Hour of the Wolf News

4.00 am, and I'm wide awake. Berit and I have, for some reason, wound up on the opposite schedules this night - usually, I fall asleep somewhere between 11.30 pm - 1.00 am, and she's up until after dawn, then I get up early and she sleeps in late. She conked out at 11.15 tonight, leaving me to my own devices.

Which, tonight, has been sound editing. I went over to Trav S.D.'s tonight to work on the song for Merry Mount with Trav and Robert Pinnock, and it was pretty much decided to not use the song Trav had written for the pagan maypole dance and wedding scene in the show, but instead some modern recordings of Renaissance music that Robert had. Made life easier in some ways (don't have to teach the cast a song), and more complex in others.

The music was on cassette, and I had to pong it over digitally onto the computer first, trying to EQ it to remove the hiss (not very successfully). Then the tracks needed serious editing, so I got into sound editor mode, and as always when cutting sound, hours went by without me noticing - not the world's greatest edit job, but it'll suffice - I had to do things like cut three sections of a 3 minute long track (the beginning, a bit of the middle, and the end) into a single minute-long track, avoiding the sections we didn't want (with cheesier melodies or arrangements). Sometimes the arrangements made it impossible to have a clean edit, and I had to put in a tiny bit of reverb over the slice to melt them into each other a bit - like putting solder over two pieces of metal.

One track I cut down now has to have a fairly elaborate little sound montage layered onto it, but that's going to have to wait until tomorrow - at least I found a website with all the sound clips I needed (basically, a journey through soundbites of the 20th Century that comes to the Colonial Puritans of the play in a vision).

Berit finished typing in Foreman's Harry in Love: A Manic Vaudeville on Sunday, and I made what edits I could (28 pages) and sent it off to the two actors cast so far (besides myself). Also sent the full electronic version to the Ontological for their database and files, which Shannon there appreciated.

I'm just about three-quarters of the way through finishing the Magnificent Ambersons script. I've slowed up as it's gotten really depressing and the main character's become a real shit - a big problem with all versions of this story back to the original novel: you're supposed to like George Amberson Minifer even while he's a jerk, and just want him to "be a better person," but he's SUCH a horrible person through 4/5ths of the story that you have no interest in his redemption by the time it comes. Welles didn't solve this problem in his film, and as I'm recreating his film as best I can, I'll be recreating the problem, too. So it goes.

After the work at Trav's, he, Robert, and I watched a documentary on Val Lewton on TCM that was a good 90-minute overview of his life and work. Made me want to watch some of his films again, but I only have one (The Seventh Victim, my favorite) on tape. Now it's too late to start something up. Or maybe it's something good to drift off to sleep with . . .

So What Kind of Band Is This?

Berit really liked the album-cover-creating meme I participated in BELOW, HERE, where you create a fake band's album cover from images/words found in random web searches.

So, she had to do one herself. As she says, she could do this for fun all day. Well, it would take a while, since she goes through 19,000 fonts or so looking for the "right one" (I just keep hitting the interestingly-named ones until I find a really good one that works).

When we were doing the random generating that went into this, we first thought it was for a Laibach-type band, then Berit decided it was more like Electric Six. Now I don't know.

What kind of band is Frederick Gent School?

B's just said she thinks they wound up more Pixies-ish, but she isn't so sure either.