Assorted Nonsense

We just picked up a new vehicle the other day. A silver Hyundai Santa Fe… but that’s not the point of this post.

The Santa Fe came with a three month trial subscription to XM Radio… which is the point of this post.

There are something like 200 channels on XM Radio as near as I can figure, some of them even worth listening to. But I don’t think I’ll be subscribing. For one thing, I’m perfectly happy with Q-107 and CBC Radio One and Two and the handful of other radio stations we generally have programmed into our car radio.

But the kicker came tonight, when I was listening to Channel 7, or maybe it was channel 6, and one of my favourite songs came on, an old Gerry Rafferty classic called Right Down the Line.

It just so happens that I have that song on my laptop’s iTunes, and it comes on every now and then when I’m riding the GO Train working on the Great Canadian Science Fiction Novel (page 292 right now, thanks for asking). So I know what the song is supposed to sound like.

I swear the song had been pitch shifted, as if compressed for time, to make it shorter.

I was appalled.

I had got in the car only moments before, when The Eagles’ Peaceful Easy Feeling had been playing, and it had sounded fine. But the instant Right Down the Line came on I knew something was wrong. It was like Right Down the Line by Alvin and the Chipmunks.

I know a little something about time compressing sound files, having used it frequently back in my sound design days. We did a little experiment with ProTools one day where we calculated you could compress a half hour file about a maximum of 7.5% before the listener could tell you’d done anything, maybe a little less if the voices were familiar to the audience. But I hated doing it at all, and usually reserved that sort of thing for tweaking sound effects. Like creating giant screaming desert scorpions out of elephant cries.

I would never, ever do it to a piece of music. Not even 1.5 percent. Not even to a country tune. Especially not to a classic Gerry Rafferty tune.

I’m sure it was a one time fluke. Maybe just that once they really needed to shave off thirty seconds to get the cut in before the news. But even so the damage has been done. From now on every tune I hear on XM I’ll be wondering, fearing that it’s been time compressed. “Is the guitar solo supposed to sound like that? Is that a man or a woman singing?”

And that is why, ladies and gentlemen, I’ll not be subscribing to XM Radio when the three months is up.

Um, that and the fact that we can’t really afford it.

Freaky Friday must seem like a strange movie to write about. It’s not a classic movie by any stretch, especially the remake this past decade starring Jamie Lee Curtis and whatsherface.

But the 1976 version is definitely worth watching, but only to catch one of the few film performances of the effervescent Barbara Harris.

I picked up the movie recently for the kids to see. I thought they might enjoy seeing Jodie Foster as a kid, having just seen her as an adult in Nim’s Island. I was also curious what I would make of Foster’s performance as a kid. I remember as a young boy being struck by her charisma. But although perfectly serviceable her performance doesn’t really stand out in Freaky Friday, especially next to Harris, who blows everybody else in the film completely off the map, and who makes Jamie Lee Curtis in the remake look like a complete amateur.

When Harris first appeared on screen I didn’t have a clue who she was, and I wrote her off as some forgettable B string actor from the sixties (though later I realized I have seen her, in films such as Grosse Pointe Blank, and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels).

But almost as soon as she switches bodies with Foster’s character Harris proves she’s a cut above. She inhabits the role of a child in a full grown woman’s body, making it utterly believable, but more than that she’s just so darned interesting to watch, beautiful for one thing, but beyond that vibrant and funny, quirky in the best sense of the word, and ALIVE. I was glued to her performance for the entire film, and as soon as it was over I raced to the internet to figure out who she was.

Turns out she was a well regarded Broadway actor who only ever did a smattering of films (16 all told, I believe), perhaps most notably in Robert Altman’s Nashville, which I haven’t seen yet, but must, just to see her.

And then there’s being a Dad.

Sometimes I wonder what the girls will say when they’re grown, and they look back at my performance as a Dad.

“Left a little bit to be desired there, Dad,” they might say.

“Hey, I did the best I could given my limitations as a human being,” I might insist.

“Sure Dad,” E will say. “But what about the broom?”

Ah yes.

The broom.

Came home one night after they’d been with a babysitter. They’re always a little worked up after babysitters. Probably because they get a sense of how great the world would be without any rules. And then I come along and re-impose rules on their universe.

So this one night I’m keeping my cool, and they will. Not. Do. A. Single thing I say.

Parents sometimes wonder why they’re perfectly calm one minute and a raving lunatic the next. One explanation offered is that it’s because the kids are getting under your skin, but you’ve got your foot on the brake keeping yourself calm, right up until the point that they’re painting the dog and putting the cat in the oven, and then, attempting to save your prize rhododendron from the microwave you take your foot off the brake, but the other foot has been on the gas all along and suddenly you’re zero to a hundred and twenty in a split second.

That was me that night. Doing my best to remain calm in the face of two completely adorable but utterly out of control orangutangs, and failing miserably.

I’d had enough. I took my foot off the brake. Picked up one of the girl’s toy brooms. Threw the broom on the floor. As God is my witness I thought it would bounce. Instead it shattered into a thousand pieces.

I had the girls’ attention now. But I certainly hadn’t improved the situation any. Man were they mad, especially E, because it was her broom I’d broken. She was inconsolable, and I was ashamed, because this was not me. I was not someone who broke kids’ brooms, or lost control.

And I heard about that broom for months. I’m sure when I’m an adult I’ll hear about it again. I won’t be completely forgiven until the girls have children of their own, and discover that they too are only human. Just as I’ve forgiven my own parents for the odd bonehead move they made when I was a kid.

Now if I can just limit my own bonehead moves to the broom for the next nine years…

Today a producer called me into a booth to ask a question about the documentary he was working on. He wanted to know about the placement of music.

I listened to the little bit that he wanted me to hear, which was essentially a guy talking, and then some music, and then a guy talking. The talking was interesting and well edited, and the music well chosen. But it didn’t work as well together as it could have.

He wanted to know my opinion, so I gave it to him, ’cause I spent twenty years doing this kind of work, and I love it.

First, find the post in the music (the part of the music where it becomes so pronounced that you’re better off not talking over it… often there’s more than one possible post). Place the post directly after the end of the talking and bring the level of the music up. All the music before that point should sit nicely underneath the talk.

The reason you do it this way is to create a little tension, like in many other kinds of art. You want to make the listener (or reader, or viewer, depending on the kind of art) want to know what’s coming next. He hears the music underscoring the words, suggesting a change in tone, and he wants to know what it means, so he sticks around until he finds out. It’s also more aesthetically pleasing to the ear, suggesting that this is something well put together, some thought has gone into it, so perhaps its worth sticking around.

It’s not rocket science this kind of stuff, but a little bit goes a long way toward giving a production a certain sheen.

How do you know when it’s right?

When you listen back and you get a little shiver running up and down your spine.