Hot Corn and Epic Failure

The Dog Days of Summer. A Don Henley favorite. Or something like that.

Damn, it's been hot lately. The Austin area has hit the over-100-degree days, and they don't show a sign of letting up. Not much breeze these days, either, making being outdoors pretty unbearable. Fair amount of humidity, too. It all adds up to staying indoors when at all possible.

On Thursday night, I finished installing the corn kernel wraps (received on Tuesday) on my Sonor kit. I had had a question concerning the depth of my bass drum when ordering the wraps, and the company never answered said question, not even after repeated emails and a Facebook message. The wrap turned out to be pretty close to the right size....I think if I would have ordered an inch more, I might've had to trim the wrap. There's a small gap between the edge of the wrap and the back head of the bass drum but not enough to be seen at any distance; you'd have to really be looking for it. It's about 3/8". If it really starts to bother me (the existing cover for the drums is a light tan color), I'll just pull the back head off and slap a little golden rod paint on that strip. For now, I'm leaving it.

The rest of the wraps fit perfectly, and the process was pretty simple but one of the most tedious things I've ever done. On the Friday before receiving the wraps (once I knew they were shipped), I removed all the hardware from the drums and placed it all in individual marked bags. The shells and bags sat in the living room a few days awaiting their dressing up. The wraps were received on the same day, a Tuesday, that the Hickoids had a video shoot planned (something I have to do most of the work for), so I couldn't really do much that day. The following day, in between video editing chunks, I began wrapping the drums. I started with the 12" tom, the drum I use least (I favor a four-piece kit, normally), figuring if I goofed the first wrapping job, it wouldn't be a huge deal. Turned out I wrapped it pretty well, following a really informative video on the wrap company's website. So, I did the snare drum Wednesday night as well. Thursday night, I wrapped the 13" and 16" toms and the bass drum.

Now, these wraps are designed as "no-glue." There is an adhesive strip at the end of each wrap. So what you do is wrap the drum as snugly to the shell as possible, using clamps to hold the wrap and then massaging the wrap upward around the shell to get any play out of the wrap. Once you've done that a few times, and you have the seam positioned where you want it on the drum, you pull back the end, strip off the protective paper, and press the adhesive side down. Then comes the fun. Leaving the clamps on in strategic places, you take a small X-acto knife and cut the holes where the hardware goes, matching the holes in the shells. You start by poking outward from the inside of the shell, and then looking at the cuts from the outside, you can start reaming the holes out (that didn't sound nice). The aforementioned video suggested doing the hardware a piece at a time, so as I would create the holes for a piece, I'd subsequently affix that piece. After a couple of nights of this process, I had plastic shavings all over the living room and a callous on my right forefinger in a place I've never had one from 40-odd years of drumming. Still, it was worth it. The drums look great.

So I debuted the "corn kit" last night at the Empire Control Room in Austin. I used the full kit, due to wanting to show off the work a bit. Of course, that meant switching the position of a couple of my cymbals, causing a couple of probably-unnoticeable-to-anyone-but-me gaffes in my performance. Fun show, too. Jeff introduced us as "Lance Farley's Drum Kit and The Hickoids." Mustn't upstage the singer!

It can't all be good news, right?

So, I mentioned a video shoot earlier. The video shoot itself went great. Jeff got Ruby (from the "Cool Arrow" video) to dress up in her dominatrix stuff and beat us a bit while we wore corn-on-the-cob gags. It's hilarious stuff, and I cannot wait to finish the video. Unfortunately....

I began editing the video on Wednesday, and a large portion of the video was shot using a green screen (actually, all of it, now that I think of it). My Mac has Adobe CS5 Creative Suite on it, and there was a special bug CS5 has concerning the eyedropper tool when running the software on OS X Lion. The eyedropper just doesn't work. In the past, I've reverted my machine to its other hard drive which has Snow Leopard on it, in order to do this work. Trying to remove a green screen without the eyedropper tool is like, well, it's just very difficult. Anyway, everything was going smoothly, and by late Friday night, I had maybe an hour and a half of work left. I went to bed intending to finish Saturday. When I woke up Saturday morning, my Mac monitor was heavily pixellated, and I couldn't select anything on the screen. Thinking everything froze for some reason (the Snow Leopard hard drive was not online), I rebooted but could immediately tell there was something else wrong. After some Googling and repeated reboots, I believe the logic board has an issue. Much work lost.

So, for now, I've moved the files to my Windows 10 PC, which I'd purchased the Vegas suite for last year but haven't really used yet. And I'm starting over. We'll see how it goes. Hopefully, when I write in this here blog next week, I'll have a finished version of the video to post. That's my intention, anyway. Since I had done one version, recreating the video won't be bad from a concept standpoint, it's just that I don't know this software very well. Hopefully ,everything will fall into place quickly.

And for now, I'm not sure what I'm going to do hardware-wise, but I believe I'm done with Macs. That was my only foray into the Mac world, hooked up by a friend in 2011. And it served fine...and to be honest, the reason I purchased the Vegas suite for my laptop PC had to do with knowing this day was coming, although I thought it would be because of obsolescence, rather than failure....but I'm headed back to Microsoft. I may buy a nice desktop, I may not. Maybe a souped-up laptop, I don't know. I do know I want a better external monitor. Ah...the joys of technology ownership. I also hold out a slight bit of hope that the machine will just boot up correctly eventually. I've seen more than one machine do that. Sometimes just a time-out will fix things. Very weird, but it does happen. Not that that fixes the "need the video done" situation.

Guess I'll go home and start work again....if you're in the South, friends, stay cool.

The Heat Is On - "Anguish"/"Autopsy"/"He Ran All The Way"

Ah, summer in Texas. Or pretty much summer anywhere, probably. These days, anyway. We've hit the 100-degrees-every-day mark, and it shows no signs of subsiding soon. In some ways, I'm happy about it, because I'd like to lose some weight. 20 pounds, at least. But then I'm using the verb "like," instead of something more demanding....my health is reasonably fine these days. It's just that I'm a bit of a chunk, and it'd be nice to not worry about how jowly I look at times. Not that I'm going to work out in the heat, nothing like that....but I have taken some steps.

One is purchasing a recumbent bike/working desk combination. (I think I've mentioned this here previously). So far, so good. I tend to bike anywhere from two to four hours during a work day at home, occasionally even a bit more. I've lost a couple of pounds over the last few weeks, so I'm thinking that the pedaling must be working a bit; my diet certainly hasn't changed. Project work has dried up for the moment, so I'll have to be more conscious of keeping to the riding while I'm working on whatever time-killing grunt work I get. Or just riding while watching a movie - there's that, too.

Last night, the Hickoids played a truly fun one in San Marcos, outside at the Buzz Mill. Hot? You bet. Maybe I lost a couple of pounds last night, as well. We hadn't played a show in a little over a month, and we were on fire. The band before us was largely made up of JaKs skateboard team guys, who were having a reunion in the San Marcos area but currently live in Victoria, BC. They were a really fun punk rock band, keeping the tempos lively, which inspired me for sure. I think I drove all our tempos at least 10-20 BPM faster than normal after seeing them. Didn't hurt.....kept the crowd in it. The night (and our set) ended with our rendition of "Brontosaurus" where, at the end, we throw in the marching snare-driven guitar solo of "Free Bird." About that time, I realized some guys had gotten into a full-on brawl by the front of the stage. For a while, I was certain they would crash back into the drums.....but it didn't happen. They were thrown out right as we were wrapping the song (and set) up. Hilarious way to close it.

Another bit of news: I have ordered the "corn wrap" for my Sonor drum kit. I sent the hi-rez image I found to the company, Bum Wrap, and they said "order away." The end result should be that my plain-Jane Sonor drums will look like corn cobbettes. The only thing that has me a bit nervous is that I have a question concerning the size of the bass drum wrap, and they have not answered my question, even after I sent the question twice. Hopefully, they're just not checking email for a bit, as I received the response to my image submission within 30 minutes. Still, I've already ordered and paid. Answer me, y'all!

One thing I haven't done in awhile is write about movies watched. There have been several, but I'll pick two that have been on my "gonna watch" pile for a bit but just hadn't gotten to. Both were released on DVD by Blue Underground, and both begin with "A." How's that?

"Anguish," from 1987, is something I've read both positive and negative about for quite some time. The plot is nothing too special, although the execution is. For the first 25 minutes or so, you witness a rather meek and nervous optician's assistant who is dominated by his mother. Mom drives him to kill ladies and take their eyeballs. Grisly stuff. Then....out of nowhere....the camera pulls back, and you realize that we have a "movie within a movie"; there's an audience watching this story in a theater. And there's a serial killer in the theater, influenced by the movie he's watching. Other reviewers think the premise for this movie is great but not developed very well.....I disagree. I think the director did a fine job in keepin' it creepy. You never get to know much about the characters, but I do think you develop an affinity for them and even root for, well, the two young ladies, anyway. The inner movie has Michael Lerner (you probably know him from Coen brother movies) as the optician's assistant and Zelda Rubenstein ("Poltergeist"s medium) as his wacky mother. The other cast members are pretty much unknowns (the movie was a Spanish production). I give it an "A."

"Autopsy," from 1975, well.....that's something else, entirely. This is an Italian production, shot in Rome primarily, starring Mimsy Farmer as a doctor dealing with......oh, boy, where to start? Apparently, due to solar flares, people are committing suicide at an alarming rate. When one death comes into the morgue and is examined, the method of death leads Farmer to realize it was a murder and not a suicide. Turns out the dead woman was a mistress of her father, etc. (I think that's true; there are still things about this movie that baffle me.) Farmer also sees visions of dead bodies in the morgue coming to life and laughing at her. The amount of nudity in the first 20 minutes of this movie (and really the whole thing) becomes laughable quickly. But, if you stick with it, the movie gets better in the second half...and becomes a more regular giallo. Still, I'd never heard of the director (and I've watched many a giallo); there might be a reason for that. The cast is pretty good, though, particularly Farmer, Barry Primus as a is-he-a-priest-or-isn't-he, and Ray Lovelock as Ray Lovelock. There is some great location shooting. Michelle and I are hitting Rome in October, so I enjoyed all of that, even if it is Rome 43 years ago. I'll give this one a "C."

I also, after obtaining a rather obscene number of Warner Archive and Kino Lorber titles from the library, watched "He Ran All The Way." This one, from 1951, has the distinction of being John Garfield's last film. Garfield plays a fellow from not-too-good stock, who goes in with one of his crime buddies on a robbery...and that goes wrong, leaving Garfield on the run, and eventually in the house of female lead Shelley Winters and her parents and young brother. He holds the family hostage, and.....well, it goes from there. Good film. Very clearly defined characters, maybe almost too much so, but the movie isn't very long; no time is wasted. At first, it seems Winters is too old to play this role (she was 31 at the time), but as the movie goes on, you realize how perfect she is for the part. I always thought Shelley Winters was an underrated actress, even if she did have two Oscars. Garfield is great in it. I'm still sort of a Garfield newbie; the only other film of his I've seen is "The Postman Always Rings Twice." "He Ran All The Way" rates a "B."

Don't have much else to write today. Feeling pretty drained after last night, but it's good to get "something down." Until next time.....