It looks like my competition, Megabite Café, has come bouncing back, an amazing performance on their behalf (since they folded last year). Given the state of the economy, we know this outfit is not being financed by any source covered in Economics 101. They are right on Hollywood Blvd, in the section that leases for $4K per month. I’m not terribly worried now that I know their primary goal is to sell small sandwiches and bubble tea at twice the going rate. When I went to welcome them at the last location, their 30-something waitress decided I was spying on them. Maybe this time I will. I was in there looking for music work, not checking out the atmosphere. Some people look at a bar and wish they owned it. I look at it and want to be the highest paid person who works there.
There are a couple of bars along Hollywood that have a single computer available for free. They don’t count. If you’ll buy beer from me at $5 each, I’ll gladly set you up a chat line, too. I put in many hours downloading and checking the beginnings of the Karaoke music I’m going to need. This is tedious, considering that the command filter to only find tunes with lyrics is easily defeated by the nobodies on mySpace. (They have nothing to offer but nearly every search leads to one of their droning profiles.)
I was also able to gain some ground with midi by finding the kind of information about how it works. Midi people still talk in circles to the ridiculous extent that if you knew what they meant, you would not need them. A midi channel is an address which is a box which is a patch which is an instrument. And so on. The significant new fact is that midi is not a good editing medium. You are supposed to convert your material to midi after it is composed. That explains why Arnel uses it only to change instruments.
Author's note 2015-04-15: I finally gave up trying to get a straight answer out of somebody how MIDI works. No, don't play anything, show me how to sit down and make a MIDI machine play what I want by programming it. You never met such magnificent no-nothings. Yet the fact remains, absolute idiots are using MIDI. They just have no clue how it works. They buy the machine ready made. Totally clueless azzclowns, every one that I ever met.
This will keep me busy. My show gobbles up to 20 songs per set. Arnel is probably close to that. (In telling contrast to the locals who tend to play maybe that many songs in an entire evening.) Last weekend Arnel mentioned something that confirms my own reasoning. He said that there are times you just cannot afford to let the audience lose momentum by taking a break or slowing down the pace. What have I been saying in isolation for the past ten years? I can think of a few people who need to be seriously informed of that fact. Play your slow tunes at the recording studio, not in a live club.
On the way home, I heard a guitarist at the Octopus. I listened but barely long enough to reject any potential. He was doing originals only, rarely a wise move for it does not give the non-playing audience anything to gauge and compare. By original, I mean he had strung the elements together by himself. Verse-chorus-verse-chorus. The amusing part was that he was mediocre in both guitar and voice, but everything was technically exact. It must be nice to possess just enough talent and money to have a stab at following the pack. There were ten guys doing that in every town when I was growing up. It was like listening to flea market tapes on your lunch break.
Is anyone here familiar with screenwriting? Not intimately, I see. It has evolved from the hack writing of last century into a very lucrative career, with some scripts bringing in $5 million. That slapped me wide awake. Formerly considered a low-grade occupation in Los Angeles, I was curious to see that Seattle has become the new hot spot. This suits a lot of people who never cared for the formulaic Los Angeles way of doing things, with every script oozing single parents, homosexuals and overweight teenagers. Screenwriting is a lot like writing a play, but with far more scene descriptions and instructions as to what is happening around the actors and their speaking parts.
When I was in tenth grade, the literature teacher assigned us to read a play, a similar type of script. I found it boring, but wonder how I would have paid attention had Mrs. Blaskovits told me it paid the big bucks. In logical progression, I checked to see if there was anything new in screenwriting software and tried to get a sample of some current work. In the first instance, despite the fact that the software is nothing but a glorified word processor, the applications sell for hundreds of dollars. And as far as samples, there is nothing but bad fragments on the Internet.
For that I blame the WGA, who frown on spec scripts. (WGA is Writers Guild of America, and spec means speculation, not specification.) Yet it is spec scripts that are bringing in the big money. They are written in the hope of being discovered, like my “El Kavorite”. This is a welcome trend away from the schlock being vomited out of Hollywood (CA) for the past twenty years. You see the WGA in action every time you go to the movies. They are the people who control what scrolls past on the screen making sure it contains the name of every flunky on the team. For instance, “Written by” is limited to one or two authors, for three or more the wording changes.
Today’s real trivia is for you to look up who George Spelvin really is. Two hints. He is an actor whose first role was in 1906 and his last one far into the future even now.
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