In the Being Steve Albini for a Day thread , FMajcinek wrote:You all never got your Steve Day? I thought everybody got their Steve Day! I got mine after only 50 posts. A lot of fun, but a lot of work. I kept a journal.


FMajcinek's Steve Day.

8:00 a.m. Wake. Shower. Exfoliate. Measure bicep. Allow girlfriend to catch me shaving genitalia. Say, "Look, honey! Another optical inch!"

9:00 a.m. Hose down intern.

9:15 a.m. Correct grammatical errors in intern's daily "What's on Steve's Coffee Today?" journal.

9:30 a.m. Watch The View. Nurse unfulfilled fantasy of watching cock dissappear into Star Jones' cleavage.

10:00 a.m. Frustrated. Burn intern. Another optical inch my ass. It's better when he cries a little.

11:00 a.m. Make intern write angry letter to producers of Celebrity Poker Showdown protesting exclusion from the show. Close with: "I'd pwzn all of you East Hollywood former porn-fluffer half-fags, and you know it. PS. Hold' em is for pussies. 7-stud is the shznit."

12:00 p.m. Tell Hot Doug: "How much fucking longer for the duck-fat fries? What do I have to do, kill the fucking ducks myself?"

1:30 p.m. Willie Nelson on the headphones to block sound of intern screaming, "There's duck blood in my eyes!" Boo-fucking-hoo. He'd better get over this crying-jag in a hurry, because once the fat is rendered, we've got a lot of roach-clips and dreamcatchers to make from the feathers.

3:00 p.m. Call Cindy Lauper. Shoot the shit for a while about Captain Lou, abortion, etc.

4:00 p.m. Shit. Totally forgot about band in Studio B for 12:00 session. One of the little shits starts in with the whining, "I've been here for hours, we've got a show tonight, we sold our sister into white slavery to pay for this, blah, blah, blah."

I say, Look, you little queers. Are you paying for time, or are you paying for the Albini Experience? And they never know what to say to that, so I say, Hey: If you fuckers want the Albini Experience, you gotta wait 'till Albini is ready. Got it?

They say sure, dude, whatever and slouch around the studio looking for things to steal. I give 'em some dreamcatchers to play with while Greg Norman sets up their gear.

5:00 p.m. I have the worst headache. Can't stomach anymore rock and roll today, so I ask Greg to put on the Albini Mask and fill in for me while I nap. He protests. Says the Albini Mask doesn't fool anybody, says it's just a hollowed-out gourd with little Pet-rock googly-eyes, etc. I ask him if he still needs his "hour with the intern" every night. There's a long pause before I get the "Yes, Sir" I've been looking for. Greg sighs and squeezes the gourd over his head.

This makes me chuckle a little. That mask is kind of ridiculous.

11:30 p.m. What a nap! Dreamed of zeppelin races and actuaries. Woke up when the sky opened and spoke firey shit in the tongue of the gods. I've never felt better, but my day as Steve is almost over!

Found that while I was napping, someone let the intern out. Luckily he just treed a bum across the street.

Greg Norman baptized the band and made them swear a blood oath to punish the infidels and fishmongers. They've foresworn conventional garments, prefering to wear nylon rope and band-aids instead. They chant "God's gonna getcha!" as I walk past, but that's not odd for one of Greg's sessions. Just so long as they pay up.

With everything under control, I spent the last few minutes of Steve Day helping Novotony build his popsicle sepulchre. He kept getting it all wrong, but would cower and whimper every time I'd "correct" him. Boy, I don't know how Steve does it everyday. Good help is hard to find.

Charlie D wrote:I think the worst, the very worst, was when I crashed a baby funeral.

On both sides of my family, food is served at every fucking stage of the funeral. As soon as someone buys the proverbial farm, the meat and cheese trays rear their tasty heads. They never leave. Ever. So, of course, every experience I've had with funerals involves deli platters.

One night, about 3 or 4 years ago, I'm driving back home from my friend Ryan's house. As I get to my driveway, some idiot asshole had blocked me out. Again. Everybody knew the proper parking: pull up and to the right. This other person just pulled straight in, so now nobody could get in. So pull as far in as I could and to the left. Within 5 minutes, the building manager, Christal (yes, she spells it like that because she's a Born-Again Christian) asks if I can move my car so her friend can back out. I tell her she needs to "teach [her] friend how to fucking park", because this is the howevermanyth time I 've been blocked out of my space. He apologizes. I move my car. Everybody apologizing. I say forget about it.

This was all in an artist commune across the street from a sports bar and a funeral home (real classy). My studio was set up on the third floor, and every weekend, Surly Bob (that's what everybody called him) and I would get together and practice, and practice included 40s of Mickey's. Never a practice went by without the Mickey's.

Well, Surly Bob and I are out on the stoop having a smoke about a month after the parking lot incident and I notice the funeral home is pretty jumping. I look at Surly Bob and say "Let's go across the street and get a sandwich."
Surly says, "I don't think that's a very good idea."
"Man, what the fuck are you talking about?"
Surly says he's going to the bar, I say okay, I'm getting me a sandwich.

Reeking of malt liquor, sweaty, and dressed shabbily, I stumble into the funeral home and ask the first couple I see where the registrar is. They point me to it and I sign in under the name Adam Castanowitz. I begin the search, but to no avail. Not even so much as a coffee maker. And that's when it happened...

I stepped into the casket room.

Now, everybody's just shooting daggers out of their eyes at me, and all I can focus on is that the casket looks awfully tiny. So what do I do? Why, I decide to investigate, of course.

We've all been through seventh grade art. We all know how perspective works. We all understand that things are supposed to get larger as we get closer. But this fucking casket is staying tiny in relation to everything around it, and my brain, firing on the few cylinders it has at the moment can only work the following sentence into my internal monologue: "That better be a fucking midget."

I keep walking closer and closer. My brain says stop but my legs keep moving and I get up to the casket and I look in (God, why did I look in!?) and IT'S A FUCKING BABY!

I hadn't been Catholic for years, but I dropped to my knees and start pulling out every move I recall from the Judeo-Christian Playbook. Our Father and whatnot.

I get up. I must beat a hasty exit. The eyes are drilling holes into me. My God, I'm almost free when I come across the panorama somebody set up with pictures of the baby in all the fullness of its short life. And it pulls at the heartstrings and distracts me from my immediate mission: Beating a hasty exit. And so I've stopped and that's when this guy out of nowhere comes up and introduces himself; he's the father.

I bullshit like I've never bullshitted before, and I manage to convince the guy that I had seen the obituary in the paper and that I live right across the street and that I had recently lost family myself (I had) and he seemed genuinely touched that a stranger would come to his daughter's funeral.

About a week later, Christal comes up to my door and I open and ask what's up to which she says, "My friend told me what you did." Well, my understanding of Born-Agains is that they aren't fighters, so I'm not worried about who I've pissed off this week.
Still, I humor her. "What are you talking about?"
"You remember my friend? Who you blocked in the driveway?"
"Yeah."
"Well, he said that you came to his niece's funeral last week! You really do have a big heart, Charlie!"
What could I do? I said, "Christal, that's a side of myself I don't like to expose to often. I'm going to the bar."

I'm just going to go ahead and consider the bar raised.