Monday 5th of March, 2001
Sort Of (from the album of the same name, by Slapp Happy) comes on. Idea for compilation - groovy freak instrumentals from all over (like Tossed by Frank Black, or Follow Your Bliss by the B52s). But are they all cut from the same cloth? Would a whole thing of them be interesting or too homogenised? The ones above are all twangy, but there is the Hard Rock Variation - the melodic sentimental instrumentals like Fluff from Sabbath Bloody Sabbath or Arbory Hill from UFO's Obsession album. And of course in these post-techno days, the idea of the instrumental doesn't have the freak appeal it once did.
Sorry. A bit of a Hi Fidelity attack, there.
I hit those Animorphs covers and manage to get the two remaining ones in this batch designed and sent of to Scholastic for approval. Reading between the lines of an email I got last week, they might be ending soon. They have certainly exhausted the combinations of animals and aliens that the kids can switch between. Including one alien that demonstrated that evolution has to have a sense of humour.
After lunch I try to get fliers for the Kamel Klub finished - Katrina would like them as soon as possible to hand out. I search for camel icons and clip art on the internet, and then manipulate them in Photoshop to try to create a silhouette, which I then Streamline and import into Illustrator. It's one of those Adobe days. I come up with a roundel design, which would make a good backdrop. If we were actually going to have a backdrop. Which, of course, we're not.
I manage to get a flier finished, although it still looks incomplete, somehow. And I've used three typefaces - Ozwald for headlines, Coronet (a kitsch scripty face), and Bell for all the body. I'm not sure about the Bell, but we'll see. I kind of want it all to fall together. But once I have enough component parts - logos, typefaces, icons and so forth - I'll be able to assemble almost anything to order.
I'll sleep on it and send it tomorrow morning.
Barbara sends me another of those office lyrics quizzes. I get a few and then throw myself on the mercy of Google. Of course it's cheating, but then it was cheating to ask me, so I'm just extending a pre-existing cheat.
Simon the Moog Poet phones about my playing bass for him on the 17th, we chat for a bit and I remember to book him for the Kamel - 17th of June, with Kirsty McGee.
More Electric Noodling. I am trying to coax my right hand into behaving properly - it seems that only through constant monitoring will it behave itself. The new right hand position slows me down terribly - I want to play a lot faster than it will let me. I have to remind myself that it will be surer in the long run.
Send an email off, trying to finalize the bookings for the Kamel. And then, hopefully, I won't have to worry about it any more.
(of course, I'll find something else to worry about...)