Ok, hopefully that all will catch me up somewhat. It's been nuts over here. I've been spending alot of time working on lyrics, writing, revising, scrapping, re-writing. Still need to set the lyrics for "Someone Else". I started taking "lyric walks" around Hollywood Forever Cemetery lately. I find my lyric walks are the best way to try to work on lyrics without working. When strolling around, listening to the music, and when not trying to "work"  I usually find that some ideas will come. HFC is a beautiful Cemetery, and it puts me in a contemplative mood. Nothing morbid, it's just a very nice park when you get down to it, and it's hard not to look at life a bit differently when walking around a graveyard. Here is the new Johnny Ramone headstone near the lake:

Last Halloween season, Riss and I took a walking tour of the Cemetery and learned alot about the "residents" there, and about Cemeteries in general. One thing that struck me was that in the past, Cemetaries were thought of as nice places to hang out and spend time, that they were made not soley for grieving and feeling loss, but so that the living can spend time with the dead and remember them fondly.

This weekend I started working on the album artwork. This is a process that will take alot of discovery and time. I started painting an image I have seen for the band for months but have not had the time to work on it. I was thinking that it would be just a guide for what would ultimately be a photograph/image manipulation, but I am actually really liking just the painting. I am 3 days into it and have about a week more work I figure until it's ready to judge. At the moment I love it. When I say painting, I mean it's done on the computer in Photoshop with a graphics tablet.

Went to see "The Aviator" last night. Absolutely loved it. Thought it was fantastic, not a damn bit of criticism at all. Leo did a flat-out awesome job with the part. One of my favorite details was that as the film progressed, Scorsese used the color processing look of that time. So that in the beginning of the film when Hughes was young, the blues are all greenish and unreal, like they were in films of that period, and as the time line progresses, the colors become more rich and "Technicolor". Really great.