dear diary…
Just realized that I was writing the blog part in the “excerpt” part.
I must have fallen asleep in “Make Your Own Website 101”. Learning as we go here. Bear with this little ole human American brain.
Today is Friday. Michael is spinning some wax (there’s only a few records and some CDs left that haven’t been packed so we will be listening to the same ones over and over again til we finally move). Michael chooses Thelonious Monk’s Underground for this evenings blog entry and dinner making background music. Salad for dinner! Michael pours a red beverage while I reflect on the day. This morning…. we slept in a little longer than usual. Then, realizing we were out of coffee, Michael made an emergency run after some morning meditations. I drank my mason jar of lemon water while reading some Tina Turner Happiness Becomes You for some added Buddha inspo. It’s one of those books that you can open up to any page and read until you want to stop.
I looked at the calendar, but instead of list making and calendar frenzying like I usually do to procrastinate, I decided to bust out the laptop right away and get straight to Final Cut Pro for my continuing production of our upcoming video Betwixt Fear and High Key. The more I use this program, the less I curse it. In the beginning it felt like a bad habit of pressing buttons, holding my breath, and hoping it works. But not today Satan! There wasn’t even any cursing today! Instead of overthinking and second guessing what I was doing, I just kept at it. The project may seem very elementary to some, but to me, this is very serious stick figure business. I am very happy with it so far and trying not to be too hard on myself with how long it seems to be taking. Axl Rose whispers advice with “just a little patience”, so I keep going. I wish I could know more and go faster, but maybe after doing it a while, I’ll get better just like everything else. I do the things and then not sure if it’s going to work out and then when it works it’s shockingly so so cute! I’m actually proud that I got as much done as I did today especially since I’ve never made a music video before.
My first experience I had making/editing videos is from an old VCR editing machine from the Media Arts department at Eastern College in the early 90s where I did my work study program during my undergrad years. My friend, Bishop, taught me stuff like putting ACDC to the original 1960s Psycho shower scene. I think it was She’s Got Balls or something silly like that. We would do this when we didn’t have to carefully balance and roll the big bulky tv with dvd and vcr players sliding around on rolling carts through out uneven cement hills all over campus to teachers’ classrooms who didn’t know how to turn a tv on. It was a crap shoot though. Sometimes stuff just didn’t work. (I went to a Christian college. Not that that means anything. Money just wasn’t there especially for the Media Services department). Listening to ACDC and watching Psycho during work hours would have been considered very rebelious as was smoking cigarettes, pot, and drinking illegally in the woods across the street at Cabrini, where the security at the Catholic College didn’t seem to rat you out like your fellow classmates would. Anyway, students and teachers would schedule and check out video cameras, microphones, videos, and shit like that for seminars,“Chapel”, and Open mic at the cafe, etc. It’s wild to think how much stuff has changed in 30 years!!! Or maybe it hasn’t at Eastern College. Time. IS. AN. Illusion.
So it seems like Final Cut Pro is nothing like that VCR editing machine and a lot more like imovie from what I remember making the Good Juju’s Yoga Videos and Guided Meditation about 15 years ago before the internet became saturated with that kind of stuff. The little snipits on instagram and Tik Tok recipe videos that Michael and I make for vegan dishes doesn’t seem to count though or maybe it does. That too seems to be all over the place now if you are into that sort of thing.
Michael finally came back with a plethora of groceries including coffee beans, made me a cup of joe, a pb&j (because he treats me like a princess that way), and I finished about 45 seconds of the video which took pretty much all day. Homes did some food prepping for the week, I practiced drums, did a workout, I posted something on instagram and thanked our new Japanese friends from Haha No Kimagure (and our good friend that introduced us to them) for the great review which is still bringing us joy when we think about it. Once again, it might seem like little things, but they are so very awesome to us.
Fingers crossed that this Betwixt Fear and High Key video will be complete by the end of the weekend. The idea started a certain way, but our friend chimed in, made a suggestion which Michael thought was a good idea too so I am running with it. It’s a suprise! I don’t even want Michael seeing it, but I get so excited and ruin the suprise.
This is what I’m learning. Rudiments. Practice rudiments every day!
Also! Even if you think you are going the easy route, it’s probably still going to be time consuming with pretty much everything you want to create. I know that there are tools on Final Cut Pro that if I knew what I was doing, I would be accessing. Tomorrow, Michael will be looking stuff up online to help me get a little faster with it while I’m working on what i know. There is something to be said for doing this on our own. We are a team!
Sometimes I feel like I’m doing a 5th grade Art project and I’m the teacher’s pet and I’m going to ACE it!
Acing in like the artists living in NYC in 1981, New Wave New York. If you haven’t seen the movie Downtown 81, it’s another one you gotta see! Over and over again. Artists living there at that time doing everything they could to make a living. They would say “yes” to everything even though they might not know how to do whatever it was, just so they could get work, they would figure it out! If they were asked to play the saxophone, they would lie and say they could, go somewhere, stay up all night, every night or whatever until they learned the sax. That’s what they had to do to survive. And they worked together to create art! As horrible as the lifestyle seemed to be in lower East Side Manhattan at that time, I respect and look up to those artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Debbie Harry, Steve Buscemi to name a few.
Michael recalls making a video with the Flaming Lips in NYC for Shine On Sweet Jesus in 1989? They played in NYC with Mudhoney at The Roseland Ballroom and at CBGB’s in 1992 before it closed at least. Ronald was still in the band. They played more times at Roseland after Ronald left. This is a post for another time.
When I tell old New Yorkers who lived there during that raw Post Punk/ New Wave era, I beg them to tell me all of the stories and how I wished I was part of that scene. They say, “No. You really don’t” and laugh. I can always tell they are not telling me everything which just makes me want to know all the more.
When I think of the crappy apartments that I lived in in my past, I would never have imagined living somewhere like Santa Monica. Bitching about a leak with a hole in the wall is small potatos compared to having cockroaches or rats. Hey, at least we have clean running water and I’m not sweating after taking a cold shower in the summertime in a 3rd floor apartment in Kentucky with no A/C. And thinking about all of our friends who live in the desert. Hoping they are hunkered down with some really good air conditioning. It’s been 116 in Phoenix! holy hell balls!
Speaking of apartments, The fan is drying up all the wetness from the leakage and bad plumbing pipes that I wrote about in the previous blogs. Michael bought some Lysol so the smell isn’t as horrendous and that’s a plus! AND our landlord ordered a dehumidifier that we are expecting to get to by Monday. I hope to post the new video on Youtube by then as well. I guess that means we will have to put up a Youtube channel by Monday too.
No expectations, but that’s what we are shooting for! Beginners Mind!
Watch better movies, write better stories, listen to better music, make better songs, and try and have a good time amidst all the bullshit in the world. Lots of Love!
-juju
