting for my laptop to finish rendering the two films. This was the final stretch - 19 hours of editing and mixing, minus numerous smoke breaks and a short trip to the producer’s office. I completely remixed the second film. It still needs a lot of work but it’ll probably hold up in the festival screening.

I uploaded a song that I was working on awhile ago. You can download it here. I wrote it when I was learning how to use a particular VST instrument (the one in the song that goes wah-wah-wah-wah-wah). It’s not typical of the usual stuff I put together though. Enjoy.

Soon, I will be off for a week of fishing, cleaner air, outlet mall shopping, and general relaxation. This will be my first time flying Southwest in about twenty years. I’ll be armed with Bill Clinton’s memoirs and a CSI graphic novel, so it should be okay.

Happy Fourth of July, y’all. Be safe and don’t explode any firecrackers near your ears - it hurts.

Feeling pretty good this morning, and very, very relieved. Yesterday, we did technical screenings of the two films for which I’ve been editing and mixing sound. It was a pretty solid bust.

Going into the movie theater at the LA Film School in Hollywood, I was nervous and tired as hell. This was my first time working on a film project, and I’ve never mixed for playback in a theater before, much less tried to mix two films in four days.

So I’ve been holed up in my apartment since Friday, trying to meet an end-of-week deadline for both projects. Around 4 A.M. yesterday morning I had totally burned out, with only the first half of the second film finished. I tossed everything in in the second half into the “Serious Noise Reduction” section of my mix and started rendering, preparing to get worked by the producer.

So later that afternoon, the four of us - me, the editor, the producer, and the producer’s wife - sat in the theater by ourselves to watch and take notes. I was starting to get paranoid, imagining that the producer would stop the movie five minutes in and say, “Hey, Mike, this sucks.” Or, even worse, the school’s projectionist would do it.

Two minutes into the first film, and I realized things were going to be okay. I’m not going to win any awards with the job I did, but shit was generally clear, crisp, and punchy (with the exception of the aforementioned second half of the second film, which was an unintelligible mess). I took a deep breath, relaxed in my seat, and thought, “Okay, I can do this.”

So now I’ve got two more days to refine things. I’ve got to finish the second half of the film, and I’ve got seven pages of notes on the rest of the material. But, I didn’t blow up the theater’s sound system. It was a good start.