I’ve given up on revising my thesis for now. I’m not going to be able to focus on it with the job for Marti so far from completed, and with so much to do before I leave LA for four months.

Today I am testing all my audio gear before hitting the road.
I’m also hoping to repack and start disassembling the garoffice.
I’m getting all the love mixtapes exported, and will get the first batch burned today, I hope. I’ll leave the first one on the bus on Sunday when I travel North to SF.

I’ll be there ten days: trying to say goodbye to a ton of people; finish the Marti job; revise my thesis; say goodbye to the GF; and record music for the Bounded by Silence project Phil and Libby and I are working on.

I’m hoping to record bits of that record with every musician I stay with. That’s a lot of people over the next four months. The heart will be me and Phil and Libby writing lyrics and laying down frames. Of course, by then, we’ll be laying down frames over pieces recorded with Nobu and Alex and a number of other folks, so…
The hope is to create the bastard child of David Thomas and Marilyn Manson, wetnursed by Comus.

I had a great convo about the editing of Disembody with my father this morning. I am thinking I’ll buy another travel drive so I can take the footage from the project. I’ll try to watch it and get a feel for what we have while on the road.
Because I really needed something else to do on this trip, LOL.

Spent a couple hours on email and FB this morning chatting with folks I hope to see on my trip.

Blah that’s enough blathering for now. I can’t wait to see my GF tomorrow!

(music for this failed transcode is courtesy of audio swap on youtube. It’s The Institute of Contemporary Music performing Triangulum Galaxy.)

Over the last few days I’ve been trying, with the help of Jonny, to find a way to transcode the initial edit of Disembody. So far no luck. The feature file is almost ten gigabytes. So far we’re having trouble uploading it (our host rejects files that big, as did our library at the internet archive). VLC, Movie Player and Transcode all failed to successfully transcode it as a smaller file. It’s too big to put on DVD as is.

Etcetera

I would really like to have it available online. And Skye would really like it for his reel, as he is looking for video editing jobs.
The next thing we’ll try is putting it on an external drive and taking it to Amy’s Mac to see if the program that spat it out (Final Cut Pro) can recognize it, load it, and export it as a .mpg or .mov.

Elsewise, I’ve updated the 23E site again. And I’ve torn through every page of Vime, updating them all. Disembody and the next two MVM projects (tentatively titled Portal 7: A Mild Informality and Portal 8: Expansion) all have improved pages and info available. And the third SPP record is now represented and available online in a rough mix.

If you are in SF between September 26 and November 6 you should check out The Colony Room. It is curated by 23E friend Anne Colvin. And our own Marcella Faustini curated a jukebox for the space featuring original music and video from 23E members Alex Lukas and Skye Thorstenson. And, yours truly.
I put up a page and info about The MVM’s work (ten songs on three thumb drives, setting the Pentateuch to music) for the show.

This our food supply.  There’s more to the right.  We won’t be able to restock apparently.

The restroom is to the rear of the gallery.  We spent part of our food budget on a Glade Pug-in unit that can’t really be used since there’s not an outlet in the restroom.  Apparently.

Lee sent me off on a break/walk to go find an RCA to BNC adapter.  I didn’t find one.  I didn’t find an electronics store.  I did find this, however:

An abandoned cat sanctuary in an abandoned bank lot.  I could smell the baking, rotting cat shit from the corner across the street.  Every inch of loose dirt was covered in feces.  There were kittens everywhere.  Someone had left them chicken wings coated in that Chinese orange sauce, but they hadn’t eaten them.  The kittens hung out behind the iron fence like lions in a zoo.  Pretty fun.  Super cute.

The editors are on edge about the powertooling next to the editing station and so am I.  I snapped at Carson for shaking some luon around.

I’d taken a break resorting Lee’s boxes of cabling & tech to stick a parking tag behind my windshield.  To get to the lot I walked down this alley, to the right heading towards the rear of Chun King court.  Unassuming.  I like the lanterns.  There are lanterns strung everywhere.  They look great at night.

A few shops in a small bird bombed down and dropped a load almost as large as itself in front of me.