"Seals in the Workforce"

Here's an excerpt from a documentary that Schnapps and I were in many years ago!



Behind the Scenes Featurette

I usually take a short nap before going out to a club, because I'm old. Sometimes I'll wake up early because my blood sugar is low, and the combination of pseudo dream-state and nutrient-starved brain is the usual inspiration for a Schnapps video.

On Saturday it was the "seal song" idea (including the complete lyrics, which I woke up with), and as I stumbled around eating raw sugar I came up with a few scenes in a potential Schnapps documentary.*

As usual, these things must be simple and easy to film. I shot everything that night except for the "They don't hire seals" thing, which I realized was necessary when I began editing the footage. You can tell I wasn't drunk when I shot that scene because the Schnapps voice is all wrong.

Anyway, a combination of voiceover and footage filmed in various rooms -- including an unexpected refrigerator hum in the kitchen -- meant that I had to apply all sorts of denoisers, noise gates, and selective EQ to everything. What's the best way to disguise imperfect audio? Other than music -- which seemed inappropriate for such a stark subject -- the best solution is to make the audio sound even MORE imperfect!

So I added a wonderful "crackle" loop courtesy of the Soundtrack Pro library, as well as intermittent "pops" (a click sample pitched downward) and an occasional rustling noise similar to a dirty audio track on a piece of old film, produced by gently rubbing a sock over a microphone.

As usual, I'm amazed at the difference between raw footage and finished material. Each clip viewed in isolation is total crap -- leading to a lot of discouragement yesterday when I began pulling everything together -- but when I trimmed it and assembled it in the right order, it began to be funny...even WITHOUT the voiceover.

The lesson, as though you didn't know: editing is half the final product.

* This is not the first Schnapps documentary ever, but it's the first one that didn't turn out so bad that it was thrown away.

Merry Christmas 2009!

Drive safe! Don't trip over your tripods!

Schnapps in "The Pooper"

Whenever I try to make an elaborate Schnapps video, it has a high chance of total failure. This is because the logistics of multi-angle seal-puppet filming result in a lot of compromises, mistakes, and unfunniness. The end product is garbage whenever Schnapps appears.

But last night I decided it was time for him to come out of retirement, and the only way to do it was to revert to the tried-and-true single take. Conceived and performed in half an hour, I give you "The Pooper."



Behind the Scenes Featurette!

There isn't much to say about this, except that the hardest part is always "how to begin" and "how to end." The beginning ultimately evolves somewhat naturally, but the ending is ALWAYS annoying, especially considering it gets the least rehearsal in a single take (at least the way I do it, which is to just try again and again until it finally finishes in a satisfactory way).

After I'd decided to make a video about Schnapps being locked in a box, I realized that I really DIDN'T know how I'd packed him. I must have hunted through a dozen boxes before I discovered him in a garbage bag full of purses, which is even MORE disturbing than being locked in a box, albeit less photogenic.

New Video: "Depressed Benny Hill"

Yesterday I started thinking that although Benny Hill is fun to watch when you're in a great mood, I bet his show would simply infuriate a depressed person. And since Schnapps the Seal is always depressed this was a shoe-in for a short video, which I shot last night and edited today:



Backstage Expose

As usual the music was mostly built up from Apple Loops -- including some sound effects that came with Soundtrack Pro -- but this time I tried something entirely new: foley recording.

If you've ever seen Benny Hill (!) then you know that much of the comedy (!) depended on over-the-top foley work...one of his trademarks was sped-up film with overdubbed sound effects. I was hoping to be able to avoid all that hassle, but as I was putting this video together it became obvious how essential that stuff is to slapstick.

So I did some brainstorming, and these were the techniques I came up with.

* Footsteps: I turned a pair of high heels upside down and hit the heel-tips with a pair of hairbrushes. Totally unnatural, but Benny Hill's footsteps never DID sound natural.

* Brushing: The aforementioned hairbrush rubbed across fabric. I enhanced the lower frequencies to make it sound richer.

* Slapping Schnapps' Head: The hairbrush again, slapped against my palm.

* Whip Effect: A thick hair elastic stretched between my fingers, then snapped on my leg. Ouch.

* Dominatrix Hissing: "Hiss! Hiss! Rah! Hiss!"

* Weightlifting Noise: This was the hardest one. I wanted something that sounded like a ratcheting wrench -- or maybe a jack -- but I'm not exactly swimming in tools. So I took three strings of cheap mardi-gras beads, wrapped them around the back of a wooden chair, and pulled them back and forth. It really worked!

iMovie '09 Stabilizes Me

This "make a movie from scratch" thing is entirely new to me, but every project is a learning experience. I've learned a little bit about composition, and a bit about lighting, and a LOT about how to use iMovie for something it's not meant for.

iMovie is a video editing tool that is part of Apple's iLife, a suite of integrated multi-media products. You get iLife for free when you buy a Macintosh so a lot of people create their home video projects using iMovie. It's a hell of a lot cheaper than Apple's professional offering (Final Cut Pro).

But why should Apple bother to even SELL Final Cut Pro if people are happy to simply use iMovie? Well, Final Cut Pro is marketed to the professional video editor, and iMovie is marketed to hobbyists. And for that reason, before Apple releases a new version of iMovie, they usually go into it with a stick and beat everything useful out of it.

Even so, if you have a little bit of ingenuity (and an awful lot of patience) you can stretch iMovie beyond its limits and create -- say -- all the videos I've been putting online for the last two years.

This week, however, I ran up against something new: shaky video. In the past I have always filmed footage using a tripod, but now that I'm trying something radically different -- which you'll see soon if it works out halfway decent -- I actually had to take my teeny-tiny camera (a Canon PowerShot SD1000) outside and shoot things by hand...on a windy day.

Despite the wind, there's apparently a growing problem with cameras getting smaller and smaller: tiny, light cameras are hard to hold without shaking them. When I got my hard-filmed footage home and looked at it on my computer I absolutely freaked: it wobbled all over the place, rendering all my focus and detail into an incomprehensible stew!

Short of hiring a steadycam operator I had only one recourse: to upgrade to iMovie '09, which -- besides a whole whack of other new features -- allows you to stabilize shaky video. It analyzes your clip, tracks the motion, and then zooms in JUST ENOUGH to crop out the edges while moving in the opposite direction of the shake.

People are raving about this feature, and about iMovie '09 in general. The thing is, you can only buy iMovie '09 as an integrated iLife '09 package, and this costs (in Canada) $100.

That would be fine if I actually USED anything in iLife other than iMovie and iPhoto, or if there were an existing upgrade path from the relatively pathetic iMovie '08 (which is what I've been using for the past year)...but no. As the folks in our local Apple store said, "There's no upgrade path, but the suite is WAY cheaper than anything you'd get from another company."

Plus there is simply no other game in town. All the other video editors for the Mac are either crappy or vapourware.

So I bought iLife '09 yesterday and installed it late last night. It came to life instantly and worked perfectly. And when I instructed it to stabilize one of my shaky clips -- which it does at about half the speed of the clip itself -- it...holy wow, it WORKED! It looked PERFECT!

I've stabilized half the footage I shot yesterday and it has all come out clean: no shake, no weirdness, just a smoothly-flowing image. All my carefully-filmed details are visible again. iMovie '09 -- despite its slightly galling price -- did exactly what it promised to do.

How often can you say that about software these days? And I haven't even looked at all the OTHER features yet.

Apple, I quite often love ya.

"A Big Gay Storm" Gets Some Big Gay Attention

I just noticed that a whole bunch of people were suddenly subscribing to my YouTube channel. That "Big Gay Storm" video I made last week was ratching up the hits, and by following the links I discovered -- wow! -- that I topped a Queerty "Top 10 Gathering Storm Parodies" list!

And our winner for the best NOM parody goes to Ms. Muffy St. Bernard. Leave it to the drag queens to come up with a wholly original take on the ad. This is everything that a good parody ad should be: It's a delightful send-up that is not only wildly entertaining, but also drives home its message by utilizing the comic power of leopard print and tiny, dirty pillows.

I mean holy cow, that's pretty cool, though maybe I should clean my pillows next time. Thanks, Queerty!

A Big Gay Storm is Brewing

It's Easter, and the National Organization for Marriage is rolling out a hilarious anti-gay scary-boo advertisement.



While getting ready to go out last night, it was almost as though Jesus himself were tickling the parody center of my brain. I was COMPELLED to make a response.



Note: You need to have been following the issue pretty closely to get the final gag. Close on the heels of American conservatives adopting "teabagging" as a method of protest, the National Organization for Marriage decided to shorten their "Two Million for Marriage" campaign to "2M4M."

Like, they live in such a bubble that they don't even double-check their acronyms against popular knowledge. They have terrible quality control of their memes.

Mini Drag Show: "A Drag Queen and Her Seal"

Last week I realized that I'd temporarily lost my grip on my own destiny. I felt no sense of purpose and didn't know what to do. After a few days of moping around and staring out the window, I settled in and created this: an epic video starring Schnapps the Seal.



I think it stands pretty well on its own, but here's the whole background, if you're interested.

What Came Before

Last month I was tapped by my company to help create a "demo reel" for one of our products. I was given a script to read, and in addition I was asked to create the music to accompany the demo. It was a challenge I threw myself into.

I figured this would be a good chance to explore Logic Studio's huge collection of Apple Loops, and I discovered that they ARE useful. It still takes a lot of skill to mix and match the loops, but that's only the beginning...if you really want the project to sound good you need to do extensive editing of the loops themselves.

The result was a darn fine demo reel, and a song called "Buy Our Sexy G-7." My company has complete ownership of the reel so I can't post the material independently, but once they post it online I'll provide a sneaky link to it.

"A Drag Queen and Her Seal"

I scribbled down some simple dialog last Thursday, with a few basic ideas but no actual storyboards. I've realized that I HATE doing storyboards. In addition I wanted this project to be totally free of copyright infringement...all me, including the music.

Friday night -- before heading out to Club Abstract -- I spent an hour recording all the footage. It was incredibly hectic. I realized how hard it is to say lines to an impersonal plate of cotton balls, especially when you're a piss-poor actor. I switched a few things around at the last minute. I forgot to record one punchline entirely. I got awfully tired of having a seal puppet on my arm.

Editing

Really, iMovie is not such a terrible (free) movie editor, if you're willing to work in an entirely linear way (with no overlaps). I felt restricted by the choice of titles and transitions, but it's not like the rest of the video was particularly spiffy. Most annoying was the terrible hiss picked up by my Cannon SD1000 "Power Shot" camera...it's apparently due to kamikaze electrons, but I just chalk it up to "cheap internal microphone."

During editing I realized how much I'd benefit from having a second person around during the filming. I pronounced Schnapps' name differently at the beginning and the end, and my "clever" substitution of a vodka bottle for a Moscow Pride weapon (as opposed to a flip-flop, the original choice), made it look like *I* had bludgeoned Schnapps in the preceding scene. Oh well, ambiguity and mysteries!

Denoising

The hiss on the audio was really terrible. Once I'd "picture-locked" the edit I exported the audio and played with it in Logic Studio, but none of the plug-ins made a noticeable difference.

Then I discovered a denoising tutorial for Soundtrack Pro -- a utility which comes with Logic Studio -- explaining how to take a "noise pattern" snippet from your audio and use it to cancel the noise in the rest of your clip. I'd never used Soundtrack Pro before -- and I can't see myself using it for anything but this, particularly because its shortcut keys are totally different from Logic -- but its noise cancellation thingy did a pretty good job. There's still some hiss in the video but it isn't quite so bad.

Music

So I exported the denoised audio from Soundtrack Pro and brought it into Logic Studio, along with the video clip, and I got to work on the music.

One problem with not having a professional video editing system -- or a bunch of people all working on the video together -- is that it's difficult to cue music to video AFTER it's been cut, especially when you're a non-musician working with a strict temp. Sometimes a video transition happens in the middle of a bar.

But that isn't really important, because I've realized -- both in this project and the demo reel project -- that soundtrack music is both subliminal and terribly important. You're not supposed to notice it -- though this "Schnapps" video is deliberately campy in that way -- but if it's not there then everything is flat and boring.

Anyway, about the loops and sound effects. Soundtrack Pro comes with two gigs of foley-type effects that I thought I'd never use...but just like the Apple loops, I've discovered how useful they are for quick and dirty (and low-expectation) projects. Want a crowd noise? Grab from the two dozen ones available on the DVD! They even have a collection of screams that are lots of fun and quite distinctive.

Since I was doing this video project for myself -- and was therefore unconcerned with an even remotely professional result -- I finally decided it was "good enough," even if it sounds a bit thin and unfinished (particularly near the end). Still, I think it worked out pretty well, and I'm amazed that an hour of filming and approximately ten hours of post-production have yielded a nifty little video.

Most important are the lessons I've learned. There's nothing like an enforced project to force you to learn your applications better. I'm ready for the NEXT video...but what will it be?

Domestic Drag Show: "Macavity" By Sarah Brightman

The newest (and longest) Domestic Drag Show is ready for viewing...if you dare!



This has always been a difficult song to do. Despite the somewhat arbitrary and easily forgettable "you/they" lyric switches, it simply has a weird tempo between "burlesque" and "big band." I don't know whether to grind or prance. And coupled with the relatively snoozy running time (3:45 in its edited version) I just don't do this live anymore.

I think all this awkwardness comes out in the video, filmed on two separate nights several weeks apart, including "second unit" hands. Fortunately Zsa Zsa consented to appear as the nefarious, gender-switching "Macavity" himself.

If anybody wants a signed, one-of-a-kind "Macavity" portrait, it's still nailed to my wall.

Domestic Drag Show: "Hot Lips" by Kelli Ali

Here's your Canada Day treat...the first domestic drag show in three months!

The song is "Hot Lips" by Kelli Ali, and the clips were filmed at various times over the past month, usually during crazy heatwaves.



It didn't take long to get the hang of iMovie 7. It's a nifty free video editor, but before you say "your editing sucks and so does your video," let me remind you that these are flippant entertainments filmed entirely by myself. The day I get a pocket-sized, portable, always-available cameraperson is the day I explode into non-static creativity.

Another caveat: EVERY clip in this project is hand-synced to the music. That's 76 clips. That's a very tired Muffy.

Coming soon: the never-before-seen Schnapps video, suppressed due to an assumed lack of interest! I'll dig it out of the vault and put it online.

Also coming soon: the final episode of the "Creepy Pedro" radio play! It's only taken six years to finish.

New "Domestic Drag Show" In the Works, Plus iMovie 7

I've mentioned that a new "Domestic Drag Show" was in the works. Since it's more of a "music video" sort of song as opposed to a "storytelling" song, I've just been filming bits and pieces over the last month with the intention of quick-cutting it together in iMovie.

Just to prove that I'm not talking out of my butt, here's a screenshot of the first thirty seconds of the project.


Much of today was spent trying to understand iMovie 7. While the previous version seemed deliberately obtuse, this one is downright kooky in its desire NOT to be useful, while simultaneously opening wide its metaphorical arms and screaming "LOVE ME, I'M CUTE!"

Still, iMovie 7 is a definite improvement over the previous version I was using. You can reuse clips, for one thing, and the trimming tools are a bit more powerful. But I'd give it all up for a proper timeline.

Incidentally, it's been noted in the past that my tripod isn't tall enough; it always shoots me under the chin. I have fixed this problem, as the screenshot above shows. Did I spend a ton of money on a professional camera setup? No, I invented a patented "tripod extender," shown below.


It isn't pretty and it sure ain't portable, BUT IT WORKS!

The Great Computer Migration of 2008

Picture this dramatic scene.

The old eMac and the new iMac meet face to face for the first time. Instead of having a jolly chat about my personal foibles and my inability to keep their keyboards clean, the iMac becomes aggressive and takes instant control: Firewire cable, Migration Assistant, only one goal: to suck all the important information from the eMac and turn it into the obsolete doorstop that we've all suspected it to be.

If the eMac already looked like an E-Z Bake Oven in comparison with the new iMac, it looks doubly pathetic when lashed helplessly to its usurper.

Macintosh computers have a much-vaunted, invincible, seamless integration, except when I try to use more than one of them at a time. The Migration Assistant connects properly to the poor eMac but refuses to do anything more; it just sits for two hours "waiting for the drives to appear." A call to technical support reveals a crucial piece of information that everybody needs to know: "Migration Assistant just always works." That is nice to hear.

My happy tete-et-tete with the technical support technician is interrupted by a dentist appointment, where I get my chipped tooth fixed by chatty oral hygienists who don't know the subtext behind "I Touch Myself" by The Divinyls:

"I always thought they were saying 'I love myself!'"

"Oh no, it's 'I touch myself.'"

"Whew! I mean, 'I love myself,' that's going pretty far! They'd never get away with that."

When my jaws are strapped apart with a pink rubber tent, one of the hygienists says I'm being "awfully quiet," and they laugh hysterically because I am unable to reply. They allow one of the tent flaps to hang over my nose where it sucks into my nostrils with every breath.

I return home with a lip that feels like a totally unfunny balloon animal. My two computers are still connected, as useless and helpless as two dogs who have become locked together having sex. Rather than dump water on them, I decide that attempting to get Migration Assistant working has already taken longer than just manually copying everything over myself.

So that's what I do for the next half hour: copy applications and data through the Firewire connection. Then I bundle up the poor elderly eMac and banish it to its temporary home in my living room, where it can join other sadly forgotten things like my pussycat.

Next, the real hurdle: configuring the system to work with my Sympatico internet account. I hold my breath through the entire procedure, waiting for it to fail the way all non-Apple software always does. Except that it works perfectly the first time, of course, whereas the famous-super-fabulous Apple Migration Assistant just wasted two hours of my day.

My first task, then? Communicating to you, dear blog readers, using my spiffy new computer...I am back in business at last.

Since "business" includes making silly videos and "Daily Muffy" episodes, I'm happy to report that the next "domestic drag show" is still in the works. More importantly, this weekend Vanilla and I documented an ambitious new Daily Muffy. It's called "Protest!" and here's a quick teaser.

Domestic Drag Show: "Fever" by Annabella Lwin

For those who enjoy watching me scamper around my living room, here's a new domestic drag show: "Fever," performed by Annabella Lwin (of "Bow Wow Wow" fame). With a special cameo by Melody Valentine (and not a seal in sight)!



Notes:

I think I've compared "editing a video with iMovie" to "herding cats." Well, it's more like herding donkeys, but the more I use it I discover additional tips and tricks.

This one was storyboarded, but it mainly came together within iMovie itself. By using "split video at playhead" as opposed to any of the cropping tools, I find I can better organize and synchronize multiple clips on the single video track. So this one is very much edited "on the fly," as required by the spunky-modern song.

This process is still very tedious. Every single edit must be individually synchronized, you must work from beginning to end, and you don't have a hope of changing anything once you've done it. But it's still better than endlessly cropping and uncropping the clips.

PS: I buy most of my props at Home Hardware because their ugly stuff is "over the top," and anything more subtle wouldn't show up on video. Hence that terrifying red "seedpod" thing, which cost me $10 but was well worth the embarrassment.

A Vehicle: Edging into Adulthood

I've done without a car for thirteen years. I live in a city with lots of cabs, good bus service, and plenty of sidewalks to walk on. I have friends and family which will transport heavy goods in a pinch, and if I need to get out of the city there is always the Greyhound.

But jeez, I think it's time to get a car. I hate sponging off of friends. I hate being unable to visit people in other cities. When I'm invited to do a show in Guelph, I hate forcing them to pick me up and drive me home. I hate taking the bus to Toronto.

Most importantly -- and positively -- I would love to be able to drive during the summer. I want to drive to little towns and explore without worrying that other people will be bored. I want to visit the Bruce Penninsula again. I want to see Lake Huron.

To do all of these things I need a car.

So I've started the ball rolling. My father works at a car dealership and he knows his cars, so he's scouting out a practical used vehicle. I've called an insurance company to find out how much I'll need to pay for the privilege of driving...I'll get the bad news tomorrow. I've decided that -- for the first time in my life -- I need to go into temporary debt to achieve a useful and substantial goal: geographic independence.

Hopefully this will all happen.

I need to balance this with two other desires. First off, I want to go to the 2008 Pennsylvania STC Summit in June, and though I'll be reimbursed for everything it always involves my paying upfront, out of my own pocket.

Also, while editing a new "Domestic Drag Show" in iMovie, I finally decided it would be worth it to get better (that is, ADEQUATE) video editing software. But that would require upgrading my operating system, which would ultimately require just getting a new computer. As nice as it would be to enjoy all the perks of a spiffy new iMac (not to mention the ability to make better videos, and to make them faster), I have to admit that this is hardly essential.

So the car wins.

Nightclubbing with Schnapps the Seal

I've taken a bit of a break from the lip-syncing domestic drag shows -- storyboarding them is a pain -- so on Saturday night I decided to do a relatively unplanned experiment: to make a "talkie" with multiple camera angles, starring Schnapps the seal who works for scale (fish).

Unfortunately my insane hair extensions took so long to apply (more on that later) that I didn't get a chance to film anything until I got back home at 1am, considerably inebriated and on the verge of drop-dead exhaustion.

That's my way of explaining what you're about to see...if you dare.

Drag Show: "Lithium"

It suddenly occurred to me: I should perform Ali Milner's version of "Lithium" by Nirvana! I got all excited about this and was halfway through the storyboard before my worst suspicions were realized: like most Nirvana songs, "Lithium" makes no conventional sense and doesn't tell a story, even though it SOUNDS like it does.

And I'm not exactly an "I love you, I kill you" type of person.

So somehow the project morphed into a "crazy housewife" story, and here are the results:



There were supposed to be candles all through the video but my smoke alarm went INSANE and I had to blow them all out. I also experimented with the "low light" setting during the kitchen clips, since my kitchen light is annoyingly dim. I now think of this camera feature as the "turn your kitchen yellow" setting.

A lyric in the song refers to "broken mirrors," and just before I left for Club Abstract that night I broke a REAL mirror, thinking it was made out of cheap metal instead of glass. Judging by the way things turned out at the bar I guess I'll suffer seven years of guys who fart on the dancefloor.

A Christmas Drag Show: "It's DeLovely!"

If you thought I was going to let Christmas go by without a treat, you're thinking CRAZY!

Here's the fictional story of me and a miraculous wooden bird, to the tune of Anita O'Day's "It's DeLovely." It's all true, I swear!



Production Notes:

It's silly to call these things "Mini Drag Shows," since they take far more work than a drag show ever does. I decided to conceive and film one in a single day, which meant rushing a lot and losing some footage. Fortunately the second unit stepped in (errr, that's me too) and we made our Christmas deadline with some make-up shots.

You'll be amazed to know that the bird is NOT animatronic, nor is it a green screen effect! Our special effects technician (moi, ici) rigged it up in the old-fashioned way. Try keeping a cat away from an effect like that. You can see an intrigued Zsa Zsa during the early part on the couch.

My version of iMovie is the most up-to-date one available for OS X.3, but it is still INCREDIBLY limited. You're allowed a single video track, so you can't lay down multiple takes and see how they compare. You can split a video clip once, but both segments must remain on the timeline if you want to keep using them, and the "dragging rules" become stranger the more clips you split apart. To cap it all off, once you have cropped a video clip, it is considered to be permanently edited; you can "restore it," but then ALL of your edits to the clip are gone.

Tedious, tedious, tedious. But free.

I'm happy with the way the quick cuts turned out but you can't imagine the work involved.

Now, About Anita

It's only now that I realize that Anita O'Day -- the only jazz singer I've ever really enjoyed -- died last year. I bought a copy of her autobiography two years ago and it arrived with a decidedly crooked signature; I suspect she was getting fragile even by that time.

So Anita, this one's for you. Thanks for your music.

Mini-Drag Show: "I'd Love To"

Here's the next "mini-drag show," recorded over several weeks in varying degrees of inebriation. It suffers uncountable continuity errors...but I tell myself that's part of its "charm!"

The song is Lee Aaron's "I'd Love To," off of her FABULOUS jazz-inspired album "Slick Chick." The guest artiste is Zsa Zsa, not to be kept away from feathers or cat food under any circumstances.

Enjoy!

Active Weekend Reflection (NOT "Weekend Acid Reflux")

On Saturday my mother and I ventured out to buy me a Christmas tree. I'd hoped for something about five feet high, but fake trees apparently come in only two sizes: miniscule or enormous. Fortunately, "miniscule" plus "end table" equals "medium," and the darn thing even has tasteful white lights on it. Some pictures (and nostalgic reflections) soon!

That night, I slogged through the first half of the next "mini-drag show" video. The "Monkeys" video involved just three setups and five scenes; this one has eleven setups and twenty-six scenes, which is a bit much to squeeze between "getting into drag" and "going to the bar." Hopefully I can film the rest of the scenes next weekend.

To make the process more efficient and rewarding I've learned to repeat scenes several times and pick out the best version, reducing how often I need to jump up and down to turn the camera on and off. For that reason I have some pretty strange raw footage. Here's a brief snippet of a Saturday-night repetition, to confuse you, tantalize you, and to prove that I really AM doing something, even if it's creepy:



After that: Club Abstract for drinkin', dancin', and socializin'. Since we were effectively trapped in the bar due to a terrible snowstorm, many of the hornier patrons were palpably desperate, which was entertaining to watch. Best of all: meeting DJ Jeff, briefly back from Japan. Jeff was the "goth night" DJ for many years (long ago), and whenever I hear Front 242 I think of him. Love you, Jeff!

For a few relevant pictures (and a few more "Zsa Zsa Collector's Photos"), plus a shot from Guelph's "Kink 2" night, go to Flickr.



(For those concerned with my emotional wellbeing, you'll be happy to hear that I think my foundation issues are licked. I'm still working out how much powder I can get away with -- and as a result I look a bit spotty by 2am -- but it's all uphill from here).

Speaking of uphill at 2am: there were no cabs available when the bar let out (basically because there were no roads anymore). I stomped my way home through the frozen, blowing snow, buffeted by gusts and confined to the tire tracks of the few adventurous cars.

Far from being a chore, this was beautiful. No vehicles, nobody outside, no traffic rules. With the snow baffling all the sound, the only things I could hear were the trees bending over in the wind and my own crackling footsteps.

I took a video of my walk but you don't want to see it; it doesn't capture the spirit of the thing and you can mostly just hear me snorting back my cold-weather snot. Some things are best experienced first-hand.

Mini-Drag Show: "The Monkeys Have No Tails in Pago Pago"

A few years ago I found this song in a radio broadcast from 1939, as part of pre-fame Arthur Godfrey's morning program. The sound quality was poor and it was jumpy and weird, but with some tender loving care I restored it to a listenable state.

But I wasn't just content to listen to it all by myself, I had to inflict it on others! I've performed it twice -- once in Guelph, once at Club Renaissance -- and both times I've been greeted by blank stares of incomprehension.

For the last two weeks I've been storyboarding, planning, and fiddling with my digital camera, and here's my second "mini-drag show" experiment. It's awfully hard to turn my living room into a jungle, I had some sync problems with iMovie (exacerbated by YouTube's tendency to go out-of-sync anyway), and the lighting is certainly wonky, but I think I might be on to something here...



I wish I knew who performed this song, but there's scant information about it online. A more popular version is slightly better known, called "The Monkeys Have No Tails in Zamboanga." You can even hear Beaver Cleaver singing it in one of the first season episodes of "Leave it to Beaver."