I'm gonna be on TV!

Today's shoot went well at the Metropolitan Room. I admit I was a little nervous with all the elements involved: reserving and renting the space, me getting the reporter on board with covering us, Tania getting the body painter to come and me getting myself there with my equipment and getting everything to work while we were shooting. But, everything worked out great. Aside from the fact that we had a little bit of a problem getting the guy to turn the lights up for us (he was afraid to touch the board without the audio guy being there, but we impressed upon him that we were doing a report and it was sort of crucial to have more than just wall sconces to light the place) and then we had a problem later on as he was rushing us to finish (he said he'd have to charge for the extra hour but he'd give us 10 more minutes, which you'd think would denote that he would make good on that. When we still weren't finished we offered to pay for the next hour but then he said he had someone coming to clean the place and the guy had to be somewhere else right after). Oh, and until I showed up and he actually made a phone call, he had no idea that anyone had the space rented today.

Beyond that, it was fun. I'm sitting here wondering, though, if I made any sense at all talking on camera about my piece and if I wasn't too fidgety and if she's going to have anything at all worthy of a sound bite in that interview. She interviewed both Tania and Danny, the painter, as well, then got some shots of us performing as well as shots of Danny painting Tania's back. All in all, I think she's got the makings of a great report there. Watch for it on NY1 on Friday and Sunday this week. I'll try to find out exactly what times they usually air the arts reports. I'm sure it'll be airing all day. And if it's posted online I'll definitely link it.

This'll be the first time I've been on television I believe...other than the occasional wide shot of the studio I've been in when I've worked floor directing at TV studios. I have also had my name on television in the Triangle area in NC for that show that I wrote the music to. But those don't count.

Anyway, it was fun getting to talk about my music and chatting with my co workers. We even joked a little about how those data cards she was recording on are probably going to go through my department at work (I work in the media department at NY1) and that I'm probably going to be the one making sure they get into the system and don't get deleted by accident. You can bet I'm going to be on top of that tomorrow.

Meantime, Lacy and I rehearsed all afternoon but opted not to perform this evening. She's feeling a little under the weather so we just attended Bar 82's open mic and stayed for Blueberry Season, the featured artist, a guy we've seen at many open mics in the past few months. He's quite energetic and has this gravelly Tom Waits/Kurt Cobain thing going on. It works. You should check him out if you get the chance.

Our other motive for attending was to try and talk to Wayne, the organizer about the logistics of playing with our laptops at our show. Yes, we've decided to do a partly electric show, about which I'm very excited. I don't want to give too much away but there are a handful of songs that we will do in the middle acoustically and then we will sandwich those between electric songs. Stay tuned. That's on August 3rd. Here's the Facebook invite. Please come if you can. I'll be pestering you all more closer to the date.

Anyway, we got to talk with Wayne a little after the open mic and subsequent show about random stuff. Turns out he used to do music stuff at Marz Bar on 2nd Avenue, an iconic rock bar that was a mainstay of the East Village for years, until it closed a few years ago. He also runs the open mic at Banjo Jim's, a paid bartending gig for him, but which is also about to close to make way for a new artisanal wine bar. There was some talk of the East Village gentrification and the loss of rock clubs like this being a shame. Although, it sounded to me like the reason for Marz Bar closing down was that they were going to renovate or rebuild that block and that the bar just had to move for a while. At least that's the impression I got from this article and this article. One article said that low income family's already living in those buildings would be guaranteed a spot in the new buildings. So maybe it's not such a bad thing...not that I want rock clubs like this to go away, it just sounds like maybe there'll be a new incarnation. It is a shame that the damned rent will probably go up.

Anyway, it's always disheartening to hear people, old school lifers, talk about how older New York is better. In the grand scheme of things, I just got here, and it still seems pretty effing cool to me but to some extent I feel like I missed out on a bunch. But then, the way I tend to look at life is that no matter what you missed there's always something spectacular out there that you're inevitably going to catch as long as you put yourself out there and go explore your world. I know it's often hard to feel this way about anything new especially if you feel you've already lived your glory days but sometimes you just have to let the old go and embrace the new...sometimes.

That's the end of my train of thought for the evening. I've got a busy couple of days ahead and should get some needed rest. Talk soon!