grocery store

I heard this lady in the grocery store today with her 5 year old kid..

kid " oooo, lets get those" pointing to some chocolate chip cookies

Mom " oh no honey, those have all kinds of chocolate in them"

Yes, I guess they do. I suppose thats why he wanted them.

The other day at grocery store I hear just this much of a conversation as a man and a lady walk past me going the opposite direction...

guy " I swear, I'll punch him in the face "

lady " do they have pretzels here? "

Once at a grocery store I was standing at one end of the aisle with my cart. Way down at the far end a mom with a 5 or 6 year kid are standing. The kid sees me and breaks away from mom. She is like " jimmy, get back here " The kid makes a bee-line for me passing other shoppers. He runs right up to me stops and barks like a dog three times. He then turns around and runs back to his mom. WTF? Funny as hell at the time.

I helped an old lady at the grocery store once. She had dropped a bunch of oranges. I picked them up and put them back on the display. The lady grabs my arm with about as much might as she had. She was a very old and frail lady. Didn't want me to get away I guess. she asks.." Are you Jewish? " I said " no, I don't think so." She pulled me real close and stared into my eyes... " You are Jewish. A nice boy like you. I can tell."

I saw this dad once in a store talking to a 6 year old girl..." are you gonna cry little princess? go ahead and cry like a baby. " He was taunting her. A real angry guy. And it was really disturbing to hear. The mother too scared to say anything. He was some gang looking dude with tats on his neck. I wanted to say something but.... in my mind I could fast forward myself to some scene in the parking lot with him wanting to kick my ass. He'd be all in my face... " who the fuck are you? Punk." But the absolute, absolute, absolute worst part would be when the mom would say something like " yeah mister, why don't you mind your own fucking business. Kick his ass Tony " So I said nothing. I need to buy a taser.

new cat

hey, our new cat is pretty sweet. We weren't looking for a new cat but the kids next door showed up one morning with this kitten. They found her on their front porch. "we can't keep her, our dad won't let us. If you don't want her I guess we'll have to take her to the pound" A lot of emphasis on the "I guess we'll have to take her to the pound" part... and all said in that sort of "oh well" tone, as in... "Oh well, if you don't want her I guess we can take her off to the gas chamber. Have a nice day Mr. Barminski.". These kids know a sucker when they see one. Pets find you they say. I can only think of one pet I have ever had that I actually was looking for.

So we kept this one. She is a Snowshoe Siamese or a Ragdoll a friend tells me. Named her Beezie. Melissa says she is named for the famous horse rider Beezie Madden. I say it is short for Bumble Bee. She looks like a pure bred cat. I have no idea how she ended up on our street. I kept and eye for lost cat posters but never saw one and to be honest I didn't post any "found cat" posters. I guess I should have, but...

Anyway, she is a lot of fun. We are keeping her inside for a while. This causes a bit of a problem since our other 2 cats are used to coming in and out at will through our half open sliding door. So I think I need to get a doorman's outfit since I am up and down about 5-6 times a night either letting one in or out. And Willie just basically knocks on the door. Honest to god. I wake up and he is "rap, rap, rap " with his paw. Always in a series of three taps too. In and out all night long. And he seems to have a knack for wanting in or out just as I am getting that heavy limbed, slipping into dreamland feeling.

Anyway, she is very cute. We are not going to get her tested for FLV. I don't want to know. It was real heartbreaking with Squeaky and Petunia to actually know from the time we adopted them that they would realistically only have about 5 years to live at most. So I don't want to know that anymore if I don't have to.

driving

You know, it should be against the law for anyone who lives in LA to bitch about the traffic here. But I just spent almost 2 hours driving home from Westwood. I swear I spent about 20 minutes going about 100 yards waiting for my turn to get on Sunset. So for a 1 hour meeting I spent at least 3 hours in the car. Thankfully I'm don't have to do this everyday so I should count myself lucky.

The worst part about this days drive was that I was listening to the Dodgers blow game 5 of the league championship game. Now I sit here at home as the Dodgers are just digging a huge hole. Its 8 to 3. This series looks like a repeat of last year. Oi!

sunday

well, hell...I guess I'll type out the mundane details of this day. Just for fun I guess.

Woke up. Got up out of bed, dragged a comb across my head. ...wait. No. That is not what I did. I did wake up at dawn..or more to the point Willie, our orange tabby knocked on the screen door around 6 AM and wanted in. For all the trouble I was rewarded with a great view above the clouds. A low bank of fog drifted below us with snaky fingers gripping the valleys and low hillsides. Socal looked like the Smokey Mountains for a brief moment.

Later I really got up and took my bath. Melissa had just left for the stables and I went to work on some music. "wrote" a song. "Go Blind" Which means I made parts for another one of my ridiculous musical efforts. This is all me trying to sing and learning the guitar. I mean, my stuff is pretty crummy BUT..it can sometimes be better than a lot of stuff I hear. And I just started so I am getting better. Anyway, got some of that fun time in.

Joey called and needed a hand with some car trouble. Nothing much other than a trip to the Pep Boys. Did that. Came home. Started to work on Mermaid. CL showed up and we kept working. I had done some music for the underwater scene and the big scene lead up to it. I think what I was doing was pretty sweet. Needs some work but at least I could see the emotional arch being played out with the score I created. And the underwater stuff I am sure I nailed since I spent so much time crafting the look of it that I feel really keyed in to the footage. That part is real and organic. And it fits. CL was in agreement with that.

however, CL and I don't always have the same artistic vision. We agreed that the underwater music was pretty nice. But he wasn't feeling the music in the lead up sequence. And it is the crucial scene. But I think I hit it just right, for me anyway. So I was satisfied with it, at least as a temp score. But he prefers to use some pre-recorded stuff that came from a feature film. I disagree with this approach in principle. I always prefer to have home grown elements if I can. We can't use the temp stuff from a feature film in the long run anyway so why keep it in there? And while my score might not be exactly right yet...it's pretty damned close. So I would prefer to use it and then garner comments on how to improve it. etc.

Well, thats the ups and downs of working with a partner. We can't always be on exactly the same page. This is hard for me since I have spent almost my whole professional life as a lone wolf never having to accommodate anyone else's opinion. And in this case I know that my score it pretty good and with some tweaking will work better. And I know if CL had put in as much effort as I did and came that close I would not even have thought about using someone else's piece of music. But that's me. And that's how I do things and that's what is hard about working with other people.

Anyway...effing dodgers got reamed tonight. Holy shit. 47 thousand to one. I bet Hank is all happy. ( Hank being my buddy from Philly )

What else? nothing

dodgers

ok...I can literally hear the crowd from my house. Its the top of the 8th, game one of the league championship. I can see the lights of Dodger Stadium from here.

go Dodgers!

midweek

lets see, working our asses off to finish Mermaid by friday. We have a lot of effects processing to do. I'm going over these shots multiple times since I want everything to look just right. Since we got signed with WME if feel like we have to kick everything up a notch. It is looking good but take a hell of a long time to process. And ever since I updated my op sys my computer has been very cranky.

Went and jammed last night down at R H's. He has a sweet set up. His studio is down in a deserted industrial section south of downtown. By deserted I mean no foot traffic, hence no psycho bums hanging around. No smell of urine, etc.

He has a ton of guitars, basses and various instruments. And a drum set on a nice stand. Best part is that everything is running back into protools on separate tracks. So every session is recorded. A each instrument is on a clean track. So if I fuck up they can just pull my track out. lol. And...I love this part, we all jam wearing head phones so that the drums can be recorded clean with a mic. This means I can set my own headphone level and not blow my ears out. For a while we played with live amps and shit, my ears would be ringing the next day since the keyboard is right under the crash symbol. I'm keyboard man. My guitar skills are so basic and well, crappy that I usually don't get a turn on a guitar. These guys are all really good. Been playing since they were in high school. SO I feel lucky to be included. It's loads of fun. And nobody is directing anyone. Just add your stuff to the sound wall.

beach shoot

Shot our last scene for Mermaid today. Went to El Matador beach and risked shooting without a permit. We had no choice. It was too late to pull a permit and we need this shot. The weather was amazing. Bright sun and about 75 with no wind. Big rolling waves gave us a hard time as the tide was much higher than the last time we shot here. Had to wait for the tide to drop a bit so the shots will match.

We bundled all our gear into blankets and an ice chest to avoid detection and took the long climb down. Our theory is that the park ranger like most car bound policemen won't bother to actually expend the energy to hike down to the beach. If they are going to catch you it has to be easy for them, meaning in the parking lot.

The shoot was longish but not too bad and the setting more than made up for it. Chris did most of the directing on this project so I more or less did some sun bathing. On the way back up the cliff Chris and I went first with the cooler and good thing to. Right there was the ranger. Chris went back down the hill to keep the camera from coming up while I waited fro the ranger to leave. Soon enough the ranger left and we were in the clear. It seems so stupid..like we are really doing something wrong by shooting on the beach. But I'm sure if they didn't regulate it it would be like a freaking circus with camera crews all over fighting over the prime spots etc.

mission accomplished. On to post work.