I think I need a vacation from my weekend...

Complex weekend... Friday night I mixed for Brah, with 'Dirt - a Tribute to Alice in Chains' opening. Dirt proved to be the local band 'Wirehead', whom I remembered from the New Orleans band scene back in the early to mid 90's. They did well for their second night out, and then Brah took the stage and played a really great set... they were in great form despite the less than packed room. I ended up working lights with my left hand and sound with my right, which was really easy with such a killer light & sound system! Late night though *yawn*... got in at 2:30.

Saturday afternoon was pretty frustrating... well, actually the whole weekend was frustrating, car-repair wise. Jeannine's car has been making an increasingly loud noise that seems to be emanating from the drivers side wheel. There are three possibilities here - the wheel bearing, the CV joint, or the differential gearbox, which is on that side. The CV joint got replaced a couple years ago, and the boots are still sealed, so I (prematurely) ruled that out. The gearbox is part of the transmission, and I just got the transmission fluid replaced - and when I did so, the technician told me to check the bearings. OK. I got the replacement bearing (actually the whole bearing assembly, not just the bearing - you can't just replace what's bad these days; they make you replace everything else around it too!!!) Saturday I got my nephew to try to help me replace this assembly; we got two hours into the procedure and had to stop when the cheap puller I had bought to remove the wheel from the axle broke. *sigh* I put the whole thing back together and went home to get ready for the show we were attending Saturday night in Biloxi (more on that in a second.) So Sunday evening, I took the car to my dad's place - he's got a higher quality puller. Put the vehicle up on jacks, took the wheels off, and put it in drive. Through a stethoscope, it SOUNDED like the bearing was going out... so I repeated the process, changing out the bearing assembly and finishing up in the dark. When I rotated the old bearing, now free of the vehicle, it was quite clearly getting rough. I was all keyed up when I started the car and drove down the street ... only to find no improvement. The noise was still there, exactly as before. Dammit! At this point, I'm inclined to let the errant component fail or at least progress further to the point where it's bloody obvious what's going on. If there's one thing I hate, it's fixing something that's not broken.

Saturday night was great fun, by contrast. Jeannine and I drove up to Beau Rivage casino to enjoy the free passes I had gotten to see Blondie and Pat Benetar (via the 'String Release Party' - Matt Touchard, designer of the string packaging, works for Pat Benetar, among other notables.) I was very pleased to see the Donnas were on the tour as well, opening for the double-bill. That was the first time I'd ever been in Beau Rivage's amphitheater, and it won't be the last... nice room! Every seat was at least decent (no 'behind the stage' seating in this place.) Sound system and room architecture were really nice; it's among the best sounding rooms I've ever heard. The stage in there is about 50~60 feet across, with four trusses of lights about 30 feet overhead. Line array speakers shoot down from either side of the stage, and there are large video screens flanking the speakers on the walls, with two cameras midway up the amphitheater seating to cover the action.

The Donnas were great as always... as my friend Yngwie Flattstein says, "They basically play one song and they play it very well." This all-girl band has toughed it out on the road for the past 16 years, having started out as teenagers. I wonder if they'll ever get their big break? Perhaps this tour was it.

Blondie followed after a short intermission, with a 5 piece band backing Deborah Harry, against a graffiti backdrop spanning the back wall of the stage. Only Chris Stein on guitar and Clem Burke were left from the band's original membership, but those are the important ones! Chris wrote most of their best material and Clem is one of the greatest unsung drummers in rock history - I'm not exaggerating - and he really made that clear throughout the set without resorting to a drum solo. Rounding out the band were bassist Leigh Foxx, rhythm guitarist Paul Carbonara, and keyboardist Matt Katz-Bohen, who resembled either Ric Ocasic or perhaps Vince Noir with dark sunglasses...

After starting with an offputting, perfunctory runthrough of 'Call Me' Debbie took off her dark sunglasses and proceeded to treat the rest of the evening as THEIRS, playing most of their hits but also digging deep into their songlist with interesting choices like 'Fade Away and Radiate' and '(I'm Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear' as well as a new song call 'Love Doesn't Frighten Me' and some off the wall covers (LOL) like 'Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough' and a punked-out 'My Heart Will Go On'. They carried themselves not as a nostalgia act but as a living, still active band! While Deborah Harry can't be said to have aged that well after a life of such 'hard living', she nevertheless demonstrated total command of her amazing, angelic voice, and her exuberance was clear throughout the VERY satisfying 90 minute set! Blondie was a big childhood favorite band, and I'm extremely glad to have finally seen them perform live.

Pat Benetar followed, after a 30 minute intermission. Her guitarist husband Neil "Spyder" Giraldo came off very much as an Italian Brian Setzer, changing from one Bigsby tremolo-equipped Telecaster to the next throughout their set. They took the stage without a keyboardist or rhythm guitarist - drummer Myron Grombacher and bassist Frank Linx provided a servicable rhythm section, and while Neil proved fully capable of taking up the musical space, his choice of Crate amplification really made some of their music sound thin compared to the previous two bands (both of which were using Marshall amps and Les Paul guitars.) The band used backing tracks for some of her late 80's drum machine-driven hits such as 'Love is a Battlefield' and 'We Belong'.

Pat Benetar's set consisted almost entirely of hits - I had forgotten how many hit songs she and her husband had fielded in their career. Pat's voice was absolutely amazing and unstoppable, although the sound man had so much top end in her vocal channel, it was burning my ears off. I actually walked over to the console and asked him to tame the high end after Jeannine complained to me, and he had treble feedback problems from her mic several times later that night as she roamed the stage. There were no surprises in her set, but it was solid and entertaining, if a bit shorter than Blondie's.

After seeing these great acts in this great venue, I finally bought my Alice Cooper tix... October 10th is gonna be sick & sweet!

BUT NOW - onto the matter at hand! C.O.G.'s playing this Friday at One Eyed Jacks with Glasgow, and tonight we have to commit to a setlist. Plus I need to come up with whatever additional production is required for this show. It's gonna be great!!!

Would you like a little success with your disappointment?

*sigh* Why must 'success' always be lovingly dipped in setbacks and daintily coated with problems? Well, I don't know ANYBODY who's enjoyed a free ride with no potholes... but the problems have certainly been problematic lately, so I must learn to appreciate the little peaks and perks here and there, to get me through the depressingly deep low points.

Case in point: recently, my co-producers have managed to scrape together enough time for us to pick back up on the Morgus documentary, which had been on hiatus for a month and a half. I had given my co-producer Barry Vedros a blank 250GB hard drive to back up the entire project so that I could keep an off-site copy. Now my current Mac (a dual 1.2Ghz G4) isn't really fast enough to edit HD video, but it's certainly capable of playing back the various interview clips, and so yesterday I sat down and started looking at some of them. Disconcertingly, some of them were silent - no audio. I thought it might have just been a glitch from copying the files until I checked with Barry and he found that the problem was on his copies too, in some of the most important interviews we taped! (Well, 'taped' is a misnomer - we'd be OK if this stuff WAS on tape. Seems the problem came from the capture/log procedure involved in getting the footage from the solid-state memory the Panasonic HVX200 uses.) I've said it before and I'll say it again - I don't trust these new hard drive cameras. Give me good old fashioned tape any day!!! Dammit. Now we need to figure out whether the soundtracks are retrievable, or if we must reshoot some of that footage. (if that's even possible.)

At least there have been some high points lately... for starters, my Robot Monkey arrived in the mail yesterday! (I couldn't pass it up, they were blowing them out at $50 on buy.com) Should be good for... EXPERIMENTS! And tonight's the night for RiffTrax at the Palace movie theater... looking forward to seeing a lot of old MST-3K fans in the audience!

By the Way, today's Dr. Z's birthday. Email him a birthday wish for 72 android virgins, or something!

Last but not least, I finished this promo video for our next show (next Friday!) Enjoy!

End of the week

Good of things to converge in time for the weekend...

I finally got a message from the guys who had taped our show on July 25th... yay! I'll finally be able to edit that video properly. It was a great performance and we have some great video, which I'll probably put out on DVD with our concert from last March.

Did some good audio recording work this week... a tape to CD restoration that came out really well (the 30 year old tape was actually a two track with guitar on one track and voice on the other, so I was able to remix it and apply some enhancements.) The recipient was ecstatic... also did some well received work on a song not written by us, which will be part of some kind of collaborative musical, apparently based on, of all things, 'Night of the Comet'... more on that later!

Just finished mowing the lawn... gawd, but there are some things that science simply hasn't simplified! Time for some food... I'm craving pizza...

DISTRICT 9

Last night I was one of 250 people (also including my wife, Dr. A Rachnid and his girlfriend) who stood in a LONG line to catch a sneak of 'District 9' at the Esplanade Mall in Kenner, LA. It was worth the wait, small screen, and generally run-down theater!

Digital filmmaking technology has become the great leveller. It's just as it should be; technology is making big stories easier (cheaper) to tell on the big screen, given enough imagination and cleverness on the part of the production team. In 2007, it was 'Sunshine'. Earlier this summer 'Moon' was a prime example. The next one up is DISTRICT 9, a science fiction action film by an unknown director, with unknown actors, with a $30 million budget (less than 'Julie & Julia!), and not based on any pre-existing property. NONE OF THOSE 'LIMITATIONS' MATTER!</a> District 9 is great action science fiction filmmaking that does not insult one's intelligence.

I admit that this film is NOT for everybody; it earns its R rating time and time again, in harrowing, intense scenes splattered with visceral violence. This film put me on edge more than any science fiction action film I've seen since Robocop (a film which I actually love and will make no apologies for.) District 9 also contains some of the most selfish, depraved, inhumane character and motivations I've seen since that film, way back in 1987... a stark theme of man's inhumanity permeates District 9, and paradoxically, a non-human, non-human language speaking character becomes one of the most sympathetic alien creatures ever seen in science fiction cinema.

Films I'd compare District 9 to:
Children of Men - similarly bleak setting (so much so that I never want to watch that film again, though I DO want to watch District 9 again, ASAP, preferably in digital this time!)
Robocop - see above. A cyborg showed more humanity than his creators. District 9 stands up VERY well next to Robocop.
Alien Nation / Buckaroo Banzai - The premise of hundreds of alien refugees attempting to coexist with humanity is a common thread, but this film is NOTHING like those, and it's played really straight, in a way that those films never could have been (largely due to the era they were produced.)

If you can take the tension this movie produces and have the stomach for intense visceral thrills, but still want something more to think about afterwards than a collection of plastic toys, I cannot recommend District 9 enough. Go see it this weekend. Hopefully enough people will catch on that the powers that be produce District 10 (and they'd better, because I'm dying to see what happens next!)

A fellow genius has passed away...

Les Paul, world genius of electrified music, has passed away at the age of 94.

I had the distinct pleasure of meeting this great master a few years ago, and watching his show at the Iridium Jazz Club in NYC. Les Paul was the most gracious entertainer I think I've ever met... he was happy to sit and sign autographs for a full hour after performing his SECOND set of the night. I'll never forget that night, and the WORLD had better NEVER forget his great achievements in guitar technology!



(also time for me to get my 1964 'Les Paul' SG appraised, methinks...)