Forgery League

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?)

Lotsa work-like stuff this week - little odd jobs mostly, like business cards and ads and cleaning up horrendously noisy voice-over audio. Almost done the recording of “Searchlights”, and another song is on the way…

The cat situation has stabilized. Spot and Tarquin aren’t pals, but they tolerate each other. Tarq has now become the bratty little brother (despite being twice her weight), following her around, wanting to do everything she does and so on. This also means they both try to sleep on the bed. We need a bigger bed. >.<

So our friend Karen’s hair salon and makeup supply outlet is now open, with the logo I designed turned into a fancy schmancy metal and acrylic sign. There’s certainly something fun about seeing something you did rendered so physical and visible… I won’t say “satisfying”, because hey, it’s all ephemeral in the end, isn’t it? And that’s cool too. The satisfaction for me is in the work itself, and handing it off at the end.

Julian and I kicked around ideas for The CD last night, and we debated the merits of various ways of recording a drum track - including renting a rehearsal space. Reason being: we sort of settled on Stars For Searchlights as a cool title, which fits nicely with a photo Sean took of us recently. But the then-title track demands a drum track with, for example, a big tom fill when it goes into the bridge at half-tempo.

So that evening, I figured, what the hell… and dropped all of US$15 on a 50-meg download membership at PrimeSounds.com, then hunted around until I found a stack of very serviceable hihat loops, tom hits and so on. Plugged them into a cheapass freeware sampler for Cubase, and went to town. A few hours later, I had a pretty solid and natural-sounding backing track. Doesn’t quite beat The Real Thing, but it suddenly shot “Searchlights” out of the rink compared to the other tracks we’ve recorded so far. So we’ll probably have to revisit at least one or two of them.

Yay for technology. It’s also been nice working with two monitors. At the very least, I can do my work on one screen while the cat chases my cursor around the other. (He discovered this pastime about three days ago. There are now noseprints all over the glass. In other news, our bathtub plug keeps ending up in the hall outside our apartment.)

Sean gets back tomorrow. I’ve been enjoying taking on a semi-producer role - mailing out packages, redoing and updating our various web sites, researching airport limos in New Jersey. Making things happen, guiding them along… I could get used to this.

Well, at least it’s only for one weekend a year.

The Molson Indy is on, and from our new place downtown we can hear the endless droning of engines circling the Exhibition grounds. Maybe next year we’ll join in the lighthearted neighbourhood protests against it… This year I am told they had a “Wholesome Undies” march, wherein people walked the race route sans outerwear. A couple years back, green mayoral candidate Tooker Gomberg and friends sat outside Mayor Mel Lastman’s house with a sound system, playing a recording of last year’s race. (Mel has since moved to a condo.)

In other news, Sean got me a POD (an all-in-one guitar effects unit and amp simulator) as an early birthday present. Yay! Then he got me to show him a couple of chords so he could see how it sounded, and spent about five minutes rockin’ out before he broke a string. :D

Ah well. It was about time to change strings anyway. Good thing I’ve got a set of electrics around to cannibalize, as every music store in town closes on Sunday.

We uploaded the first ‘official’ Flickershow MP3 today: “Suit Impostor Prophesy”. Yay!

Went out to see a friend’s band the other night. When we arrived, we were informed that we’d missed seeing a girl who’d shown up earlier and looked exactly like Julian. The two were never seen together, so people drew the obvious conclusion. “Don’t go out with her,” Jason warned me, “‘cause she’s actually Julian and it’ll totally fuck up your band’s interpersonal dynamics. Don’t sleep with the Julian-woman.” I reassured him that this would not occur.

It’s nice having a musical crowd to hang out with, yes.

Julian came by to record last night, and we laid down a demo version of “Gold Thieves”. It’s a good ole hurtin’ song. Who knew we could be so country?

“Suit Impostor Prophesy” may take a little longer. We have yet to decide on a “fast” song to kick the demo off - maybe “Idiot Grin” or “Threshold Interrupt”.