The Cost of Recording

I'm a musician...sort've. I don't make any money off of it, but I play in a band and I launched a solo project about a month ago. I have a website with a blog and all that jazz and I would normally post this kind of music-related biznazz there. The thing is, this little rant is going to be about someone local, someone known, and I don't want to burn any bridges before I've built them, you know what I mean? So I'm just gonna go ahead and separate this out so I can get it off my chest but still maintain relations in case I need them again in the future. In the short term I have no intention of working with him again, but you never know what's going to happen.

When I decided to launch this new music project I had this great idea. I was going to release a single month. It would be a good way to keep people engaged, prevent them from burning out on the same old tune and losing interest. I happened to have a bunch of professionally recorded tracks that I'd done a couple of years ago. Wifey got me some studio time with a friend of ours who has a studio in town, and I went in with my guitar and laid down rhythm and vocals, had the dude from my band come in and play bass, and then had some local college kid do drums. I recorded like 6 or 7 songs during this time. They were essentially done and all I needed was some lead guitar work. I had asked a friend of mine to do it and he agreed, but he kept putting me off and finally the whole project just languished. When I re-committed myself to a solo project I thought, Cool, I have a bunch of pro tracks to start off with. I'll just play the leads myself. I planned to do a combination of releasing the professionally recorded ones and home-recorded demos of new songs.

There was a small snag in my plan though. Upon re-listening to the previously recorded tracks, it became clear that the dude with whom I'd initially recorded either had a tin ear (which I feel like he didn't because his other shit sounds pretty good), or just didn't really give a damn. The guitar was so badly out of tune it made me wince to go back and listen. I remember recording an EP with my band, using this guy (let's call him Scarf, because he wore a scarf one time) who has a studio in the same building as our practice space and having him flat out replace my guitar with one of his own to play because it didn't sound very good. That's a producer, and it makes sense. It's what I'd expect. I'm going to release these recordings and tell everyone that you recorded and produced them. It's in your best interest to make them sound good. For whatever reason that didn't happen with my initial recordings. I never told the dude either because I have no backbone. At any rate, I now found myself in a position of having to re-record all of the guitar, and some of the vocals too.

I decided to work with Scarf. He was a known, I liked the work he did on our EP, and he was conveniently located. No-brainer. I sent him the tracks I had and said, "Tell me what I need to do to make these sound good." His assessment? That much of it was unusable. He didn't think the drums were mic'd very well and therefore they lacked good levels, and he agreed that my guitar was out of tune. He said it would cost me more money to have him try and massage all of that into something listenable (and it still wouldn't be great) than it would be for us to start over. He would use what he could, but in the interest of quality replace whatever didn't rate.

Camp Belvidere: My Half-Assed Review

In my last post I mentioned a movie I'd seen recently called Camp Belvidere, and I threatened to talk about it. So, I'm gonna talk about it. It's a 38-minute short only available for rental via Vimeo. I find that incredibly disappointing because a) the movie's been out since April I think, and b) I could go broke renting it. I liked it that much.

I don't typically go in with high expectations when it comes to shorts. It's a challenging way to make a movie. You have a limited window in which to tell your story, and that often results in movies that are purposefully vague (re: "artsy") to avoid having to adhere to standard storytelling tactics which might not work well; movies with a lot of short scenes and quick camera changes, resulting in a frenetic feeling; or movies that just don't get to tell the whole story and leave the audience feeling disconnected and lost. Camp Belvidere rather masterfully avoids all of those pitfalls and leaves me feeling like I just watched a complete movie. A short one, but complete.

Ahem...there may be spoilers from here on out because I can't censor myself. You've been warned. I'll even make a little jump link for you.

Lesbian-related Media Thought of the Day: Soap Operas

I've just completed a binge re-watching of All My Children's Bianca/Marissa storyline. It's been a little light in new lesbian media these days (although I did just watch in interesting little short called Camp Belvidere; more on that in another post maybe) and when that happens I tend to go back to my old standbys for my girl-on-girl fix. Re-watching AMC is one of those standbys. As always, watching those clips made me start thinking about how odd the state of lesbian affairs is in the daytime soap world, so I thought this time I'd write it down and maybe not have to think about it the next time. Doubtful, but hey, no harm.

I don't know how many lesbians there've been in the history of US soaps. I'm not an avid soap watcher, although when I was a teen I tuned in to Days of Our Lives, Guiding Light, As the World Turns, and Another World whenever I had a chance. I of course didn't realize that tuning in to Another World simply because I was enthralled with Anne Heche, or that I really, really liked As the World Turns's Shannon O'Hara played by Margaret Reed might mean something...else. Like, it wasn't because of the stellar acting.

I became reacquainted with soaps by watching clips of Maggie and Bianca on AMC. I had heard about Lena Kundera but honestly, she wasn't all that attractive to me so I didn't really fancy going back to see any of that. It's kind've the way I pretend Callie and Erica didn't happen on Grey's Anatomy. I enjoyed the BAM storyline even though it just didn't make sense a good deal of the time, and it seemed that the writers were doing everything they could to keep them from having to actually do anything about the attraction between the two characters. It was so weird because they had already established this lesbian character in Bianca Montgomery, and that was such a big deal, and they'd given her a relationship already (two actually because there was Frankie I guess), but for some reason they were really balking about fully committing to Maggie and Bianca. Who the hell knows why? They kissed a total of I think 3 times during the series, and for all but the last time it wasn't mutual. You have the Maggie snogged Bianca while Bianca was with someone else kiss: http://youtu.be/Ery5wWUTgX4. I'd embed it but the user disabled that functionality. It's at the 3:40 mark.

The next time is the other way around. Maggie's in an abusive relationship with some dude and Bianca kisses her: http://youtu.be/ZYO-DcQcFc0. Same deal with the video, but this person seems to be the only one with any BAM vids on YouTube.

And the last kiss: http://youtu.be/LTmJLs4tgYk. It was still a sort've non-mutual kiss; it was a break-up kiss. They actually talked to each other and said out loud that they were lovers...right before Elizabeth Hendrickson left the show. I guess better late than never.

Your Bodies, Your Selves...Naked Celebrity Pics

I've read a lot of articles about the latest naked celebrity photo leak: Facebook, Gawker, Jezebel, Slate...well, hell, everyone has something to say about it. Welp, here's my two cents.

First, I'd like to address the way people are calling the theft of these photos a "sex crime". Lena Dunham was one of the first people I saw use that term to refer to this incident. I tried to find a standard definition of a sex crime, and in the majority of cases the definition always involved a physical component. From http://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/sex-crimes.html

A number of different offenses fall into the sex crimes category, but they generally involve illegal or coerced sexual conduct against another individual. Every state has laws against prohibiting the various types of sex crimes, such as rape and sexual assault, and each state has its own time limit (or “statute of limitations”) in which victims of sex crimes may file a lawsuit against the alleged offender. 

 The website http://sex-crimes.laws.com/ lists a number of offenses including child pornography, molestation, statutory rape. It does not list distributing personal photographs without consent. I found a rather broad definition of "sex offense" from fbi.gov:

Sex offenses (except forcible rape, prostitution, and commercialized vice)—Offenses against chastity, common decency, morals, and the like.  Incest, indecent exposure, and statutory rape are included.  Attempts are included.

I don't know what an "offense against chastity" would even look like, but none of these say to me that this was a sex crime.

Now, I'm not saying that this was not a crime. It certainly falls under the criminalization of hacking in general, a breach of personal data that should be handled with the same levity as any data breach. The person(s) responsible, if found, should be prosecuted, along the same lines as Christopher Chaney. I can't imagine how violated and embarrassed the victims must feel. If it were me I'm not sure how I could show my face in public. It sucks.

But. But. It is not a sex crime, and frankly the unwillingness of some circles to acknowledge the other side of this —the responsibility on the part of the actresses in question—is perplexing and just plain stupid. People do foolish things, they make foolish mistakes. It makes you feel bad for them, but it does not negate their part in what happens to them. And this is the second thing I want to address, and it's an opinion that will get you flooded with accusations that you are victim-blaming, supporting rape culture, etc. GTFO.

Listen, you have every right to take selfies, naked or otherwise. Do you. Congratulations on feeling so secure in your body and yourself that you want to express it in that way. Don't be naive though. Know that just as hackers can grab credit card data from Target and Home Depot, your online data is vulnerable as well, and if you put that shit online you are assuming risk. It kills me when people do risky shit and then act all surprised when it goes pear-shaped, especially since this isn't the first time this has happened. Did no one pay attention when this happened to Scarlett Johansson? Christina Aguilera? Jessica Alba? Vanessa Hudgens? I mean, damn man. You'd have to be living under a rock to not have some reticence about uploading your naked pics to the cloud.

Okay, so maybe they didn't do it on purpose. Maybe they had some sort of automatic upload enabled through the iCloud service. Is ignorance an excuse? In many other circumstances we'd be quick to say no, it's not an excuse, but here we're willing to give them a complete pass and dissolve them of all personal responsibility. Again I say: GTFO.

I hope they prosecute the guy who did this. I applaud sites like Reddit that have been working vigilantly to remove links to the photos and shut down discussions about it. I hope the victims are able to recover from this and don't suffer too much emotionally or professionally. I hope they delete all of their nude selfies and refrain from uploading them without taking proper precautions (like stronger passwords, two-factor authentication, encryption, etc.). I hope others, celebrities and mere mortals alike, learn from this and do the same.

On Mike Brown

When I heard about Mike Brown's death, I didn't care. I saw the headline and thought very little of it. Very little of it. Do you understand that? An 18 year-old man-child was killed and I barely batted an eyelash. It seems that hearing about black people being killed —by police, by neighborhood watchmen and other self-appointed vigilantes, by paranoid people, by other black people —has become so commonplace, it's no longer worth noticing. Kind've like mass shootings. It's all part of the American landscape now. And you know what? It sucks. It sucks to be in a place in our "evolution" where we barely blink at death any more. We make the required noises, but it doesn't affect us. These things don't shock us anymore, and they should.

Ferguson is what made me start paying attention to this one. The protests, the riots, the images of neighborhoods covered in thick clouds of tear gas, of a police force that more resembled a Michael Bay movie than any police I've ever seen in real life. This got my attention, and so I started paying attention. I paid attention to the news coverage, Twitter feeds, and to what my own Facefriends were saying. What I've seen has gotten to me, and prompted me to write this. I had to write this because all of these feelings were bubbling up and taking away my concentration, making me angry, making it hard for me to move on.

Facebook is not helping matters. I've always prided myself on the diversity of my Facefriends. We have a tendency to surround ourselves (or try to surround ourselves) with likeminded people. It starts with the kind of school we go to, right? Conservative Christians don't typically enroll in Oberlin or Hampshire, and the more liberal-minded of us are not about to matriculate into Liberty University or Brigham Young. So you amass a cohort of people who tend to believe the same things as you, and then you graduate and maybe you turn towards cities that reflect your thinking. And within the cities you migrate towards neighborhoods or nearby towns that are populated by others like you. Sometimes you even gravitate towards professions/businesses that are in keeping with your social and political leanings. I missed the boat on this last one. I went into tech, which is dominated by white guys, and a pretty large number of them have mostly turned out to be conservatives/tea partiers/libertarians because, well...white guys.

There are of course exceptions to absolutely everything I just said because the world isn't black and white and doesn't neatly divide itself. It's messy and the universe is a trickster and contrarian and is always waiting to prove you wrong.

My Facefriends reflect a social and political diversity that is difficult to reproduce in real life, especially real life with a toddler and a demanding job. This wasn't done on purpose. I friended people with whom I worked, people with whom I have never engaged in a political conversation. They know me, we chat and joke and get along, we friend each other online...and then you find out what they think about "things". Things like gun control and immigration and social services.

People like Mike Brown.

And I start to wonder if maintaining this diversity—which admittedly fuels my ego and makes me think I'm so enlightened and egalitarian—is worth the assault to my sensibilities. For every gun control rant that has a few salient and valid points that I can admit to, there are more posts that make me cringe, and comments from their friends that make me wonder who exactly I'm dealing with.

Yesterday one such Facefriend posted a photo of Mike Brown. It showed him sitting at a table, pointing a gun at the camera, a bottle of Hawaiian Punch on the table and what looks like the neck of a liquor bottle just out of frame. Behind him sits another black male, and smoke is curling around him. I'm not going to repost it here. My Facefriend captioned it with: Here's the image of Michael Brown that the news doesn't want you to see. I'm sure you can draw your own conclusions.

Oh boy.

WeightWatchers

Weightwatchers is the best of times and the worst of times. It's the best because I honestly do lose weight when I do it. How could you not? The simple act of paying attention to what you're eating is enough to get you pointed in the right direction. That's pretty much its plus point (see what I did there, fellow WW subscribers?).

The downside to WW...well, jeez, where do I begin? How about finding out that everything you thought you knew about eating just doesn't matter when you start the plan? This is my second time doing it and I was still shocked when I started. I got up in the morning and prepared to pour my standard bowl of cereal and milk. We're not talking Reese's Puffs and whole milk, people. We're talking Kash GoLean and unsweetened soy milk. A nice healthy, well-rounded way to start my day I thought. Nuh-uh, not according to WW. They generously allotted me 27 points per day to start, and that bowl of cereal and soy milk? A solid 7 points. 7 out of 27. And that's only if I actually follow the serving sizes listed on the products. Do you know what a serving of cereal is? 3/4 of a cup. Have you ever poured exactly 3/4 cup of cereal into a bowl? It looks pathetic. Like, surely there's more, right? Nope.

I can't decide if this is an issue with the serving sizes reported by manufacturers or if we simply make our bowls too big, but this is the way of the world when you join WW. You start to realize that you can no longer eat the portions you used to eat, even if you didn't think you were overeating. It will break your spirit when you learn that a serving of pasta is actually only 2 oz and you see what 2 oz of dried pasta looks like in your hand—and that it will cost you 5 points. That's before you add olive oil, or pesto or red sauce or whatever you like on your pasta. You pretty much decide right then and there that it's not worth eating pasta any more because how depressing is that?

And hunger. If you try to eat the things you ate before but simply adhere to the serving sizes listed, you will never feel sated again. When I ate what was, for me, a normal serving of cereal in the morning I was usually hungry by mid-morning. What was going to happen when I ate even less than that? It's an impossible strategy, until you learn what WW is actually trying to do.

See, they fool you a little. Their literature and ads spend a fair amount of time reassuring you that you don't have to give up on the things you love. Yes, you can still eat cake or pie or a hotdog or whatever! The word "diet" brings thoughts of deprivation and denial. Deny yourself the things you like to eat. Everyone knows this eventually backfires and can often lead to bouts of binge-eating. But WW says, "Hey, no, we're not asking you to do that. That's silly. We just want you to think about what you eat, plan it a little. That's all. No big."

The things is, you absolutely can continue to eat pasta and pizza and cake or whatever, if that's your thing. Just know that if you eat a piece of cake, it'd better be the tiniest sliver known to man or you'd better plan to not eat anything else for the rest of the day. Go ahead, have a bowl of pasta. Same rules though. You have 27 points. You can spend it on whatever you want, but that's all you get so choose wisely. To be fair, they do also give you these extra weekly points that you can use, so technically you could go over your daily allotment, but I get the feeling that doing that a lot doesn't yield the same kind of results.

You eventually get the hang of it. You realize, okay, I want some pasta. It's 5 points. 2 oz of pasta is not going to fill me up. So, I'd better make it count. I don't want to be hungry in an hour after using 5 points (and then some unless you eat just plain pasta). So you layer your pasta with a shit ton of vegetables. Lots and lots of vegetables. Conveniently, most vegetables and fruits cost no points. You can literally eat a lb of grapes and WW will say, "Cool. Good for you." You learn to pile these foods on to actually get full, and you learn to live off of these if you plan to splurge and have that piece of cake.

This is a nice, clever way to get vegetable-adverse people to eat more of them. I get it. But a person like me, whose meals largely consisted of vegetables and tofu and brown rice and other shit that I thought was healthy? It's just frustrating. I'm not trying to eat cake. I'm not trying to eat fried chicken. I just want a bowl of fucking cereal and some fucking soy milk. Now I either have to accept that I'm going to never feel satisfied by breakfast again, start piling a bunch of berries on my cereal (whether I want to or not) and hope they help fill me up, or change my breakfast eating all together and decide I can only have cereal and milk as a treat to myself every now and then. That...that just pisses me off. Who uses milk and cereal as a treat?!

You know what started this rant? My company provided sushi for lunch for us today as a reward for good financial performance. I had four pieces of sushi—not fried, no tempura, just stuff like spicy tuna and squid nigiri and a california roll—and some edamame, and it cost me 20 points. 20 points for lunch. A small lunch even. I'm hungry again already. To add insult to injury, because I lost weight WW decreased my daily point allotment. I went from 27 points to 26. It's one point, but if you do the program you'll realize how precious one point is. I'm hungry and I have 6 points to use for the rest of the day. Dinner should be creative. Maybe I'll dive into some of those extra points.

But hey, I'm losing weight, right? And that's why no matter how much it sucks I will continue to do it. The reality of WW though? Shitty, shitty reality. I'm gonna go gnaw on some cardboard now.

Dream

Last night I dreamed that one of my hot coworkers got me a pair of shoes. Well, it started out that we were actually doing a Yankee Swap type of thing and I'd just happened to get her gift. They were Crocs. But then we started talking about the size and it seemed more like she had bought them for me. She asked if they were the right size. They were 6 1/2, and I told her I probably needed size 6 because they were a little loose. She said she wore a size 1.

Maybe I ought to play the lottery today.