How's about you drink 6 cases o' me, Joni?

"Phoebe wanted me to go out, but I said 'These guys just finished their CD, they really want it tonight, and I'm not going to deny them that!'"

One of the many, many reasons I love our design team. They get it.

Aren understands that to the concierge at the front desk of his building, this is just a pile of 6 cardboard boxes, but to us, this is two years of diligence, panic, excitement, apprehension, euphoria - the utmost of emotion and intimacy. This is how Seth Rogan felt watching the baby crown in "knocked up" (which, I'm sure, was quite a bit different from how I felt watching that particular scene in the movie = how to make one of the most delicious leading ladies in hollywood lose all sex appeal in one shot...ok she lost it for like two minutes, but let's get back to the point).

There's something to be said for having music in a tangible form. I guess this is why I spend all day pushing paper in a record store. I really just don't get iTunes, Limewire and the like. Granted this is the future, and like my Grandma embracing the internet, I'm sure I'll fall in line eventually, but I'll miss being able to sit on the carpet in front of my speakers, flipping through the pages of some random OLP album and wondering if Dom will ever be able to pull off the "chicken" rock pose as well as Raine Maida. I'll miss knowing that Siamese Dream sounds like three different albums if you play it on CD, cassette and vinyl. Most of all, I regret knowing that at some point in the future, no one will care that our CD features the most beautiful artwork I could have imagined, or that it has three different covers (on cardstock), or that I won't get to spend mountainous amounts of time scheming and planning (and learning) with Phoebe & Aren...phone calls, e-mails, and many a meeting of beer and tasty delights at the Irish Heather or the Six Acres (you should all go here; the beer list is monumental).

Either way, our album is pressed, signed, sealed, delivered. I'm excited as hell to share it with you all. I can't wait to hear which tracks win out the "this one's my favourite" race, and which ones get utterly rejected.

Many, many thanks to Phoebe & Aren (Glasfurd & Walker), who took soooo much time out of their crazy busy schedule (designing for real clients, like MTV) and without whom this process would have broken me.

Cheers.

~S

certain agitators...

so i'm about to delve into something that is no business of mine, predominantly because it is political and what do i know about politics?
sitting on the bus yesterday i picked up one of those free disposable mini newspapers you can find anywhere these days, except, perhaps, inside garbage cans.
after finding out that paris hilton is once again in prison (or out of prison, i forget), i flipped to this article on Prince Harry. Harry, the bad boy and my favourite royal family member, had allegedly been out partying on the same night that the 150th british soldier had been killed in Iraq.
I always hear these totals. And frankly, besides them only ever being totals of Western soldiers killed, they always sound surprisingly low. And yet somehow, Bush, or our local newscaster or whoever is reporting such totals, is always overcome with such shock and dismay.
Don't get me wrong, i'm not in support of more American or British soldiers dying in Iraq, or Canadian soldiers dying in Afghanistan, or anyone dying for that matter. But why haven't I heard totals of Iraqi soldiers or civilians killed? My gut told me, the totals would be a lot greater, and after reading the BBC article below, my gut was right.
A research team from the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health estimated last fall that Iraqi death totals were in the neighborhood of 655 000. It is just an estimate, but at least the school bothered to take notice of how the Iraqi's were doing. And, furthermore, if they are drastically wrong, oh let's say they accidentally doubled the totals. There's still over 275 000
Iraqi deaths compared to... wait for it... 3500 American deaths, and let's not forget 150 Brits.

It's kind of like we're complaining to the kid who's failing math for the 3rd time that the teacher screwed us over and gave us a B+ instead of an A! 85%, looks like little Georgey won't be getting the super soaker 7000 from mommy after all. better luck next time kid.

link pasted below
dom

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6040054.stm

re-writing

i helped a friend read through the first draft of his movie script with a couple of readers the other evening. half way through we started giving him some compliments, to which he said "thanks guys, and seriously if this script sucks, tell me because i'd kind of like to make a career out of this, so if its bad please tell me".

hearing this and reading on, i was reminded of something my old professor Stephen Heal once said in a scriptwriting class. he said, "there is only one thing that separates good writers from great writers. great writers are good re-writers". of course, Mr. Heal had said this when all the students in his class, including myself, had failed to do any rewriting on our scripts as he had assigned. which perhaps made his lesson have even more impact.

i think that's the thing with this business of art. or any kind of vision that we want to reify. my friend had the foundation for something great, the real question was if he had the perserverance to hammer and chisel and fix this thing until he was blue in the face, and this thing was perfect. it gives us simple people hope. we don't need to be mozarts, who's manuscripts were allegedely flawless, perfect first drafts. we just have to have the determination and the patience to work on it until it's perfect.

it also reminds me of one of the songs on the album, which i will in no way claim to be perfect.
in the middle of shawn' and i's writing period two autumn's ago, shawn, when i was away, decided to rank our first 15 songs. this was upseting to me cuz how on earth could i compare my, or our, babies in such a way. needless to say i eventually came to terms with it, and made my own ranking, which i didn't like but i could deal with. at the bottom of both of our lists was a song, that we pulled out of the rubble, rebuilt and improved enough to make it on the album.

so, in a way i'm glad he made the list. the song may have just fallen by the wayside if we wouldn't have admitted to it needing all the work.

anyhoo, go back to your lives

d

The Suit

I work at a wine store, which deals mostly with fine wines, but also supplies the more “economical” hooch (dirt cheap wine) and coolers. We in the industry, or my colleagues Andrew St. Cool, Jerry and I label said drinks as “loser juice”. The reason for this being that loser juice is largely bought out by the people who come in once, twice or even five times a day to buy their daily get drunk treat. The spectrum of loser juicers is pretty broad. At the bottom of this spectrum you will find ones that stand outside our door pan handling until they accrue the 2 dollars they need to buy a single cooler and then repeat. Other ones you would guess have stopped eating completely to fill their bodies with whatever nutrients you would find in an 8 dollar bottle of Almond cream sherry.

As icky as some of these patrons get, on Wednesday a man with a suit and an American Express came in and out grossed all of them. It was a slow hour so when he came in he was alone and under the magnifying glass of St. Cool and myself.

Sweating like a pig in his finely cut suit, he taps me on the shoulder.

Suit: Hey buddy, I need you to get me a FABULOUS wine

Me: Ok, how much are you looking to spend.

Suit: Doesn’t matter I need it to be fabulous.

enter St. Cool

St. Cool: How fabulous do you want it?

Suit: Honestly?... I want her in bed.

St. Cool: Oh so you’ll need high alcohol then.

Suit: Will that work?

St. Cool: oh yeah, should do the trick. So how much do you want to spend?

People often give us really evasive answers to this question, but really it saves us a lot of time. We can get you a good bottle of wine for $13, and we can get you a great one for $25… or $400. The options are endless. The man in the suit chooses to beat around the bush

Suit: Look don’t dog me, but don’t puppy me either.

(What on earth does this mean? please i need to know)

St. Cool: I’ve always been more of a cat person, so you’re gonna have to be a bit more concrete.

(The final Verdict!!)

Suit: Like 28 or 30 bucks.

I wish I had one of those shocked as heck emoticon faces. Not only was this sleaze bag trying to coaxe some woman into bed with his wallet, but he wasn’t even even spending the standard sleaze bag amount, which is $50 dollars for you sleaze bags in training. Cmon!

So St. Cool runs and picks him out a french syrah in his price range, keeping in mind that he wants a wine of at 14 or 15% alcohol and starts to ring him up. The icing on the cake is that when Suit tries to pay with his American Express, we have to tell him that we only accept mastercard or visa. To this he says

Suit: Oh I gave all my credit cards to let her to go shopping with.

The suit then leaves the store sans bottle of high alcohol wine. Hopefully his mastercard, visa’s 3 thousand dollar shopping trip were enough to get him somewhere. Deep down I hope it was the curb.

Dom