about last night
As the result of a series of events too long and complicated to go into in detail, but having to do with how much I love some of my former students, I have in my freezer quite a few pounds of bison meat. (Don't ask.)
Last night I turned a pound of it into bisonburgers for truepenny, Mirrorthaw, and myself. They were somewhat compromised in terms of structural integrity - partly because I added shallots and parsley in addition to the obligatory salt and pepper, but also because bison is so damn lean that there's not enough fat to properly hold the burger together.
They were nevertheless quite tasty.
Afterwards we went to a Peter Mulvey show. The experience was slightly marred by annoying barstools, and suffered a bit in comparison to the other Peter shows we've seen recently (this venue is actually larger than a postage stamp, so we weren't practically in his lap for the whole thing), but, you know, it was a Peter Mulvey show, and therefore just about the most worthwhile thing one can do with twelve dollars. And he played my four current-favorite songs off the new CD, so everything else was candy.
Peter is pretty much the opposite of those performers who show up, play a bunch of songs that sound just like they do on the CDs, and leave. Like many charismatic folkies, he chats while he tunes, he goofs around, he references recent political events, he tells amusing stories about being on the road, he introduces songs with wit and humor, and generally doesn't take himself terribly seriously.
But it's not just the between-song patter, and it's not just the quality of the performance, although that's never less than stellar. It's the way he plays, the way songs are living and evolving things for him. No song ever sounds quite the way it does on the CD. He changes lyrics, changes chords, messes around with melodies and rhythms. He does lots of covers - interesting, weird, wonderful covers - but (as either Truepenny or Mirrorthaw pointed out on the way out of the venue) he essentially covers his own songs as well. So there's a lot of joy to be had, for those of us who have listened to all the CDs dozens or hundreds of times, not just in the songs themselves but in the difference, the slippage, between the songs we think we know and the versions we're hearing come to life onstage.
Then I got home and, after a few detours into other activities, sat down to finish the clip database for the LotR vid I've been thinking about for, let's see, well over a year now.
At which point I had a small crisis.
I was listening to the vid music - not the final cut, which I still haven't worked out, but the 10-minute version - and thinking about the vid, and realized: this music is perfect for what I want to do with these movies, but I'm not sure it's perfect for this vid. When I started planning this vid, I hadn't seen The Two Towers yet. Now I've seen both TTT and RotK, and I think maybe this needs to be an ensemble vid covering all three movies - sort of a mega-trailer thing. I mean, the really climactic moments in the music are just crying out for some of the RotK shots.
But I still really want to make the vid I originally set out to make.
This is not sending me into as much of a tailspin as I would have thought. As I told renenet last night, I'm feeling very jazzed about a different vid project as well, and I can certainly transfer my energies directly to that while I wait impatiently for the RotK DVD to come out. And I can go back and expand the LotR clip database beyond its original focus, so that when RotK does come out I'm ready. I know that it is better to wait and do this vid right than to stick to my original idea just for the sake of having the vid Done.
But it's hard to give that first idea up, because it is a good idea, and I could make it work; it's just that I could make the other thing work better. (Also, if I can't get the music cut down to five minutes, which I suspect I can't, I can justify the length to myself more easily if the vid's covering all three movies.)
So this is me, switching gears. And feeling like an idiot for not having seen the necessity of this switch from the moment I walked out of the theater after seeing RotK. :::sigh:::
Last night I turned a pound of it into bisonburgers for truepenny, Mirrorthaw, and myself. They were somewhat compromised in terms of structural integrity - partly because I added shallots and parsley in addition to the obligatory salt and pepper, but also because bison is so damn lean that there's not enough fat to properly hold the burger together.
They were nevertheless quite tasty.
Afterwards we went to a Peter Mulvey show. The experience was slightly marred by annoying barstools, and suffered a bit in comparison to the other Peter shows we've seen recently (this venue is actually larger than a postage stamp, so we weren't practically in his lap for the whole thing), but, you know, it was a Peter Mulvey show, and therefore just about the most worthwhile thing one can do with twelve dollars. And he played my four current-favorite songs off the new CD, so everything else was candy.
Peter is pretty much the opposite of those performers who show up, play a bunch of songs that sound just like they do on the CDs, and leave. Like many charismatic folkies, he chats while he tunes, he goofs around, he references recent political events, he tells amusing stories about being on the road, he introduces songs with wit and humor, and generally doesn't take himself terribly seriously.
But it's not just the between-song patter, and it's not just the quality of the performance, although that's never less than stellar. It's the way he plays, the way songs are living and evolving things for him. No song ever sounds quite the way it does on the CD. He changes lyrics, changes chords, messes around with melodies and rhythms. He does lots of covers - interesting, weird, wonderful covers - but (as either Truepenny or Mirrorthaw pointed out on the way out of the venue) he essentially covers his own songs as well. So there's a lot of joy to be had, for those of us who have listened to all the CDs dozens or hundreds of times, not just in the songs themselves but in the difference, the slippage, between the songs we think we know and the versions we're hearing come to life onstage.
Then I got home and, after a few detours into other activities, sat down to finish the clip database for the LotR vid I've been thinking about for, let's see, well over a year now.
At which point I had a small crisis.
I was listening to the vid music - not the final cut, which I still haven't worked out, but the 10-minute version - and thinking about the vid, and realized: this music is perfect for what I want to do with these movies, but I'm not sure it's perfect for this vid. When I started planning this vid, I hadn't seen The Two Towers yet. Now I've seen both TTT and RotK, and I think maybe this needs to be an ensemble vid covering all three movies - sort of a mega-trailer thing. I mean, the really climactic moments in the music are just crying out for some of the RotK shots.
But I still really want to make the vid I originally set out to make.
This is not sending me into as much of a tailspin as I would have thought. As I told renenet last night, I'm feeling very jazzed about a different vid project as well, and I can certainly transfer my energies directly to that while I wait impatiently for the RotK DVD to come out. And I can go back and expand the LotR clip database beyond its original focus, so that when RotK does come out I'm ready. I know that it is better to wait and do this vid right than to stick to my original idea just for the sake of having the vid Done.
But it's hard to give that first idea up, because it is a good idea, and I could make it work; it's just that I could make the other thing work better. (Also, if I can't get the music cut down to five minutes, which I suspect I can't, I can justify the length to myself more easily if the vid's covering all three movies.)
So this is me, switching gears. And feeling like an idiot for not having seen the necessity of this switch from the moment I walked out of the theater after seeing RotK. :::sigh:::