DAY "THIS WAS THE LONGEST DAY EVER":*  Home, James

I feel badly about my lack of recent updates, but a lot has happened.  So much so that I can't even be arsed to recap most of it.  Should have been here, bitches!  But, because you're all - everyone ever - my friends, I'll go over the important stuff.

First off, my weird allergies.  Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, assuming that I'm Denmark and rotten equals "allergic reaction."  I've narrowed it down to a few things.  It may be my incredibly stupid move of buying suspiciously cheap Chinese produced t-shirts from Walmart and then wearing them without washing them first (hey, the formaldehyde in Miller Light never hurt me), or possibly the bath soap our director's mom gave me.  To be honest, I wasn't that into the soap anyway.  If your idea of a great time is attracting over weight, single mothers from Beverly, MA by smelling like a Dunkin' Donuts' Pumpkin Spice Latte, then by all means email me and I'll give you the brand and product that I've been bathing myself with.  If not, then join the club.  Anyway, I'm miserably broken out in hives.  Oddly, given my caring and loving nature, none of the crew seems to be overly concerned with my discomfort.

Next important thing: The Tulsa State Fair.  Jesus, where do I even start?  I mean, you all see the name of it, right?  Tulsa.  State.  Fair.  Now, I'm not real good with U.S. geography, but come on.  Yeah, I'm one of those people that believe that the East ends at Philly and the West begins at Los Angeles (Canada is in the middle, right?), but even I know that Tulsa...you know what?  I'm not even going to bother.  Sure.  Tulsa State Fair.  Whatever.  At least it had alpacas, which are super cute.  Also, as I learned during my two hours of recording wild sound at the fair, alpacas are absolutely mesmerized by boom mics.  I wish I had a picture to prove it, but the rest of the crew were busy eating corndogs by then.  Whoops, corndogs may actually be two words.  Corn dogs.

Woof.  Today was nuts.  We had a ton of scenes to shoot, and guess what...we got them all.  Because we're professionals (does anyone check these links?  I work hard on them, you know...)  We were joined on set today by the wonderful, and totally annoying, character actor Marshall Bell.  And he fucking killed it.  Also, I'm kidding about him being annoying.  He's a ball-buster, for sure, but he has great stories, great readings of his lines and his voice screams "I fix cars, shoot guns and know more about sports than you do."  Basically, my kind of guy.  He also didn't care that I cut holes in his clothes for mic'ing purposes, which pretty much rules (our director/leading man doesn't either, which is also super cool...just don't tell our wardrobe person...)  Anyway, it was a great day of shooting.  Mainly because we wrapped our first major location and I got to give Rick Dacey a bunch of shit for absolutely no reason.  Unless you consider totally trying to molest me a reason...

...which I do.  Fucking actors.

BT...oh, christ, I can't help myself (sorry, Jake)...BTDubs, have I mentioned the dog?  No?  Rhetorical question, I know I haven't.  Anyway, we had to get a stuffed animal dog at the, um, Tulsa State Fair for a prop.  Now that it's no longer in play (fancy film speak for "being used"), she has become a crew house joke.  The game is to position her in places that either scare or amuse others.  Our actress/AD/"whatever we need that day and don't want to pay for" Teresa hit pay dirt the other day and completely owned me by doing this:

Those are my clothes.  On my bed.  With my water bottle.  I came home to this.  However, it's me, so I'm pretty sure my reaction was something like, "Dude, seriously?  I want to go to bed."  I'm so fun!

On the technical, sound side of things, Super Su and I have created a new term:  West Winging It.  It comes from the fact that on the show West Wing, they never used a boom mic.  Everything was solely lav'ed (small lapel mics with wireless transmitters.)  This initially seems really counter-intuitive, but after experimenting with it for awhile I honestly feel that, if you have the time to do it correctly, it creates a much more consistent and "project-specific" location sound.  I'm not confident in it enough yet, so I still back up with the shotgun/boom mic most of the time, but this is a stylistic decision that I will definitely be experimenting with more and more as time goes on.  I'll keep you all posted on it, as I know you only read this blog for egg-head tech reasons...barf.

I'm sorry this post is pretty whack, but I'm super tired.  I'll get back into the swing of things soon.  Assuming whatever flesh-eating disease I've contracted here in the 1930s doesn't kill me first.  I really wish I had a good Grapes of Wrath pun right now.  Maybe some of you can help me out with that.

Sleep well, it's a long time until the empire of the sun.

Also, screw you, Clooney.

**AWESOME "I TOTALLY FORGOT SOMETHING" HIP-HOP UPDATE!**

Because I'm literally on my deathbed with hives, I accidentally forgot to mention that we had another supporting cast member last night.  His name is Travis and he's a rapper.  He free-styled something about cooking and being a redneck, I think.  Maybe it was about something else.  What do you want from me?  It's not like it's my job to listen to what's going on all day long...

Anyway, as he's also a fan of this blog it would be rude of me not to mention that he did a great job and added some seriously needed humor to the end of a super long day.  So, thanks, Travis.  Werd.