Well, dear readers, I am sitting here like so much tired fish, listening to some very weird and atonal music by Gunther Schuller – Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee. It’s the kind of music that makes you want to eat pistachio nuts and choke the living daylights out of a plush toy. Which is exactly what I’ve been doing. This is my second only five hours of sleep night in a row so I’m needing a good night’s beauty sleep this night, I can tell you that.
Yesterday, she of the Evil Eye arrived and before leaving her to her own devices, I did some work on the computer and at the piano – proofing a chart on one of my new songs, and printing out a few orders (not a bad order day at all), answered e-mails, and then went and had bacon and eggs and fruit, oh my. After that, I picked up a couple of packages – a happy customer of ours was so happy that he sent me a little gift – a book he wrote about being a vinyl soundtrack collector. I also finally got all the book promo stuff – postcards, bookmarks, and all that jazz. Oh, and there are now nine lovely reviews for GEE on Amazon, so check ‘em out. Two people who just finished it and really enjoyed it told me they’ll write reviews today, so that will be nice. I’ve gotten some really nice e-mails about the book, too – people have been lovely telling me that they’re very moved by it, which means so much to me.
Then I came home and had a brief visit with someone who brought me some art stuff for upcoming projects – LP covers to scan for good quality. We really do have some fun and surprising releases scheduled throughout the year – and in fact I think it will be Kritzerland’s busiest release year in ages. There are at least six show albums in the queue and probably as many soundtracks. And I’ve reconnected with someone at a studio where the licensing guy has simply never responded to me after I put in for three titles – so I went back to the original person I’d talked to and she was rather shocked by that and said she’d get on it right away, so that may lead to something worthwhile. I listened to an upcoming album, probably in the batch after the next one. It’s really super fun and we can definitely improve the sound from the previous cheap CD release, which is now going for very big money. I never released two titles at once more than a handful of times, but I’m finding people really appreciate it, as they save a bit of money on postage, so I think that’s going to become fairly standard for us this year.
After that, I had some food – I’d gotten a little thing of chicken salad at Jerry’s Deli to take home and so that’s what I had – it was actually really good – that and their egg salad are tops, and I may start taking home the little containers more often to make them the meal o’ the day. I rewrote a couple of lines of a lyric for one song – I’d used a really sort of lazy non-rhyme, I mean not a rhyme at all even though it looks like one: surprises/prizes. Really just the same word, rhyme-wise, so I came up with a replacement, but that involved a word that after much thought, wasn’t a word the young character would use, so I changed it one more time and found something I was happy with. I worked on the other song I’ve been slaving over – a ballad. I had the intro and the first two verses, but couldn’t come up with a bridge that did anything for me, and finally it came to me and I got it recorded and written down. So now I just have to write the lyric for the bridge and the final verse and that’s another one down. After all that, I finally sat on my couch like so much fish.
Last night, I watched a movie from a new box set of Seijun Suzuki films. Now, I’m not a FANatical lover of this guy’s movies, but I did enjoy the two that Criterion put out – Branded to Kill and Tokyo Drifter – very weird movies but stylish. This set is early Suzuki movies and the first one I watched is the earliest in the set, 1957. It’s supposedly a suspense thriller set mostly on a bus with a bunch of disparate characters, like a then-modern day Stagecoach. But the tone is so wacky – the score plays like a comedy score, the characters are really dopey and weird, and I just thought it was pretty terrible. And yet, like all these uppity auteurists, they forgive anything and just automatically love anything with this guy’s name on it. But if you showed them this film and they didn’t know it was him, my guess is they’d think it was terrible.
Then I watched another episode of The Outer Limits, this one called O.B.I.T – I don’t think I’d watched it before. Jeff Corey and others star, but the real star is director Gerd Oswald and cameraman Conrad Hall. Unfortunately, this episode is a real word-fest, just a whole lot of babbling, so not my favorite. I started another episode, but may skip it, since the director, Abner Biberman, is not interesting at all.
Then I watched a low-budget “thriller” on the Flix of Net entitled Bad Match. It’s one of those Fatal Attraction things but for the Tinder age. It’s competent in a way, but the dialogue is pretty terrible and the acting is no great shakes. It does end up going in a different direction at the end, but it’s telegraphed pretty strongly so it’s not the twist the filmmaker would like it to be. The real problem is that the two leads are completely unlikeable and the female lead reminded me very strongly of someone I no longer communicate with and who is behaving reprehensibly, so that didn’t help, if you get my meaning and I know you do because you dear readers are smark cookies. SMARK cookies? Shouldn’t that be smart cookies or, at the very least, smart cooties? Smart Cooties – that’s the title of my next novel and it’s now going to be the title of these here notes. See what happens when your typing finger goes to the wrong letter?
Then I relaxed, listened to music, took a hot shower, and that was that. Not exactly a ME day, but not a bad day as days go.
Today, I’ll hopefully arise after a good night’s beauty sleep. Once up, I’ll hopefully print out more orders, I’ll relax, make the show order I should have made yesterday, try to finish the song, and then I’ll mosey on over to The Federal for sound check, and then I sup and it’s show time.
This week is writing commentary, working on songs, prepping our next two titles, having a work session for the May show, setting some more performers for the Richard Sherman concert, and meetings and meals.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, relax, hopefully print out orders, make a show order, try to finish a song, do a sound check, eat, and watch a show. Today’s topic of discussion: It’s free-for-all day, the day in which you dear readers get to make with the topics and we all get to post about them. So, let’s have loads of lovely topics and loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, where I shall fall asleep thinking about smart cooties.