May 25, 2004 - 5:44 PM

Sleep, That's Where I'm a Viking!

I slept for 15 hours yesterday, and I am not apologizing for it. Zoom zoom, straight through, from 6 PM Monday evening until 9 AM today, I was out like Liberace. What led to this superhuman soma coma? 5 consecutive days of exhausting work and play that we enjoyed very much.

It seems that, with the school year approaching its end, many teachers are using up their stockpiled vacation days before they lose them. So Wednesday, I filled in for a 6th grade History teacher AND a 6th grade Science teacher. Had to send a handful of them to the office for bad behavior...unfortunately, I have many of the same kids again this coming Thursday as I'm taking over the History teacher's classes for the day again. L'il varmints. After school, I had dinner and psyched myself up for the Angel series finale (yay! and dang!). Then I went to the gym. And now it's been a week since I've been there.

Thursday through Monday found me subbing at the school's second site (they have a main school complex at 8th street, and another school yard, a bit smaller, about 2 miles West, and I float between the two) dealing with History again, this time at an Eighth Grade level. 4 different sections over the course of 3 days. I managed to remember only a few of the students names and found it necessary to constantly refer back to the seating charts to scold the insubordinates. Kinda takes the sting out of the reprimand when you go "hey...uh....you! Waitaminnit, I gotta look at the seating chart...who are you again? Oh yeah, Michael, be quiet and stay on task or you're going to Mr. Vandenberg's office!" But when you do catch a kid doing something and call out their name immediately, the look of surprise on their faces as they ask "Mr. Kim, you know our names?!" is priceless. Heh.

After school on Thursday, I raced out of the parking lot because I had to pick up Tony and "She's So Lovely"'s cousin Joan from the airport. They had been on vacation along with The Magnificent One and her sister for 2 weeks in Paris and London (man, what's with all these people I know taking trips all over? My parents to Vegas, Nick, LDBL, and Mer to Italy, my sister to North Carolina). I made it down to LAX through damnable rush hour 20 minutes late (sorry!) and dropped them off at their respective homes. I stayed with Tony and had dinner with him and his sister Jennifer while we watched le boob tube. It was about 9:30 this time when we all drastically began to fade...Tony because of his non-stop flight from London to L.A., Jen and I because we had both been teaching (she's a first grade teacher).

Friday was Nick's first day off in two weeks and his first day off of a bizarre sleep/work schedule that was foisted upon him by the necessary coverage of the Cannes Film Festival that his paper undertook. His normal worktimes are 12 PM to 10 PM, 4 days a week, but to prepare a paper daily for the festival, he had to be at work at 3 AM and stay there until 1 PM everyday. Well, after school on Friday, I called him up and offered to buy some food to grill at his place, and we could watch the movie The Cooler (we've recently joined NetFlix together and, in addition to ordering up all of Farscape Seasons 3 and 4, we've got a list of 30 or so movies queued up for rental; The Cooler was first on the list). The food (grilled corn, zuchinni, and chicken) was excellent (and, I'm ashamed to admit, it was Nick who did the cooking...but he's the much better cook! I'll just stick to the buying of the raw goods), the movie was ok, made good mostly because of the top-notch acting, brought down by the not-quite-there story.

On Saturday, I played tennis and threw around the baseball with Nick and LDBl and Mer. We cut short our trip to the park because I was heading South to San Juan Capistrano to see a friend from Berklee perform at the Library concert series there. Almost a 2 hour drive down through some mad L.A. traffic was so very worth it though.

Hanneke Cassel (pronounced "hannukah castle") is, without a doubt, one of the most talented persons with whom I've played, and I don't mean that in the sense that, of all the kids in my school, Y was the smartest; I mean it in the sense that, of all the people in the world who do what Hanneke does, she is one of the most talented and I'm lucky to have been able to play with her. Hanneke plays various styles of Celtic fiddle, including Scottish (for which she was the U.S. Champion I believe while she was at Berklee), Irish, Cape Breton, and Swedish. And boy does she rock. Accompanying her were two other Berklee alums who I also knew: Chris Lewis on guitar and Rushad Eggleston on cello. Rushad is probably the second most talented person with whom I've had the great fortune to play (in case you are wondering, foremost on my list is Hilary Hahn, a classical violinist and former prodigy with whom I played in a trio when we were, like 11 or something back at Peabody in Baltimore...nowadays, whenver she releases a new album on Sony, it's more likely than not to be reviewed in Time or Newsweek). He can do classical very well, but devotes his passionate playing to bluegrass, jazz, and generally funky shit.

This trio performed two shows that each lasted around an hour and 15 minutes to very appreciative audiences. As with any celtic fiddling, some of the reels and strathspeys and jigs were traditional tunes; but many of the gorgeous and rousing pieces they did were Hanneke's own compositions, including a version of U2's "Mothers of the Disappeared" (her favorite band) and two tunes inspired by C.S. Lewis' Perelandria and J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. She also allowed Chris to perform one of his own songs and Rushad to do a few of his strange Primus-like ditties (if you just plugged his cello into a big bass-amp, you'd swear that he was Les Claypool of Primus channeling Dr. Seuss).

After the first show, I was unsure if I wanted to stick around for the next one since I had plans to record a band Sunday morning starting at 10. But talking with Chris convinced me to hang around since there were other Berklee-ites coming, and plans were afoot to go out for drinks afterwards. Thank you Chris for convincing me to stay, because the second set was (happily) completely different and featured one song in particular, First Goodbye, which Hanneke wrote and arranged for the string orchestra when we were at Berklee, that brought goosebumps to my skin.

A group of about 10 of us went out afterwards and had a few drinks, talked (Chris and I, after finding out that we had a fair amount of common interest in independent and non-mainstream rock and pop, had a lot of fun batting around names of bands and artists that we've been listening to lately) and danced until close to 1 AM. It was a fookin' greet dee.

Oh, and Hanneke? Not from the Emerald Isles. Born in Cali, grew up in Oregon.

I made it home in just over an hour, checked all my baseball scores and stats, and was in bed around 3:30. Not so fresh as a daisy, I was at the studio at 10, ready to set up for the recording. It took me and the producer (a co-worker at the studio who had asked me to engineer because he wanted to focus his energies on the music aspect and let me worry about the microphones and sounds) a few hours to set everything up, and a few hours more to make sure the drums and bass sounded good. We ended up recording drums and bass for 3 songs, leaving the guitars and vocals for another day. But it took forever for the bass player to give us anything good, which left us wrapping things up around 12:30 AM.

In the meantime, my friend Adrianne called me around 6 PM, asking if I had time to mix a song either that day or Monday. It was urgent because the song had just been chosen to go onto a soundtrack for the ex-TV show and comic book called Witchblade (which apparently still airs in several countries around the world), and it needed to be fed-exed to the people putting the soundtrack together Monday by 5 PM. After much tussling in my brain between the smart parts and the giddy parts, I said that I could do it later that night after the recording session ended, thinking that we'd be done with the band around 10, and that I could start mixing the song by 11 and be done with it by 3 or 4 AM, leaving me 3 hours to sleep before I had to teach Monday morning. I was to be proven wrong.

The producer brought the tracks to be mixed at 11:30 (after I had called Adrianne to tell her that we would be starting later than I anticipated), and we set to work close to 1 AM. Rodney, the producer, turned out to also be a Berklee grad (class of '97) who had worked with some really cool producers and songwriters in the past up in San Francisco and who counted among his recent work the theme songs to the tv shows The Shield (booyah!) and Now and Again (not the Sela Ward/Bill Campbell show, but the the semi-science fiction show that lasted a season back in '99 or something with Eric Close). We completed the mix at 6, which meant I didn't finish recording the various versions we needed until after 7. Barely alert, I made it home a little after 7:30, took a shower, grabbed a banana, and zipped off to school.

I made it through the day with no problems other than feeling like my legs were giant rods of metal clumsily welded together at the joints and my arms were overcooked pasta noodles. I managed a 20 minute nap during lunch (when i woke up, it took me at least a minute to orient myself and remember where I was before I lurched to the bathroom to splash some water on my face). The drive home this time was a bit more perilous as I found myself nodding off each time I hit a stoplight.

Finally, I collapsed on my bed at 5 PM, called Nick to inform him of my lunatic triumph, and then fumbled with my consciousness before giving up and letting it slip from my grip for 15 hours.

Now Listening To : Fleming and John - Delusions of Grandeur
Random Thought : Off to see Sylvie Lewis again at the Hotel Cafe right now.

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