men at work.

And, as always in September, summer nights are just suddenly gone and dinnertime looks like the above snapshot from our hallway window into the backyard.

And also kind of like always in September, I tell myself that this year I am determined to make the most of The Darkness and be a productive motherfucker all winter long.

Today's maiden voyage involved that thing I mentioned about finding a place to put everything in the kitchen, which meant cleaning out the kitchen cupboards.

Which meant discovering 4 half-used jars of rock-hard peanut butter, 2.5 sizable boxes of powdered cocoa, that same crusty old bottle of Chinese black vinegar that I never ever use but insist on keeping, a pound of buckwheat flour, a completely crystallized jar of date syrup, some literally 12-year-old marjoram, a canister of powdered milk from the gulab jamun experience that will never be used for anything else, and a number of unfortunately unlabeled jars or bags of a substance that is either cornmeal or semolina, we can never tell the difference.

And so, yes, that made me do this: while realizing that this would immediately decimate any stray testosterone that might be hiding out somewhere in my system, I nonetheless felt compelled to....

Your silence is valuable to me.

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destructoland studios.

ze best of all.

Recording for a week. Food-related news? Made Black Pepper Cod last night, was all good.

de kortste nacht.

From relaxed 8pm soundcheck through scarily underattended 10:40pm opening notes (due to scarily lightning-attended storms maybe?) to engaging 1am Xenakis to desperately necessary 5:30am croissants and multi-amplifier guitar solos. To....yes, 12noon hangover. It was a pretty fun night. Also a bit, mmm, "special" due to the fact that this room is where we had our first gig together back in 2008, almost four years ago, and every time we play here seems to be generally pretty satisfying.

And in the aftermath? Spirits remain pretty OK, and Coming Up Next: the wagon. And two recording sessions. I'll take pictures.

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not drowning, waving.

Not blogging, recording.

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it's the little things.

Sunday's gig was nice, thank you for asking: lovely-sounding room, friendly and conscientious organizers, and a crowd made up of almost no one I knew. And, I was home by 8pm! And, I made enough money to go grocery shopping with afterwards!

Mara returneth from France, bringing all manner of tiny little jars of pates and confits: duck + armagnac, pork + green peppercorn, black cherry, plum/cumin, etc. My favorite is a jar of black fig preserves given to the band by the drummer (bassist?) of one of the tour's opening acts: he made it himself, from his own figs. Where else besides south of France does this happen?

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re(mis)direction.

If you're here for the food, this won't interest you. If you're here for the me: it looks like most of my writing effort is being aimed somewhere else right now, which should not be taken as any kind of death knell for VDuck. VDuck will roar back into action during our December In America adventure I'm sure. But until then, it's thundersticks or bust.

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procrastination hacks.

Sigh. It's become clear over the past 120 minutes that under normal non-fasting circumstances, I eat when I'm procrastinating. Not a lot, just like a nut here or a prune there or maybe a bite of leftovers, but it's one of the things I do to break up the monotony of "single-item procrastination", like compulsively checking email. 

I can only drink so much water/tea...I'm up over 3 liters today. My mouth wants to chomp. I guess this is why people smoke, huh. 

OK, so I'm going to hack myself. I've linked to this before, but it really seems to help me if I can manage to remember what I'm doing. This is called Procrastination Hack: '(10+2)*5'. As the article mentions, the payoff comes after you've managed to complete a couple of 10-minute segments and you fall into a rhythm, at which point you realize "Hey, what if I didn't take all of these breaks..." It's ludicrous that we have to trick ourselves, but that's what it's come to. Ludicrous, but effective. 

Here's how sorry my ass is: I downloaded a nice freeware stopwatch app to remind me about the 10 minutes of work I'm supposed to be doing. 

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The above actually worked really well this evening, I accomplished things. One thing I accomplished was to finally see this Giada Delaurentiis creature in action. Holy fucking Jesus in hell is she annoyingly perky. And not even her not-insignificant jiggle could sufficiently distract me from that ahhhhhhhhhhh, that voice.  And those teeth. Why is she constantly showing them to us? She's like a Greyhound Barbie with an upset stomach. 

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the sound of silence.

Jiminy Cricket, what a weekend. Friday's 6-guitar swordfight turned out to be fun and not boodley-boodley-boodley at all (mime Eddie Van Halen fingertapping here) at all. IIRC more than 100 people paid, which is a lot for the Music/Dance series...

...and then Saturday was just hard work from 3pm to 5am. We were already operating with a minimal crew, hoping that we'd be able to power through an unusually crowded night with our usual rag-tag team of misfits, but one of our bar staff fell ill and another one of them ended up unexpectedly playing in the first band of the evening, after said band's guitarist/founder's wife fell down the stairs back in England causing him to not make the trip (ehh write much?).

So with all this falling about, we were forced to go all Transformers for the night, everyone doing 3 different things simultaneously: the place was utterly packed, we had a record-setting bar night (for our events) to boot, mostly beer, at least 30 crates of Grolsch (and Palm and Koninck). Thus our most successful evening yet in terms of consistent musical quality and sheer profit, but we were so understaffed that it was difficult to fully enjoy it while it was happening.

We were so torn up at the end of the night that we didn't even clean; the 5 of us looked at the rather gross devastation around us and quickly decided that it would actually be smarter to return 6 hours later at noon and clean then (and, actually, it might have even been the right decision). But hey I guess this is what makes the OT301 the OT301...if you want an overstaffed place with underseasoned music, Paradiso is right down the street bitches...

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Right. But anyway, Saturday's event expanding into Sunday afternoon kind of trashed the SnL as well...I have to just laugh at my gumbo plans...I was so not even close to making gumbo this weekend. I'm going to try and knock it out before I go to America this week.


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