This last week, I spent three nights recording with the inimitable Al Tuck at Charles Austin's Studio, The Echo Chamber. We went in each night immediately after work and stayed until all hours, getting down about 10 or 11 songs live off the floor. Charles got a fantastic representation of Al's voice, and in general I think we made some pretty solid recordings. I guess Al and Charles will now have to sift through the hours and gigas of bytes to pan gold out of the bitstream.
What with that and this long weekend we are now into, work has been mostly if not entirely exhausting. This may be a pretty controversial opinion, and I might get kicked out of the Society of Complaining Office Workers and Layabouts (SCOWL) for expressing it, but I kind of don't like long weekends. They always mean getting so much more work done in less time that the extra day is usually spent either catching up on lost sleep or drinking oneself into oblivion in a misguided attempt to chase away the stress demons before they start persuasively suggesting you throttle your boss or replace your co-worker's screensaver with a compromising picture of her from last year's Christmas party while she is in the washroom. My own as yet unthrottled boss has decided that we should only work a half day on the Friday before each long weekend this summer, which is awfully decent of him, but when noon had come and gone and everyone was still hunched over their computers trying to finish off all the projects that absolutely had to be finished before they could even think about leaving, the resentment was palpable. In the end, I left most of the job that I usually take all Monday and Tuesday to complete — and which I'd thought I might get a decent start on to avoid the otherwise unavoidable freakout on Tuesday when four o'clock hits and it's inexplicably only half done — undone in order to come home and nap for most of the afternoon.
I did manage to produce something I was somewhat proud of this week: an ad for a used car sale based on the concept of the sales people's boss ordering them to sell off all the cars. That was the client's direction, and I captured it in what I thought was a pretty amusing way, but unfortunately the negative boss stereotype did not go over well. Instead, I was forced to make the majority of the ad a memo from the fictional boss, using bosslike but non-negative language. Not nearly as visually interesting, but I guess it gets the point across. Anyway, here's my original design.
Let's see... what else? There were a couple of practice sessions with Charles, Cliff, and Mike on Monday and last night. That's really coming along well and the addition of Mike on vocal duties has been a stroke of genius. Now we just need a name. I can't remember whether I told you this, but we'd settled after a lot of debate on Sea Takes Castle. However, it was never an entirely popular choice, and now we've decided it sounds too much like The Sea and Cake. So it's back to the drawing board. Suggestions are welcome, but will probably be shot down. Just so you're warned.
Oh yeah, some updates to the last post: it turns out the name of the dish is actually General Tso's chicken, not General Gao's. I don't know anything about either of those presumably venerable military figures, but apparently this is a common mistake. Also, the Beauty Queens did not win the Amazing Race, as you may have seen. We were quite disappointed, especially as the team that ended up winning were a couple of misanthropic jerks. The Beauty Queens always had such a refreshingly positive attitude, we were convinced they were a shoe-in, and then on the final episode they actually got in an argument and said some hurtful things to each other. That's the problem with those reality shows — you can't expect the plot to follow any kind of coherent structure or even resolve satisfyingly. Reality needs some new writers.
There've been some other art projects going on that I can't really talk about yet, and the next bit of business is to learn the songs of The Got to Get Got, as it seems we have some shows booked over the next couple of months. Their four song EP, which was made before I joined the band, just came out and it sounds great. That'll help me figure out those ones at least. I was supposed to practice with those guys last night, but it conflicted with my other band practice so I had to bail. I also had to skip yoga class this week. Priorities, priorities. At least we have another one this afternoon.
And finally, in among all the crazy hecticity, Ali and I have been listening to an audio book called Practising the Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. He's one of these metaphysical, spiritual guys who tells you the best way to live. It's a very popular subject these days. But this guy is pretty down to earth and not completely kooky and new-agey. OK, he's a little bit kooky. He has a very interesting German/English accent, for instance. And he's kind of ugly. His writing is mostly about recognizing the ego in all its guises and trying to watch it detachedly, rather than getting suckered into identifying with it and its foolish desires. Very buddhist, but this guy's more into cultivating awareness at all times, rather than using meditation as a temporary/temporal practice of awareness cultivation. Plus, he seems to advocate my long-held view that the best way to think of the world is as a giant insane asylum wherein we are all both patients and doctors. If you already think of everyone, yourself included, as completely insane, then it's not so upsetting when you witness insane behaviour in yourself or others. I recommend you check it out. But don't blame me if you don't like it — I'm loony as a cuckoo bird.
- Andrew
