Burning Down the House II

It's a working holiday... put in an afternoon at the lab covering for Julie who had a film shoot for class. I'm also working on some sounds for the show at the Underground Café this coming Saturday. I uncovered a few minidiscs of stuff I did while I had Marc's laptop with his shmancy software. It's fun listening to the stuff a couple of years later and discovering (a) it sounds actually pretty darn good (mostly) and... (b) I have no idea how I did it in the first place.

I had a semi-social/semi-unibomber weekend. After work at the store on Friday I ate, showered, napped for an hour the came up to the lab to get a couple of things I forgot, then stopped off at the ArtZone launch at Memorial Hall. Checked out John and Matte and Andrew jamming it up as XIII Wise Mothers... pretty low-key... with the sound system on the floor you could be standing next to them and still hear very little... I understand this was a problem with 9volt soundsystem later too. It's something you have to learn from experience: Memorial Hall is great for either unamplified instruments from the stage under the proscenium... or loudly amplified (with a higher end PA) low-end reinforced electric instrumentation. I ducked out while people were preparing for their poetry slamming to go put posters up around the Market to startle the Saturday morning sheep... er, people... and to get some booze for James' post-show. Once I was halfway through postering a wave of non-specific lethargy overcame me... perhaps brought about by the numerous St. Patrick-related cries of EEeeeeaaaAAAARRRrrgggghhyaHAHAha!!! I heard rising from the basements and bedrooms of Saint John St. Whatever it was, that and a little fevery, chilly feeling sent me to my nearby abode for some frankly needed snoozy-by time.

Saturday was a low-frequency mix of picking up after myself and reading Denis Johnston short stories. That and killing hookers. You know, with my PS2... sicko! Later I broke up the monotony by cruising box stores for shelving... settling on something cheap and easily put together (like myself) from Zellers. Which brings us back to DO (a deer, a female deer)... which is me here writing this.

Two little sidetrips of insight:

1) I went down to the SUB at 5 pm to get something to eat at the Shoppe... choices are limited to $5.99 sub sandwiches (lots of bread, a little cheese and cheap meat and onions that never seem to break apart when you chew them), $6.99 "Real Roast Beef" sandwiches... which call into question all the other meat sources in the slightly cheaper sanwiches. I settled on: an egg salad sandwich on whole wheat ($2.69), a bean and cheese burrito ($1.49), a 500ml carton of 2% milk (price unknown) and a small bag of Lay's Old Timey BBQ chips (price unknown). I had $10 in my hand and was paying the counter lad, who had on an excellent Caber Tossing t-shirt, when Pierre Loiselle wandered in from The Bruns where he works in his usual Rev. Jim from Taxi-crossed-with-Care Bear style. We were chatting a little and the counter lad rang my stuff in and said "$4.40." I finished chatting w/ Pierre and grabbed my bag of "food" and was on the way out when my mental math-ulator went off saying, "That couldn't have been $4.40. The sandwich/burrito alone totaled $4.18... without tax." But then I did a little knee-jerk reflexive, "the amount of money I put into UNB... the actual value of the food... the actual food value..." type calculus and just kept walking back to the lab. I am a bad man.

2) You know how in the movies, or TV show, or in commercials for insurance or diet Pepsi, there are those scenes when someone steps off a curb to cross the street... and they're chasing a ball or dazed from a large lunch or just not paying attention... and someone further up the sidewalk spots this.... There are all the quick shots to heighten the tension: the person's feet and legs up to the knee stepping off the curb, racked focus beyond the legs to a diet Pepsi delivery truck rumbling towards them. The person further up the sidewalk, seen 3/4 from behind, wearing a loose fitting black hoodie pulled up over their head, just finishing a big gulp of diet Pepsi then tilting down their head and spotting the person and... swish pan... the truck. A close up of feet as the diet Pepsi can hits the ground and they breaks into a sprint. Cut to the person crossing the street... she has her iPod on listening to Shakira... and she too is an impossibly attractive woman with blonde curls bobbing as she walks then cascading down the back of her DKNY jean jacket as she takes a seductive sip of her diet Pepsi. Cut to the driver of the truck with his eyes not on the road but on the radio as he tunes in the same Shakira song we heard on the iPod. Cut to a long pan, full frame of the woman, the truck and the other person's hand entering frame from the right. Cut to a close up 3/4 from behind the woman as the other person grabs the shoulder of her denim and propels both of them to the far curb just as the truck driver spots them and... cut to inside the truck... swerves to the left, spilling the diet Pepsi in his cupholder onto the floor. Cut again, long shot, to the woman and other person sprawled on the far curb in a heap. Medium close-up as the woman turns over into a sitting position and the person pulls back the hoodie top, blonde hair spilling out. Close-up of the woman's face... ice blue eyes growing larger and larger, mouth in an astonished oval. Pull back to medium close-up from a side on two shot revealing the woman has just been rescued from a certain pancaking by... Shakira.

You know those types of incidents? Well last week I stopped off at Coffee and Co. to get a large, black organic coffee before work then wandered out to the corner of King and York, waiting for the light to cross York. Already standing at the curb was a guy in a (possibly) expensive overcoat talking loudly on a cell phone about some crap people talk about on cell phones that couldn't possibly wait until they were indoors somewhere. A guy with a bald head and a goatee carrying a box ran across King to our corner... obviously in a hurry to get somewhere... paused at the corner for a second, looked both ways and saw a car about halfway up from Queen coming towards him, gauged the distance/speed and ran across against the light... he had plenty of time as the car was travelling quite slowly after turning onto York. The guy on the cell phone, who was standing about five paces in front of me, noticed absently that the bald guy had run across the street and followed behind him at a dopey slow-assed pace. I saw the guy step off the curb and walk out in front of the car... realized that he mistakenly believed the light had changed because the other guy crossed, but didn't bother to look... because he was on his cell phone, having an important conversation you see. So, did I drop my Coffee and Co. large black organic, run out and drag him to the far curb? No friggin' way. I didn't even yell. I just patiently watched the car slam on its brakes and the driver lay on the horn while the guy froze in his tracks realizing his mistake. Nothing happened to him, finally. He didn't even drop his cell phone, or stop his conversation for that matter... just sheepishly wandered back to our corner and let the car go by.

I am not Shakira. I am a bad man.


So for those of you who didn't guess... or whose technology didn't reveal to you... and those of you who even care who last week's mystery artist is. Of course it was Gene Simmons of KISS. All three tracks and the fourth below come from his 2004 solo album ***hole. Here are a few shot of Gene and Kiss from the early years as mimes, then as proto-KISS and then, later, finally getting it right.





The last track is Gene's take on the Prodigy's Firestarter... featuring Liam of Prodigy providing the music, of course. It makes sense where Gene was the original Firestarter, right...


...well except for Arthur Brown, of course, who did his fire act in 1968. But he never had an action figure or comic book. Slacker.


Firestarter