Extras

I meant to post these pics awhile ago...Stagg and I were extras in a commercial for Mike Ditka. Ditka is a bit of a hero for a lot of people in Chicago. Stagg was pretty excited about not only being an extra but also getting to meet Ditka...and later telling his dad about making a commercial. We've got soem friends who work at Ditkas so we got to spend a whole morning with the staff and have a great time seeing a commercial being made which Stagg had never had that experience before.

One of our perks was a nice big meal before filming.

Well that is Mike Ditka behind the bar but I am too far away...I was nervous about taking pics anyways.


Our buddy Carlos. You can see how mischievous he is right?


The stars of the commercial...the directors got Stagg and one of the waiters wives to get into a scene with Mike Ditka. Okay, they picked the skinny people. So while they were in the shot Mike, Carlos and I stood on the side and looked at each others pooches: laughing, keep the chubby people out of the close ups!

I thought about these pictures this week because I was at Ditkas restaurant last Friday for a birthday party...I will post those pics tomorrow...

Coming Home From Work....

Also getting ready for work. I have a couple of jobs and one of them is bartending. The other night after I got ready for work..with lots of eye liner...and after my shift...Stagg came to pick me up from work.


What am I doing? I am standing on the bench on the subway line. I love that the trains in Chicago have little kiosks with heat lamps. It has been so cold that I've been climbing up to get closer to the heat.

Angel Pavel

Fruit Of Our Labour

Remember last year just about this time...we pruned our friend Gardenia's orange tree? Here are the oranges this week!

A Co-Worker

I love finding out about peoples skills that I work with...she's got a voice!

Dub Step

What I have usually called "drak rave" has kind of merged or become what the guys I work with call dubstep. I've been very glad for these guys getting me to look deeper into this facet of dance music...but here are the more mainstream songs right now...

Usually around 140bpm in tempo, the unifying sounds within dubstep are always bass and sub-bass.

The music ranges in style from melodious instrumentals to dark, techy and distorted numbers.

Many UK grime mc's also mc over dubstep tracks, although grime and dubstep should not be confused.

Dubstep is usually mellow and generally has a well paced structure to each song. Grime beats are generally more disjointed, the overall production level being grittier than that in dubstep. from Urban dictionary


Dubstep is a genre of electronic dance music that originated in South London, United Kingdom. Its overall sound has been described as "tightly coiled productions with overwhelming bass lines and reverberant drum patterns, clipped samples, and occasional vocals".[
The earliest dubstep releases date back to 1998 and were darker, more experimental, instrumental dub remixes of 2-step garage tracks attempting to incorporate the funky elements of breakbeat, or the dark elements of drum and bass into 2-step, which featured B-sides of single releases. In 2001, this and other strains of dark garage music began to be showcased and promoted at London's night club Plastic People, at the "Forward" night (sometimes stylized as FWD>>), which went on to be considerably influential to the development of dubstep. The term "dubstep" in reference to a genre of music began to be used by around 2002, by which time stylistic trends used in creating these remixes started to become more noticeable and distinct from 2-step and grime. It was labels Big Apple, Amunition and Tempa that began circulating the "dubstep" term. From Wiki



The above song is probably one of the most popular and most heard versions of a dubstep piece.

and here are Skrillex and Deadmaus

On Making Art

"Don't listen to your peers, don't listen to the authority figures in your life, your parents, and don't listen to the culture. Only listen to yourself thats where you're gonna find the truth. The idea of making money, the idea of becoming famous, the idea of being powerful is in essence meaningless. It's only that you are happy and you can only be happy when you do what you love." George Lucas