So forget about getting anything done today. I just found a repository of interviews with character actors from the Onion’s A/V Club! These are the kind of people you see in just about everything but don’t necessarily know their names. Hey, it’s that guy/girl from that movie! Of course, some of them started out being very famous and have since gone on to play character roles. And some of them have done so many parts that they get name recognition decades into their careers. And many of them are still “that guy” or “that woman” from “that movie” or “that show.”

So, you can wade in to the whole list here, or go with some of my personal favorites like Danny Trejo, Illeana Douglas, Luis Guzman, Kevin Corrigan, and Olivia Williams.

As of this posting there are 87 interviews, all of them lengthy, in depth and insider-y. If you enjoy film like I do, get set to spend a good chunk of your time with these interviews.

We live in a small apartment complex, much like Melrose Place, where the apartments surround a courtyard (but no pool). About a year ago, our new neighbors moved in and they had this cat who was formerly homeless. They let the cat come and go as he pleased and he was very sweet with all of the neighbors. He’d wait in the parking lot for anybody to come along and pet him. He’d come into apartments if the opportunity presented itself. More recently another couple moved in, and they have a cat who also comes and goes as he pleases, waits for people in the parking lot and tries to get into our apartments. But this cat is kind of evil. One time he meowed in front of our door until my wife let him in. He got right in her lap and demanded to be pet, and then when she stopped petting him, he hissed and scratched her. When I started mentioning that to the other neighbors with the nice cat, before I even had a chance to tell them what happened, they were all like “oh, you mean that bi-polar cat?” Apparently being incredibly needy for attention and then attacking when he hasn’t gotten enough of it is his MO. So that cat is now known as Scratchy (though after seeing Kick Ass, I really like the name Mr. Bitey). And since the other one is a bit on the raggedy side, the only logical name for him was Itchy. As if this cat didn’t have enough obvious indicators of not being quite right in the head, Scratchy wears a full harness, not just a collar but a full freakin’ harness like this one, all the time. We thought about why this was came to believe that’s because the only way a vet will see this cat is if he’s good and secure and that they just leave it on because it’s easier and safer than trying to get it on and off.

So Scratchy is a total stalker. He’s got a really annoying and grating meow. Whenever I come out of the apartment, he’ll dart out from somewhere and give me that whiny meow. I love cats but I will not reach down and pet this one. Last night he tried getting into our apartment, whining at our screen door for a really long time. My wife asked me to go water the plants outside and I didn’t want to because psycho kitty was out there. I was walking by the laundry room the other day and one of my other neighbors was loading the washer with Scratchy rubbing up on his legs to the point where if he moved he was going to trip. Another time I was sitting in the courtyard when Scratchy just got up in my lap and demanded petting. At that point I was a little bit frightened to get him off my lap, but I gently got him down and he quickly reached up with his claws on my legs like he was trying to sharpen them on a couch. He did the same thing to my wife yesterday.

What does one do with a kitty who is a bit off? These neighbors totally keep to themselves and don’t really talk to anyone. Should we be worried that they’re experimenting, breeding a new feline-based weapon of mass annoyance? It’s always those quiet types who are up to no good.

Our gig last Friday night really kicked us into high gear and we thought we should add a new song to our set. There are a couple of really challenging ones that we’ve noodled around with for a long time that are just still miles away from being stage ready, namely Genesis’ Return of the Giant Hogweed and Yes’ Long Distance Runaround. When we have a nice long time between gigs (like between our May 7th and June 18th gigs, perhaps) we can maybe get one of these in shape. But with only 3 rehearsals between, we needed something a little bit less challenging, yet still complex and interesting enough to add to our set of complex and interesting music.

We all really like Genesis, though not the Genesis most children of the 80′s know. Before they were a pop band fronted by Phil Collins, they were a prog band fronted by Peter Gabriel. And that’s just how we like them! There are three brilliant chapters in American Psycho where Patric Bateman takes a break from all the killing to talk about music and wax philosophically about his incredibly pedestrian musical tastes. The one on Genesis is hysterical. He pretty much says that their old stuff sucked, but they finally achieved greatness with Invisible Touch. So when it was suggested that we try a song from the first post-Gabriel album, Trick of the Tale, I was a bit skeptical.

But Squonk rocks. According to wikipedia, it’s Genesis’ attempt to sound like Led Zeppelin. Most of what I’m playing is just basic thumping on open D and A strings, but there are all sorts of places where we need to anticipate and come in a little bit ahead of the beat. Having worked on it all alone during the week between rehearsals, there were some spots where I just could not figure out what I was supposed to play, but last night it all came together in practice. We spent about 2 hours on the song and by the end it was damn near respectable. We went over the transitions, and over them, and over them, and over them, and it paid off. I can’t wait to debut this song in a little over a week! And now, for your listening pleasure…

So here I am in a battle of the blogs against some teabagger. While I would hope the post about my band could beat somebody like that, I thought I’d bring out the big guns, and by big guns I mean… well, you get the picture. See more of this Mad Men hottie’s Esquire spread here.

UPDATE: OK, the blog I’m against might not be a teabagger, but still, if Christina Hendricks can’t beat angry politics, there’s something wrong in the world.

Friday night was my first gig since October, and only the second time we’ve played in front of an audience. It was a pre-4/20 party at a medical marijuana dispensary. For those of you not hip to the reefer lingo, April 20th is like St. Patrick’s day for stoners. (Here’s more info on that.) And what better way for a cannabis club to celebrate than by having a progressive psychedelic jammy band like us come play for its patients? We loaded in the gear as the dispensary closed down and rolled the displays behind screens. Our host finally arrived with trays of food, the room filled up with people, the room filled up with smoke, and we started playing.

We had a projector set up to show things behind us. For the first set, we had Reefer Madness playing. For the rest of the night, we had a loop that I put together of random public domain oddities. I also tried to set up my flip camera to shoot us, but it was really difficult to get a good angle without really being able to see the screen. So the videos I have show people sitting around in a dark room listening to us play.

A few songs into the first set, two friends of mine from back East who I haven’t seen in over 5 years walked in. They had just flown in from Baltimore that morning and fought the jetlag to hear me play. I also had a couple of other friends there, one of whom brought my former boss (the one who laid me off right before the holidays) who was rather complimentary but wound up bailing shortly into the second set. Everyone was really complimentary. The audience really liked what we were doing, and we kept them well engaged.

This being only our second show, and our first in many months, we debuted a few songs which we’ve never played live before and that we’d been working on for months. We had two solid hour-long sets prepared. After the second set, we took a break and Breakfast, one of the guys who runs the club, hopped onto his keyboard and started regaling us with some ragtime standards, Tom Leher tunes, and an interesting take on Girls Just Want to Have Fun. Then we got back on for a third set of completely improvised stuff, mostly in E. To conserve space, our drummer brought his electronic kit which comes with a lot more sounds than just your standard drums, and this really ads to the jam in new and exciting ways. And then just as we’re really hitting our groove, I hear a sax. I looked at my keyboard player wondering if he had that realistic of a sax sound, and then in walks Breakfast blowing a sax. A sax always kicks things up a notch, and this time was no exception.

We wrapped up around midnight, and as we were tearing down the gear and cleaning up the room, Breakfast was playing Beatles songs on an acoustic as our singer and a friend of ours sang them in perfect harmony. It was an incredible evening and I can hardly wait just a few weeks until our next gig.

Below is some YouTube from the second set. Like I said, the video is just people sitting on the couch and walking by, but you can at least hear what we sounded like.

No Quarter:

Child in Time: