Forgery League

The dust’s settled on 2007 at last, and does it ever feel like a new year now. Here’s a few highlights, including some stuff I didn’t write about the first time round:

January: Spinglobe moves into a brand new office in a neat building in the east end. One of the first projects is a music video for the Mahones. It’s a takeoff on that Fellini scene where la Saraghina dances the rhumba on a Mediterranean beach - except it’s January, on Ashbridge’s Bay, and the warm spell of the previous week is most definitely over. We should have called the production Minus 8½. We freeze our collective asses off, but the video ends up looking pretty darn fine.

February: Played in the band for a musical revue put on as a fundraiser by some friends - my first time playing Broadway style is a fun challenge; I stress way about it more than I have to. Reconceived long-running audio drama idea as a podcast; later in the year would reconceive it again as a comic. Expect it to morph into a novel, a musical extravaganza and finally a series of haiku in 2008.

March: In the studio with Ellen Carol to record bass tracks for her new CD, produced by Don Kerr. Restarted work on Flickershow CD; we get some solid demos done and some cool results on a trip-hoppy new song called “Hold Up Donny”. It doesn’t last, however; I end up firing myself as producer later in the year. If all goes well we’ll be recording with Don in 2008.

May: Played with Flickershow at the Sammy Sugar Day Festival, the kickoff for Ellen’s fundraising bike tour of Eastern Canada. Finally launched a site for Presonance, a collaboration with Rezo Largul.

June: Attended OpenCities, an “unconference” about the convergence of civic engagement and the open source movement. Among the topics are the waterfront revitalization, public space, DIY electronics and public art, dancing in the streets. Coincidentally, the next day, Flickershow played at Pedestrian Sundays, a monthly car-free event in Kensington Market (other events occur in Mirvish Village and on Baldwin Street); our first outing with keyboard player Rich.

Later in the month, Sean’s mom comes up from Pennsylvania for a visit. Tuesday we’re at work while she takes it easy; she’s out having a smoke on the front porch when lightning strikes a tree two doors down, and a gale-force gust of wind tears off branches for several blocks. We return home to find our street a maze of police tape, tree limbs and downed power lines. Neighbouring streets are almost unaffected. “I didn’t do it,” she pleads.

July: Played Newmarket and Brampton - our only out-of-town gig prior to this was our TVO appearance taped in Parry Sound. First steps toward developing an analog-to-MIDI interface using that splendid new toy, the Arduino.

August: Cottage outing with co-workers. Lots of laughs, plenty of good food and drink, and some cool photographic exploration of natural forms and painting with light.

October: A week from hell. Two or three clients go through reorganizations, and a number of key projects go on indefinite hold. Contractors removing a cellular tower break a sprinkler pipe and flood part of our office. None of this registers, however, because our co-worker’s 21-year-old brother has just died in his sleep. Things are very quiet for several days.

November: Two good friends of ours invited us to play a song at their crazy cabaret-style lesbian wedding. The only question was what to wear. (As MC for the evening, Sean had no such dilemma, since they’d put him in a rather lovely kilt and feather boa.)

At the end of the month, a beautiful, awe-inspiring, mad trip to Marrakech with Sean, his mom and stepdad, and a new friend, the irrepressible and energizing Katie. We stayed in the heart of the medina, a maze of winding alleyways full of people, tiny shops, mopeds and stray cats. A handful of local kids kept asking for money; Sean juggled for them instead (years ago he did it for a living in Dallas) and became an instant hit. Later, we drove through the Atlas Mountains to ride camels into the desert and sleep in a tent. Beautiful country, lots of wonderful people. And occasional strange family moments.

December: The partners make the tough decision to sell the company to a bigger firm. Some of us move over, the video business splits off (taking on the name Robotnik Films), and I start looking for work. I’ll miss the place, and I’ll miss working with the Spinglobe crew. But it’s a huge opportunity, both to find work in a field that’s important to me and to have some actual free time again. Here’s to the new year!

Finally watched Velvet Goldmine last night. It’s basically a revue - there’s a thin plot about a reporter looking into the extravagant life of a vanished glam rocker reminiscent of David Bowie (complete with “Ziggy Stardust” stage persona)... but it’s mostly an excuse to do an extended music video with fey, pretty boys in glitter and makeup doing lots of posing and snogging and Oscar-Wilde-quoting amidst all the rocking out.

It goes on a bit long, perhaps, but there’s plenty to recommend it if you’re a music geek and/or like watching pretty boys snogging. It’s full of references, and the soundtrack is almost all period stuff. No Bowie - that’d make the parallels too obvious, I suppose - but plenty of stuff like early Brian Eno and early Roxy Music, both in original form and covered pretty ably by the cast with help from Thom Yorke, Shudder To Think and others. Most of those musical details went over my SO’s head, but the eye candy made up for it. :D

The shoot for “Invincible” was amazing. We spent Saturday afternoon shooting the opening and closing sequence on B&W 16mm: singer Julian falling asleep in our “rehearsal space” (actually our director Remi’s bachelor apartment, the furniture having been relocated to the deck and the roof). Geez, it’s a lot of work doing this stuff, and we were only doing about half a minute of ‘story’ at most… I have a new respect for TV and movie actors and crews now.

In the evening, we crammed a few dozen people into the same room for the main event. We performed the song in front of an audience as a dream sequence, shot on Super-8, using 6 different cameras of varying makes, on several different types of film stock for a sort of ‘patchwork’ look. Even the movie cameras were part of the scene.

Three of our camera operators were women wearing little pink tops, hotpants and knee socks - Remi promised “space helmets” early on, but they were nowhere in sight, sadly. I did have a moment of “dear god, have we sold out already?” over the Female Eye Candy Thing, but Remi’s justification was that the whole thing is Julian’s dream. Really, this video is just a big character assassination on poor J. :>

One of our guests (I shan’t say who yet) was a strapping fellow in a dress and boa, with whom I ended up dancing. The sight of him, complete with chest hair and glitter, prompted one of our scantily-clad camerawomen to blurt out “Ohthankgod. I don’t feel so dumb now.” Alas, our friend David Hein couldn’t be there… he was planning to be there in a superhero costume, appropriately enough.

Next, we have to record the final version of the song. We’ll have a screening party in June, most likely, and then we’ll put it up on the web site. And then, who knows? I’ll have to start looking up places to send a DVD…

We took in several documentaries at Hot Docs, ranging from wonderful to appalling. Among the better pictures: a double bill of Terminal Bar (trailer and info at Tourist Pictures, the story of a seedy bar opposite the Port Authority Terminal in NYC that gradually became a gay hangout, all told through photographs taken by the owner… marvelous; and Rockets Redglare! - a biography of a somewhat obscure character actor who lived one hell of a roller-coaster life (frightful childhood, much drug use and self-destructive behaviour). Gave new meaning to the term ‘unflinching’, and also made me feel good that a human being who can go through so much utter shit can still be warm and open-hearted to the end. Saturday we saw one called Tishe! or Hush!, a somewhat experimental film in which the director spent a year taping scenes from his window in St Petersburg… I can’t really summarize it beyond that, but: marvelous.

In between, we’ve been working on a half-minute web video for a project an old friend of Sean’s. We taped the footage for it at M’s place (she and her roommate are the stars). Possibly the Scariest Taxi Ride Ever while taking our equipment there: The driver looked just like the Orchid Thief in Adaptation, sweartogod, and turned out in fact to be a Nascar racer. Any time more than seven feet of lane opened up ahead of us, he floored it. We all thought we were gonna die. Interesting guy - we had a great conversation as we roared up the Bayview extension about how screwed up the infrastructure is in this town, and generally agreed that private automobile ownership in the city is dumb (he, like us, is carless - “and I live to drive, man!” he says) but we were all very very glad to be out of that car and unharmed.

Mn. What else? Went dancing for the first time in ages - twice, in fact. Sean always laughs when I do my eighties robo-spasm routine (when, for example, Gary Numan comes on). I don’t know why. And J and I played at the open stage at the Free Times last night, yay. New song of Julian’s called “To The Nines”, which is mighty fine.

I should have sat down to play bass, though… my ribcage isn’t quite up to the task yet, and so is Not Happy. See, I’m going to a new chiropractor, who is amazing; in the space of two weeks he’s made great strides in curing my chronic slouch, a feat I’d thought would take years. (Holy crap, I have shoulders now.) The down side is that the muscles between my ribs, which have been squished to bits all this time, are protesting something fierce. Until I regain some strength, namely by learning to use the muscles I should have been using all this time, I’m a little off my stride.

And that’s the news, or as much as I can remember. Back to Pro Tools…

Oh! And I finished a new song: “Nog Chomper”. (It’s a sort o’ incense, innit?)