this post-time i've concluded a game of playsite scrabble, three players (why?), wherein i bingoed twice, once with a phony (CUISINAL*) on a triple. also, listening to my old mp3s, which have just got up and running again. the seemingly random section of the library that i listened to during the game was fantastically good and varied. i may have to lift it straight to a cd.

this day i woke at 7:30 in order to meet Dan's neighbor Brian and spend a day with him at his studio, where he does post-production work for film, television, and radio. we dropped off 14-week-old Ethan for daycare and arrived at the blank-looking brick office building with labyrinthine corridors, at the one of the longer ends of which dexter media is located. first thing i noticed about the studio: he has a juno-60 (says he doesn't use it much though.)

the main project for the day was continued tweaking of the audio for a documentary about young women (in this case, young means between 20 and 40) with breast cancer, hosted by melissa joan hart, to be aired on the lifetime network. the title (although nobody mentioned this) is "fighting for the future." you can imagine, i'm sure. brian gave me explanatory running commentary as he loaded in the protools session and made his way slowly through the program, automating levels of dialogue, fading music in and out, processing soundbites occasionally to reduce noise.

this was interrupted by a minor client, a teenage dance troupe-member who needed some simple edits of janet jackson and cassette tracks of cobbled-together hip-hop cuts. i felt like he was being ever-so-slightly demeaning to her; and i empathized especially because i particularly enjoyed the lo-tech method of tape-editing that someone had clearly gone through to produce the music for the dance pieces. a minute of jay-z here, forty seconds of clubhouse spliced in.

in the late morning and afternoon, the (director?) of the documentary was in, observing the process and making numerous requests for specific amendations to the audio that towards the end seemed more and more nitpicky, considering the eventual destination of the piece (tv broadcast). but whatever. the working method revealed the documentary to me much more slowly than watching it straight through would have, which made a kind of suspense. we'd cycle a line of dialogue tens of times, over music, and the words would seem to fall in. very neat control of the video, which allowed him to hit a key on the computer keyboard to set the video in motion.

for the most part i just sat and watched. i helped in what little ways i could. takeout mu shi for lunch. at the end of the day (long - we were in the studio until seven), Brian dropped me off at CompUSA as dan requested, and i was driven to barbs for dinner.

dinner was Turkey Terrific sandwiches - turkey, stuffing, gravy, cranberry jelly, and mayonaise in between two slices of bread. that makes a surprisingly good sandwich. good family times.

benny back in town again, and upstairs it is senerap central once again. just like old times. yesterday and today have seen substantial developments in the contents of my hard disk. i now have more or less working versions of reason, recycle, rebirth, and a full suite of waves plugins, among other things. some of which i've been using to make bunches of samples: of duke ellington, marc ribot, the nat king cole record i bought the other day. dan is looking for interesting little samples, small enough to be unidentifiable, and preferably old enough for it not to matter. a horn hit, a scatted vocal, weird ribot high-pitched guitar plucks that i rearranged and cut together into a sort of groove.

the macnerding is slow, and my computer is still having lots of problems. hopefully we'll do a lot of troubleshooting tomorrow as i sally forward and get myself psyched up for all kinds of fun things i can do later on when i have the liberty to work on my own projects.

i'll write about cape cod hopefully tomorrow. i'm behind on a number of things, including e-mail and sleep. man, it's 3:30 now. 'night.

you are a star
and you are a hospital
you play great keyboards