Every couple years, I look through a bunch of stuff that I've written to see what I was feeling at the time. It's weird, I can write something simple like "haven't had anything crazy happen in a while. I'm bored. Hooray!" and can decipher that I was mildly depressed at the time and can remember other things that were going on then that I didn't write about. I'm glad that I have this deep understanding of myself. At least I have no delusions about my predicament.

Also, I almost feel like I'm spending so much time working, and that time is moving much faster than I like it to, that the timeframe between events is much larger than I remember it being. In my mind it's the end of June, not the end if July. What does this mean? Not sure, it doesn't feel like I'm overexerting myself, maybe just mismanaging my time.

Finally, I'm reworking my website (yes, again) and will probably merge this very livejournal into my new website. Nothing against livejournal, they've hosted my dismal rantings for over four years now, but it just feels like nobody reads this crap. Plus myspace is the new hotness. This way I'll be able to manage one blog with everything I want on my own server (brianbernas.com/blog). You'll still be able to go there and post comments if your little heart desires and I'll leave my livejournal active for as long as is humanly possible. This isn't the end, I'm just right around the corner.

Since I never really posted about the trip to Nashville since I've been back, and I can't remember too much about what happened when I was there, here is a quick rundown of the guitar players that I met while I was working on the documentary.

Stephen Housden: Host of the program. He's been playing guitar since he was 10 and has become a master of worldly styles. Most notoriously known as the guitar player for The Little River Band.

Muriel Anderson: Incredible classical guitarist with a very special whimsical style.

Bob Margolin: Blues guitar player who was a member of Muddy Waters' band from 1973 - 1980.

Brent Mason: Top session guitarist presently in Nashville, TN. Session guitarist are players who are paid to sit in on recording sessions with bands and help them out with songs that are being developed. These people write most of the music, while the band takes credit for it.

Tom Bresh: Son of Merle Travis.

Phil Keaggy: Leader of the band Glass Harp. Incredible loop performer.

Reggie Young: Session player who's famous for writing riffs for Elvis' "In the Ghetto", and "Suspicious Minds", along with "Son of a Preacher Man", and "Drift Away".

Scottie Moore: Played lead guitar with Elvis right from the beginning.

Duanne Eddy: Inventor of the "twang rock" sound. You've heard his stuff, look it up.

James Burton: Widely regarded as one of the most influential rock guitarists of all time. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001.

Jack Pearson: Guitarist for the Allman Brothers Band and Jimmy Buffett.

Fred Newell: I'm told he has played live on TV more than any guitarist living today.

P.F. Sloan: While sweeping floors at Capitol Records, he convinced the powers that be to bring The Beatles and The Rolling Stones to American audiences. Then he wrote "Eve of Destruction" and "Secret Agent Man."

Steve Cropper: Member of Booker T. and the M.G.'s and The Blues Brothers Band.

So what did I get out of it? Now when I listen to oldies or classic rock every ten songs I can say "Hey, I met the guy who plays guitar on this song!"

Tomorrow, Tuesday June 6th, 2006 I boldly go farther west than I have ever gone before. Nashville, TN. This excursion has a lot to do with a documentary that we are shooting on the guitar players who changed the face of rock n' roll. It should be a blast. Nashville to Memphis, then maybe to St. Louis, then Philadelphia. Take a few weeks off to do some actual work, then maybe off to LA, then New York, London and I think Pluto was on the list at one point, but has been scrapped due to the fact that Pluto is frickin' cold.

I should be back from the first leg of this adventure on June 17th. but we'll see how that goes.

On November 3rd I had a dream. I was destined to write and direct my own short movie. I didn't have a script, I didn't have a cast, I didn't have a clue what the movie would be about, only that it would be awesome! I exploded every idea I had in my noggin to explore it's movie potential and when the brain matter settled and my sinuses had cleared I had the perfect plot. The quest to survive in a food crisis. I wrote the 9 page script in two days and gathered a group of people I knew who said they would be my actors for free. Could they act? I didn't care they were working for free.

November 10th was the start of principle photography. In one week I had gone from a simple idea to actually shooting footage. Absolute proof of what a person can achieve when motivated. After several wild 5-hour weekend shoots. I had the bulk of the movie done. I spent up to 15 hours per day editing and adding sound effects.

Knowing nothing about music arrangement and composition, I knew that I was the right man to be put in charge of creating the original score for my movie. At least I knew that I would be cheap.

Last night I debuted my life's work to 3 out of the four actors in my movie and nobody complained.

So I present to you, the general public, my directorial debut:

Nothing Good

The hardest part about making a short film is composing the music. Especially when you know next to nothing about music composition. But someone has to do it.

Today the redesign for our company website went live. Check it out to see the work that I do: www.AVIOProductions.com. The content of the site is still under development. The services page is bound to change about 5 times over the next week, but things like that are to be expected.

Now I need to update my resume and my own website.

I broke the head off my tripod tonight. It was kinda fun. I haven't even been drinking. I noticed it was lose and tightened it up...too much...too much to the point that it became unattached. Not the first time it happened either, my brother did the same thing a couple years ago to another tripod. Neither of them were of excellent quality and now I have a reason to get a better tripod with a good fluid head. I'll probably get a Manfrotto 351MVB2K since I've read some great things about that setup. I love to waste money!

So now I've started using Skype. All of you fellow Skype users can contact me at my very clever username of brianbernas. My contact list is currently a lonely place.

If you aren't a techie and don't know what Linux is stop reading.

For the rest of you here is what I'm doing tonight. My Debian machine's kernel has taken a huge dump and my root filesystem, which is xfs, somehow didn't survive whatever happened. I was trying to get Xorg to run better and stop giving me errors about font paths. A screen lock and no way to ssh into the system (I disabled that for some reason) forced me to do a hard reboot. Never came back to a login prompt, just a kernel panic. So I thought this would be a good time to try something different since being a Debian fanboy has worn out it's cool. Now I'm off to try out Ubuntu. How much damage can I do?

Principle photography is done.

Woohoo!

So we started on December 10th and Finished on February 25th. Not bad for a 12 minute short movie, huh?