How odd! I just finished reading a book about George Antheil yesterday, only to see on Yahoo! News that his “Ballet Mecanique” is about to be performed – with the 16 baby grand pianos and various percussion mechanically controlled, as he originally wished. But the nutty composer called for a 152bpm performance, whereas — apparently — pianos can only be played at 138bpm by machine, and 120 by humans. Interesting…

Last night we saw the movie Rashomon, director Kurosawa’s 1950 masterpiece. Damn that was good. Another one of those gems that has sneaked past me up until now. I highly recommend this movie to anyone who’s into movies that are a little different from the Hollywood mold, from then or now.

After finishing up the podcast yesterday, we started recording another new song. We had starting writing this one a few weeks (months?) ago, before the mixer blew… Anyway, it’s always so fun to be working on new music. We’re constantly evolving and finding new ways to express ourselves. Got to be one of the best feelings in the world!

Man, Robert Cray was SMOKIN’ HOT last night. He is like 100 times better in person than on record. Ryan and I were standing right in front of him, getting his monitor feed really loud in the mix so we could hear his guitar and vocals much louder than the keys and rhythm. Holy crap is that man talented. Not a stinker note in the whole set. Not only was his guitar totally fucking amazing, but his vocals were perfect, as well. He has such control, I was in awe. And such presence. I almost burst into tears after the first or second song, it was so beautiful. Wow.

Now the crowd was a whole other story… I really wanted to pop this one guy in the face, he was so fucking rude and annoying the entire set. He was some dufus named “Dave” who apparently is on vacation from Jersey and has spent the last few days at Disneyland. He told these women he was trying to pick up on next to me that he “was all Mickey’d out” hence, he mosied over to the House of Blues for a change of scenery. I know a lot more about his trip, since he kept talking the whole time, only stopping to yell “Woo!” during solos and “Thank YOU!” between songs. Finally, during the encore performance of “Time Takes Two” – which I’d been looking forward to all night – I said “Shut up!” and flipped Dave off to his face, but he was so stupid and drunk, he didn’t seem to notice. The chick he was talking to left, though, so that helped. But then some gross guy in a sparkly red Ruby’s Costume type shirt and a super gross lady in a cheap flame patterned polyester dress lurched over and started dry humping up against me. I pushed the guy’s back away from me, but he didn’t move, so I started elbowing him and kicking his foot, but that just seemed to excite him or something. I had to retreat backwards a foot and move to the other side of Ryan, but by then, my song was over…

Anyway, all the dufi in the world can’t take away the magical feeling songs like “Who’s Been Talking,” “Poor Johnny,” “That Ain’t Love,” “Twenty,” and (the unexpected) “12 Year Old Boy” gave me.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I watch American Idol. I started watching the second season sporadically and have become more consistent since. This is the first time I’ve watched all of the shows, and the reason is Taylor Hicks. Man, something about that guy is just really compelling! My first thought was, “Hmm… is this one of the crazy people?” But then he let loose with the soul thing and this Ray Charles/Joe Cocker move and Ryan said something like, “He’s an idiot savant!”

Today I looked him up on Google and see that he’s actually a professional musician, so he’s obviously got his thing together. I don’t know what that odd look in his eye is about, but I’m totally suckered in to watch every episode now, just to check out what this guy is up to. I found 3 free downloads of his music and enjoyed them quite a bit. The sound is very familiar and warm. “It’s a Soul Thing” was the real stand out.

I would hate to see him win the competition – or come in second – and be forced to do those crappy hack songs they finish out the show with, and then make a sell-out auto-tuned over-produced Top 40 record… But I’d love to see him stay in the competition long enough that we get to enjoy his performances most of the season and see how he does with the various genre challenges. Why a guy like this enters American Idol kind of perplexes me (I’d never dream of doing it!), but then again, if guys like this didn’t join, the show wouldn’t even be worth watching. Go Taylor Hicks – whiteboy soul man!

Oh, and on a side note, I’ve been trying to get the hang of playing harmonica recently and was pretty stoked to hear him playing it last night. I have a long way to go…

So the mixer is in the shop now. Ryan’s been researching alternatives for days now, just in case the mixer can’t be fixed, or the price is really high to fix it. Either way, he’ll have to pay $75 just to have it looked at. 🙁

Ryan did figure out a crude work around, using a tiny mixer he had for his computer, so that he could still create a little jingle for The Chillcast. I think it turned out pretty cool, actually. Didn’t get to use the PCM70 reverb, but we made due. Maybe we can play the jingle in the next Chillin’ with Lovespirals?

Speaking of which, we are waaay behind schedule on our podcast… sorry to the loyal listeners!

Put together another episode of Chillcast today featuring music from bands on MySpace. Seems like a lot were also on Garageband. Anyway, you can check it out at chillcuts.com in the “Chillcast” section. Still don’t have my official site and RSS feed setup, but hopefully by the end of the week. Then I’ll start listing on iTunes and all of that fun stuff so it’ll be really easy to subscribe. Now I gotta round up Ryan to do another Chillin’ with Lovespirals!

Finally had a chance to work a bit on updating the Chillcuts site (www.chillcuts.com). Now the site matches the style of the record label logo, which our current site is also modeled after. The content has been updated to reflect the imminent launch of my new podcast, tentatively titled the “Chillcuts Chillcast.” I even put up a link to my rough draft of the first episode. I haven’t yet worked out where I’ll be hosting the podcast, so this is just a sneak peek, as it were… Also updated the store so that you can see more about the CDs listed for sale. Looks more interesting, too. So this site is an improvement on the last one, but it isn’t totally complete yet. Oh yeah, I also made a banner ad for the site/podcast and put it up on our MySpace page.

Forgot to mention that Chillin’ with Lovespirals went back onto iTunes a-ok the other day. Guess Apple figured out their problem. Cool. Speaking of Apple, Ryan’s all excited about Steve Job’s keynote today. I asked him not to tell me all the news so that I can be surprised when I watch the video. If they’re putting one up, which I assume they are. Those live events were always a pain in the butt, so I can understand why they didn’t do it this time, but it’s kind of a bummer, all the same.

So I put together my first Chillcast this weekend, but I haven’t actually launched the podcast yet. I realized that I have to do some unfun stuff, like create a proper site for it, get my RSS feed together and all that. Ryan did all the hard stuff for our band podcast, but this one is my baby. I can’t decide if I should call it Chillcuts Chillcast so it’ll make more sense to host it on www.chillcuts.com, or maybe Chillcuts with Anji Bee and host it on www.anjibee.com? But I don’t want to go buy www.chillcast.com, really… Blah, this is the part of creation that I don’t find fun. Anyway, stayed tuned for future developments with my new music podcast!