Sleep no more...

Oooo! Free wifi in DUMBO! How cool! Blah blah blah whatever, I had the coolest night last night. Really. I'm so excited about it I can't even get excited about having free wifi in the park. I went to see Sleep No More with a free ticket from my work. What an incredible time! I don't even know where to begin.

I feel like this is the kind of play where you could go not knowing too too much about it and have an amazing time still…mostly because of how alarming it might be to walk into this place not knowing what to expect and how unique your experience would be. You get taken for quite a ride. It's a modern dance production of Macbeth crossed with Hitchcock's Rebecca and set in an old warehouse that they've cleverly reconstructed into a hotel, The McKittrick Hotel (apparently a reference to Hitchcock's Vertigo), with several floors of intricately decorated sets (of which you can and should touch anything and everything). You are allowed to walk around the hotel during the performance, following performers from scene to scene or just exploring the place to your heart's content. Also, you are made to wear a mask and told not to talk during the performance so it becomes a highly individualized experience. You could be all alone exploring the hotel and it feels like your own little adventure. There is period music and Bernard Herman scores pumping through all the speakers as you wander from room to room providing the eeriest of soundtracks. Goose bumps covering my skin most of the time, I got lost rather easily and, in my disorientation, was always surprised when I came back upon something I had already seen. When we first entered the hotel, there was a 1930s era bar filled with fake smoke at which you could order a drink, punctuated by a stage with piano and drums set up. Here, we waited for a gentleman, presumably the host, who stood on the stage to call us up according to the playing card we were given upon entering the hotel. I was a 3 of diamonds so, once I realized they were going in sequential order from Aces up through whatever, I had to guzzle my scotch that I was drinking. We were then masked and given instructions and then funneled into an elevator.

Now, I went in having heard a ton about my co workers' experiences who had seen it last Tuesday so I don't feel too terribly bad sharing most of mine. I'd say spoiler alert but honestly, you won't have the same experience as me if you go. So, consider this a preview.

One co worker told me about how he ended up being the first off the elevator and how the elevator operator stopped the other audience members from leaving the elevator. Now my co worker was totally alone in the near pitch black hallway and eventually a woman walked up to him with an old fashioned wheelchair which she directed him to sit in. She wheeled him into a room and reclined the wheelchair so he was looking up at the ceiling when the lights came on to reveal a painted ceiling (I believe that's what he described). Anyway, the woman kissed him on the cheek and told him he'd never be able to see that place again and then promptly sent him on his way.

I did not have the same experience though I expectantly waited to be the last on the elevator so that I'd be the first off. As had happened with my co worker, I was the only one let off the elevator while the others were held back. I turned slyly to my fellow audience members to see their stunned expressions showing through their masks as I raised my eyebrows and grinned though they couldn't see my face.

The floor that I found myself on was a psychiatric ward with rows of beds and charts describing patient conditions. I wandered through the ward into another room lined with claw-footed bath tubs, one of which was filled with water. More on this later.

It wasn't long before I ran into other audience members and started to traipse around amongst them exploring, picking things up and reading letters on the desks and tables. Soon after, actors started to appear. It was quite hilarious to watch every one perk up and start swarming after them as they moved out of the rooms. I won't say much about the scenes acted out so as at least not to spoil that aspect for any of you who might go but I will say that it was some amazing acrobatic stuff and that the costumes were spectacularly done as well. I found myself in one particular scene shortly after that my co workers described as the naked goat head man dead baby orgy scene. Use your imagination and don't hold back.

This is where my experience got way weird and incredibly exciting at the same time. After the strobe lights went down and after one of the dancers, supposedly one of the witches from Macbeth, did her solo dance, a lady in red with feathers walked past me and trailed her feathers along my neck as I locked eyes with her through my mask. After watching a scene unfold between her and another woman, she began to leave and made the same motion with her feathers along my neck and so I did what any curious audience member might have done and followed her out of the room. She turned at one point, in the hall, and met my eyes again, studied me for a second and then grasped my arm and gently pulled me into a room, closing the door quickly behind us. Not sure where she was going with this, but terribly curious and excited to be essentially in the scene with her, no longer a passive observer, I consented to join her. She studied my face again and then drew in closer, lifting my mask. At this point, she quickly turned to a desk covered in tiny vials and jars and raised one to my lips. It tasted salty and I imagined it was either salt water or tears. Either way, I didn't exactly drink it but some dribbled down my chin at which point she hastily turned and grabbed a note, saying, "I need you to take this to the porter in the hotel!" I asked, "Downstairs?" She nodded, "I can trust you with this?" I said yes and she pulled me towards the door, then quickly turned to me and kissed me on my mask and then shoved me out the door.

Holding the note in my hand, I began to frantically run through the hotel, now fully ensconced in the action of the play, feeling truly a part of it, trying desperately to trace my steps back to the hotel. Before I could get very far, new scenes were unfolding in front of me and I got drawn in. Then I started to think, "This is just a play! Of course, I don't need to take the note if I don't want to, and I can't be that big of a deal if I don't find the porter right away and besides, I don't even know which one is the porter!" The gentleman on the microphone in the bar could have been the porter, so could the elevator operator. I was at a loss and the play was happening before my eyes. So I chose to follow the actors that I first saw and wound up watching scene after scene unfold not sure at what point in the narrative we were. Some were more obvious. Lady Macbeth was played by a young woman who, at one point, was stripped nude and was washing blood off herself in the same bath tub I had noticed earlier in the psychiatric ward. When I saw it this time the water was tinged red already, a sign that the scene had already played out once before by the time I came back to the room. As the scenes changed I followed her and watched her dances which were incredibly choreographed and artfully executed. The most fantastic scene I saw took place in a giant ballroom with a huge table on an elevated stage. I figured that this was the banquet scene at the end of Macbeth. Seeing this climactic scene for the second time signaled to me that the play was through its second run of the evening and that it would soon be over. The disorientation complete, I was startled when I found myself jumping out into the hotel bar to the sounds of a jazz band in full swing (no pun intended) and being pulled into the room by grinning hosts, shuffling me onto the dance floor where I was offered champagne and absinthe. Here I joined up with some co workers who I knew were attending but whom I had not seen the whole night (masks and all that). So I sat with a fellow media operator and watched the band while swilling a shot of absinthe, something I had wished I knew they served before I paid $15 for Johnnie Walker Black Label earlier in the evening.

I'm finding out more and more about what I was seeing as I read the reviews linked from Sleep No More's website. Here's a really good one I'm currently devouring. The reviewer really captures the essence of what an evening at the McKittrick hotel will entail and even gives really good tips, one of which I may take if I happen to get the chance to see it again before it closes in September. That is, read Macbeth and/or see Rebecca.

Train logic....

Often on a train ride home I find I have multiple options as to what route I take. The number of routes I could possibly take numbers in the double digits and it usually depends on which train comes first. During rush hour anyway, any route will take about thirty to forty minutes. In cases where it's late at night and the number of stops, whether the train is stopping at local stops and whether or not it's actually running on its regular route, all come in to play, often it makes sense almost immediately which one is the best way to go. But sometimes I find myself debating what could get me home faster, if I actually have the time to engage in such ridiculous analytical exercises. Picture it: I'm on the F and the train is stopped at the Jay Street/Metro Tech stop in Downtown Brooklyn for a seemingly indefinite period of time (probably more like 3 minutes). Here, I could forego the waiting, get up and switch to the R up the stairs and down the hall. Or, I could stay on the train until 4th Avenue/9th Street and switch to the R there. I'm debating whether I'll end up waiting for the train longer at Jay Street or at 9th Street and then I'm wondering if the R train is even stopping at Jay Street (it is the weekend, though probably not late enough on a Friday night for the service changes to be in effect). If I get up and check, I risk missing both trains and having to wait for the next F. If I stay on the F until 9th Street, then I'm at least walking distance from home should the R train fail me entirely or if I end up missing the connection and don't feel like waiting longer. A unique aspect of the R train stop at 4th Avenue/9th Street is that it takes me the same amount of time to walk home as it does to wait for another train when I've just missed one late at night. Just about. So, I end up staying on the train at Jay Street and getting off at 9th Street for the R train. And wouldn't you know it? I just miss the R train at 9th Street. Maybe I could have caught that same R train if I had gotten off at Jay Street? Or maybe I would have just missed it there too and had to wait the same 10 minutes.

So you see, to some degree, such speculative calculating is seemingly useless especially when you factor in the amount of time it actually saves. It's usually zero time though it might be 5 to 10 minutes. Maybe I find it fun because while it may not save time it certainly kills time and on the off chance that it does save me time it gives me a boost of confidence like I have beaten the system that screws me over so regularly. It is also good to know these things when considering whether or not to even bother with trying an alternate route that isn't dictated by which train arrives first. After all, in this case, the distance in number of stops between Jay Street and 9th Street is the same on the R train as it is on the F train (at least it will be when they open up Smith/9th Sts again).

And then I deal with ironies like the fact that the route that is shortest for me from home to work, in terms of number of stops, requires that I take 3 trains, while the route that takes the fewest train connections nears the most possible stops it could take me to get to work.

Either way, whether thinking like this can make my dealings with the MTA more efficient or not, it certainly does make good practice at time management in every other aspect of my life. I use the same kind of logic in the name of productivity when deciding what to work on while at home and what to save for while I'm on the train or at work in my downtime. It doesn't make much sense to answer emails at home or blog at home when I have work to accomplish that I could only do with the equipment I have here at home. I can't exactly bring my MIDI keyboard to work so I can compose on my break. Nor can I practice piano or write songs on the guitar (or do laundry for that matter). I can, however, mix things on my laptop, write blog entries and answer emails from my phone or laptop while at work or in transit.

That's not what I'm doing now. No, I'm actually blogging at home after a thundery, rainy commute home and debating, as always, what to start working on next. I have to play piano at church on Sunday, so I'll practice a little bit and I feel like I may be able to accomplish some VO stuff tonight but ultimately, I'm just planning for the week. I'm planning on starting to take a look at a few pieces that I've left unfinished and seeing what sparks the most inspiration to decide what I'll work on next there. I'm still waiting for a friend to find me lyrics for the choral piece, so there's almost no reason to start work on it yet. I'm excited because, beyond all that, on Thursday, I'm shooting down to Philly for half a day to record some guitar tracks for Lacy's new album. After that, I fly to NC for a little visit to the family. When I get back is when I'll really get to dive into my new projects. For now, I think I'd better get to practicing...

A musical day...

So, I'm about to tweak a few things on the film score mix because a composer's work is apparently never done. I dreaded listening to the mix after I submitted it for exactly this reason. But last night I was showing Karishma and a crucial part was not coming through the mix strongly enough. Plus, I just spoke to the director, who submitted the film yesterday to both Sundance and the Big Apple Film Festival, and he had a few extra ideas once he heard I was in an editing mindset. But that's okay. Perfectionism can be a good thing. At least it's not procrastination.

And speaking of, I don't want to procrastinate since I'm free of one job and essentially don't have anything big on my plate. So I spent most of last evening trying to figure out why my notation program wouldn't open. Turns out there was some background process interfering with Sibelius. I need to be able to edit my scores though so that was something I definitely wanted to work out. I'm planning on diving into at least three different pieces. I want to tweak a piano sketch that I finished writing this year, write a new choral piece for which I have no lyrics yet and finish a chamber piece with electronics that I started the year I moved to NYC.

On top of that, I'm playing three hymns on piano at the Brooklyn Unitarian church on Sunday so I need to practice today and then Lacy is coming so we can practice a little and maybe play Bar 82 or scope out another open mic to play.

So, it's going to be a pretty [insert title of blog entry here].

Film Score = Done!

I just submitted the final mixes for the film score to my dropbox so that Mohammad can download and listen. Tomorrow is the deadline for online submissions to Sundance Film Festival, the first of many that he intends to submit to.

So, I'm pretty psyched about that and pretty pleased with my final cut of the music. It's been a great project to work on and has taught me a lot. I especially enjoyed working with another musician again. My scores for Boyce Returns (2008) and Solstice (2007) both included my friend Jon on the clarinet but most of the other scores I've done, I worked alone on even if they were collaborative scores like Zero Sum Game (2008) and Peeper: A Sort of Love Story (2009). I was just responsible for my cues and the other composers either were working before I came on to the project or were working simultaneously on their cues.

Anyway, there's a dynamic nature to the piece when you have another mind come in to interpret what you've done. On this score, in particular, there were ideas that occurred to me only after we had recorded the first few takes of the oud (sampling his performances and mangling the results to create atmospheric sounds, for example). Add on top of all that the fact that we had our oud player improvise around an idea that I wrote. You almost never know what you're going to get in that case. All you can do is set a mood and hope that it works with what's on screen.

And in this case, as with Solstice, I was writing the music before the film had even been shot and continuing to work on it after the shoot and well into the editing process without even having seen the scenes I was scoring. Luckily, there wasn't too much that had to hit at the right time, so it was easy to conform the piece to the action on screen after it had been written. But miraculously the key, the tone, the mood, the tempo, everything fit perfectly when we saw it with the scene. I can't wait to be able to show everyone a finished product.

Right now, it's rainy and muggy in New York and I just finally dealt with a fly problem we were having out in the living room. It was apparently due to the window being cracked open at the top, unbeknownst to us. Our window is uncomfortably close to the recycling bins down on the ground level, so that explains the high number of flies and why they were wafting up to our level.

Either way, it feels good to have a clean apartment and a clean slate to get to work on some of my next projects. I do want to write a choral piece again and I have tons of other unfinsheds and as yet to be writtens floating around the apartment and the inside of my brain. But I've also thought it might be nice to try and find some more film scoring work. I'll probably focus on the choral piece first though because it's always good to know when starting a piece that there's a high probability that I can get it performed without too much financial investment.

So, I'll be updating as that progresses. For now, I'm too tired to think of anything else to say...imagine that. Me. Tired on an overnight shift.

Diving into work...

When I get depressed or just harried or when things don't seem to be going my way, I tend to throw myself into my work. It's gloriously therapeutic and has the strange effect of helping me to change my perspective on a lot of things. I remember that I'm lucky to have something I'm passionate about and that things are going to swing back and forth from good to bad, overwhelming to underwhelming, good times will come and go. The ever popular, "This too shall pass." No matter how bad things get I remember that at least I have the basic things I need to be happy, right here and right now and that whatever is bothering me probably won't last too terribly long.

That having been said, this is the perfect time for me to be feeling like that because I have a lot of work to do. Sunday night I finally saw the scene that I've been writing music for all this time. It fits amazingly. I watched it about three times in a row with my music over top of it before actually sitting down Monday afternoon when I got up to put it on a timeline and line up all the hits. There were at least three points in the animation where we wanted to have the music accent and sync up with the action on the screen. So that only took me about an hour or so. I had to play with the length of the oud solo a tiny bit and then cut down the electronic part at the end so it would finish with the end of the scene.

But seeing it with my music was pretty awesome. I actually got chills a few times! This is going to be a great film. The rest of the week will be devoted to getting the mix to pop. I'll be trying it out on a few different sets of speakers and headphones in order to really fine tune it.

On top of squaring away all that, I've been plowing ahead with my new VO demo. I've decided to get some peer reviews on this, first to get an idea of how the quality of my equipment measures up and then to get an idea of how my delivery is. Additionally, I've decided to compose the music for all the scripts I'm reading and have gotten three of them done so far. But this won't be finished until I get the peer reviews. That's key. I can go on Edge studio's website and upload it to get people to review it. They have system where once you've uploaded your first, you have to review two other people. And then each subsequent time you upload you have to first review two other people again. So, I can at least expect to get some attention up there. Either way, I've found other online VO forums as well that I can tap into.

It occurred to me that this was the way to go. I'm not going to be able to jump to where I want to be without acknowledging where I still am. So, I decided to back off of trying to jump to getting a paid gig right away and start to work on honing my skills even more. That doesn't mean I can't submit to jobs and auditions but I feel I should spend more time on presenting myself professionally. Just a few things at a time. The next thing after re-doing my demo is going to be to train a little more and then eventually, when I'm confident I can get one, to go look for an agent.

Incidentally, this is also attached to something I've realized a long time ago. The best way to achieve a goal is to break it up into manageable increments. If you tell yourself, "By next year I want to be blank," and blank happens to be a monumental task, it can get overwhelming thinking how you're actually going to get there from where you stand. So, I find, you should set the goal and then just focus on the next step. You can't reach the goal from where you're starting, you can only reach the first step, so worry about that first. It's sounding a little bit trite and obvious the way I'm explaining it but you get the idea.

At any rate, I'm pretty confident about the first few steps. Once I finish those, the ideas is I'll be confident about what comes next until I'm doing what I couldn't have imagined doing a few months ago.

Anyway, tomorrow I'll spend some more time on the mix and then devote the rest of my time on getting a first version of the demo together for uploading to Edge's website. I got here late today because of the trains so I have to stay a little later and then I get to sleep. Glorious hours of sleep.

The best place to work away from home...

Trying to decide where to do this comes down to three factors: how restrictive is the wifi (i.e. does it time out or do you have to pay or is it a weak or often interrupted connection?), how expensive the coffee is (does it justify leaving the apartment to do work), and how full it tends to get on a typical afternoon (i.e. will I find a seat that I can hold on to and make my trip worthwhile)…this also depends on what day of the week it is. Like, is it national effing brunch day in New York City and does the place serve food that attracts brunchers? So, considering all these factors, I wound up at Tea Lounge on Union Street. I needed to spend the afternoon here working on the business plan and other stuff so I couldn't go to Ozzies, even though their prices are a bit cheaper, because Ozzie's wifi connection times out after a certain amount of time (or at least it did last I was there) and I think you have to pay to keep it going. 'Snice was full of brunchers because they are first and foremost a veggie sandwich shop that sells coffee and happens to have wifi that attracts laptoppers like myself. (Boy, I'm just making up words left and right, aren't I? There's lots of red squiggly lines in this blog entry). Unfortunately, I paid almost $4 for an iced green tea so I could sit here all afternoon.

I could have honed in on this shop first and saved myself some time but I tried "Snice first. Was full. I had wanted to take a meandering stroll through parts of Park Slope I don't get to that often, anyway, just to feel a little leisurely before diving into work. I find that taking an aimless walk or just allowing myself some leisure time helps with my focus just as much as the act of getting out of the house. While the internet itself is rampant with distractions, I find so many more at home than I do when I come out. Here at a coffee shop, I have the sense that I've allotted time and I'm here for a reason so I'd better take advantage of the time and be productive. At home, I feel like if I wanted to laze around, no one would judge me. Not that they would here but I'm still not compelled to lie down on this couch on which I sit.

But I digress, I'm considering in a few months when I have the extra money to throw at it, going back to Edge Studio to take the next round of webinars and workshops. Actually making a plan to take off two Saturdays in a row from work so I can make it to the workshops and mock auditions that they have. I missed out on getting to take these when I was doing the program last summer because of work. I did do two of them, one of them over the phone, but I feel like I could benefit from going to a few of them this time around so I can meet more VO artists like myself and keep in touch with them this time. I met some great people last time but they too quickly disappeared off my radar.

So, that's the bulk of what I've been doing this afternoon, researching the cost of all of that and working it into the business plan. Additionally, I'm trying to hone in on voice over events and places I might go to meet an agent. This one is not as urgent because I'm not even going to approach an agent until I re-record my demo. This might be what I spend the month of September on. Doing the first test runs of that this week. My cousin will be on vacation and I will have the apartment to myself to focus on that.

Beyond all the VO work, I think we'll be done with the film score as I mentioned last night. So, it'll be a busy week for me but I don't mind. I'm getting my opportunities to socialize. This past Friday was Ra Ra Riot in Prospect Park. I went with Karishma and met a co worker and his wife and another co worker there. They're a great band with an incredible live show. We had to sit pretty far back and the band was half blocked from our view by the beer tent but we didn't care. The weather was freaking amazing and we had snacks and booze. If you haven't heard Ra Ra Riot, give them a listen. For now, I'd better get back to my work. Talk soon!

Film Score...

Another evening spent working up a mix for Mohammad. We were hoping to get some more time with the oud player but he's leaving the country for we don't know how long so we have to either get him to record us one more take from his apartment and send it via FTP in .wav format, or just go with the cleaned up mp3 files that we have.

Tomorrow will tell what we end up doing. But I think we have just about everything we need to make it good. I finished a mix this evening but I may still have to tweak the timing of things once I see the fully edited version of the scene which we'll be laying it over. That should be tomorrow as well.

It's exciting that it's almost finished and that there's a first deadline in sight. I had a lot of time to work up my part of the score because I started working on concepts before they even shot the scenes. But now that everything is coming together in the editing room over there, I can see an end in sight. Well, in truth, my anticipation is just heightened. I can't really see anything yet. Except for the few concepts I've gotten to glimpse along the way.

Either way, it's been fun getting reacquainted with using Logic Studio along the way, and finding ways to use Native Instruments' Kontakt Player as a sampler. I even got to use Guitar Rig 3 again, as one of the things I added this evening to make the mix a little stronger was guitar.

Anyway, here I sit, exhausted but wide awake and listening to the indie version of Marvelous 3's Hey! Album. A song I haven't heard in ages that wasn't on the later version of the album. It's really bringing me back to junior year of college when I last listened to this album regularly. A time when I lived in West Greensboro in a house with 3 other guys while I was finishing up the last semesters of my music degree and before I ran off to France for a summer and met the woman I would eventually marry and later get divorced from. It was an innocent time. Little did I know that that would be the last year I took piano lessons. And little did I know that a decision I made that year to study composition instead of piano for my masters would lead me where it eventually did. As I remember, it was a decision that was hatched partially out of my disappointment with my piano professor and my disappointment with myself for failing at lessons and not having improved much over the course of three years of study...but mostly out of a realization that I was not cut out to be a performer and that I should be a composer instead like I had dreamed of as a kid at the age of 13. Of course, I needed the expertise if I was going to become a composer. I remember feeling as though I'd wasted the time I had in college doing the wrong thing for myself, studying piano and doing horribly at it (I was a bad sight reader and couldn't discipline myself to practice 8 hours a day like some over-achievers that I was studying with) when I could have been learning about composing and getting started earlier. I regret that more and more that I didn't realize that from the beginning.

I was told by that same piano professor when I suggested changing my major that I should just do a masters in composition because it didn't really matter what I did my undergrad in. Of course, he made this statement because he was assuming that I wanted to go into academia, a place I still find myself at odds with. After that year, so many things changed and I almost didn't pursue this career. But I did. It just took me a while to feel like I was making any headway.

I'm going to start this next thought with a disclaimer that I'm not comparing myself to other composers and other human beings by this, but I often do look at other people and see how far they've gotten when they've been alive the same amount of time as I have or shorter. By "far" I mean that they've succeeded in doing things I've aspired to do but haven't been able to find a way to do...yet. I consider that maybe they've had more opportunities than me, but then maybe they've had the same amount of opportunities as I have and have just taken more of them, or just taken the right opportunities and not wasted time with ones that weren't right for them or weren't going to lead them anywhere. I wonder what they knew that I didn't know and where they were getting that information. Was I cheated? Or was I just not paying enough attention? Letting things slip by while I got distracted by things like love and alcohol and social situations?

I know. It's pretty dark stuff for a Saturday night, but I assure you I'm not depressed right now. No, I'm feeling relatively good despite how harrowing it can be to pursue something for years and feel like you're moving at a snail's pace. But I guess this is just the way it goes for some of us. I've already said I'm not doing this because I think it's going to be easy. I'm doing it because I have to.

Despite having just done some fairly big stuff recently (performing in two very different concerts back to back for starters), I still feel like I'm in a bit of a funk. So, I should probably just sleep on it and I'll be good tomorrow morning. Good night.