Crushing Krisis

The Newest Oldest Blog In New Zealand

Archives for August 2005

Happy Birthday To This

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I have been blogging for over a fifth of my life.

Purely as a statement, it’s meaningless. Abstract. People will tell you that you’ll be asleep for a third of your life, or waiting in line for a seventh of it, but you won’t suddenly re-evaluate the way you’ve been living your life. People don’t find god in an attempt to save themselves from a seventh-of-a-life of waiting in line.

I have been writing this personal web log for five years. I turn twenty-four in less than a month. I have been blogging for over a fifth of my life.

That’s a little more succinct. It works in numbers that you may be able to grasp – you know what “five years” feels like, and you either remember what it was like to be twenty-four or you can imagine what you want to be doing when you will be.

Or maybe you can’t do either. Perhaps you’ve never done anything for five whole years – not live in one place, or date one person Perhaps twenty-four is just another meaningless milestone in the blithe fiction that is your imagined future – so you can’t relate to that either.

Also, there are the concepts of “personal web log” and “blogging.” What do they even mean?

I have been writing this personal web log (an internet-based, sometimes diary-like, irregularly updated collection of thoughts, feelings, links, pictures, music, and other online errata) for five years (one year longer than a US president’s single term in office, half of a decade, less than a third of the the time The Simpsons has been on the air). I turn twenty-four (twice as old as a twelve-year-old, one year shy of a quarter century, three years younger than Joplin, Hendrix, and Cobain were when they died) in less than a month. I have been blogging (“blog” n., short for “web log,” thus “blogging,” v., the act of creating and maintaining a blog) for over a fifth of my life.

Is that explanation thourough enough? How else can I more succinctly quantify this peculiar obsession to you? It is at once less and more than keeping a diary, more and less than a simple concatenation of thoughts I have and pages I view. It started out as a place to say something without editing, but soon evolved into a more oblique window into my life complete with its own voyeristic audience of hundreds. Sometime after that it became about documenting moments in time, snapshot stories of misadventures freed from the banality that surrounded them.

All of this attempted definition begs the question: what is it now? And: how can I hope to quantify something that I can’t even define? This is no longer my occupation, or my pre-occupation. Sometimes I only write once in a month, and other times I have a week’s worth of sentiments tied together with a common string. In the past this was the central repository for all internet statements, the me-archive. Now I sometimes want to publish a thought or a piece of writing that has no place here.

Ulimately, I have run out of pithy, charming, defining things to say on August 26th. August 26th now looms less as a day of celebration, and more of a mandatory mark on my calendar to remind me to remember, and to try to remind you, what this means to me. The date has become less like the birthday of a child over whom I dote and obsess and more akin to the wedding anniversary of a second-cousin – to whom I periodically send a card.

In either case, I thank you so much for being an inexorable, impossible-to-define part of this half-decade-passed … for being the eyes and ears receiving these words and sounds … for being a friend, even if you are a silent one. I may not be able to articulate my definition of what you’ve been consuming, but it couldn’t be whatever it is without you to observe it.

So, thank you. And, Happy Birthday To This.

Looking Up to Something

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Having never had siblings I always feel a little awkward with Elise’s brother. On one hand I completely identify with him, because he’s dragged around to adult-stuff all the time and all he really wants to be doing is reading or playing a video game. On the other, what could some twenty-something year-old have said or done for me to cheer me up on all of those occasions of my youth?

Elise and I brainstorm sometimes about finding him some cool teenagery hobby; she had batted around drumming and web design for a while, but neither really went anywhere. So, imagine our surprise last night when Elise’s mother remarked as we approached her truck, “You’ll have to squeeze into the front; the bass is in the back.” Apparently Elise’s little brother (who, incidentally, is now about as tall as we are) got an electric bass over the summer.

When we returned to our house the four us us sat around chatting and catching up and, much as I’ll play guitar through any conversation just for the sake of playing guitar, out came the bass. However, it was out of tune from bouncing around in the back seat. Tuning isn’t a problem in our house, considering Elise and I are both in-tune-freaks and own four tuners between the two of us.

While her brother proceeded to tune up and noodle I fetched a guitar with broken strings and fixed it up. Once I was restrung I began to quietly follow along with his noodling. I thought I recognized the song, but I wasn’t sure. Not wanting to embarrass him, I waited until Elise and her mother headed upstairs to examine something in the bathroom.

“Is that ‘Seven Nation Army’?”

“Yeah, but internet tabs are always wrong,” he grumped.

“Yeah, they suck. It’s better to trust a site that specializes in one artist, especially for bass, because random people never really know what positions or techniques a certain player tends to use. Do you know what Occam’s Razor is?

He gave a half-wince of understanding.

“It’s the idea that the simplest explanation is almost always the best one. So, the simplest way for that bass player to play the song is probably the right way to play it.”

(Elise, passing through (or was it later?) commented: “Yeah, like Dave Matthews will always play something in in the most obscure possible way, but Ani will will do it the easiest.” I smirked, and inexplicably failed to also include Joni Mitchell in our comparison.)

“Well, let me hear it.”

He did, and it became apparent that there was a slightly easier and more-correct way to play it. And, since Jack White isn’t necessary a king of bass-playing technique, I didn’t really have qualms about changing up the positions to make it a little simpler.

“Hey, hold on, I have that record.”

Over to the CD collection I bounced, and back I came with Elephant. We listened to the song and i immediately realized that his riff was transposed by a fourth (effectively, a string) – easily fixed. And, then, ten minutes after playing a bad internet transcription in the wrong key he was playing along to the song! I pointed out the quick walkup at the end of the verses and then improvised some chords to accompany him (since the whole song is almost all bassline and guitar solo).

Elise and her mother came down at about this point, both looking somewhat bemused at the White Stripes jam that has sprung up in our living room. Later he told me the other song he was learning was “Money.” I told him I had that too, and that I was impressed, because it’s notoriously in a weird time signature. I put it on, but just listened; my brain doesn’t have the higher level functions required to count upbeat guitar stabs in 7/8. He was pretty good at it.

(Aside: Elise, her brother, and their sister all have ridiculous natural musical aptitude, which always makes me wish I had grown up in more musical family. More musical, I mean, than lip-synching Madonna into hairbrushes and sporadically breaking out into “Let The Good Times Roll” in the kitchen, both of which traits came from my father’s side.)

I’m really happy to have found a connection with Elise’s brother, and even happier to have gotten to be the cool older kid instead of the unspeakably geeky one, if only for once. Before he left I tabbed out the version we worked out and slipped it into his bag along with a copy of Elephant and White Blood Cells.

I bet I would have been a cool older brother.

Not In Love

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Here’s some news: Fiona Apple shit all over her wonderful unreleased Extraordinary Machine so that she could have something banal and common.

Yes, it’s true. If you don’t believe me, go listen to a clip of the OFFICIAL version of Not In Love here. I can’t hold up a Jon Brion UNRELEASED clip of Not In Love because Sony has sued them all off of the internet so you would have to resort to Torrent if you’d like to hear one, but what you have to understand is that there was this gorgeous little cello riff in the background that sortof spat back at the little piano rumble, and she sounded so playful, and little violins swooped in so that this bed of strings caught her every phrase. And there was NONE of this SISSY cymbal ride crap, no drums were required, and NO GUITARS either, for that matter. Not on this song, and not anywhere on the album, and its lack was a beautiful refreshing thing – like drinking beautiful clean water from a very deep well. But, what has Fiona given us? Nasty, ugly, terrible ELECTRIC guitar spread like a thick coating of shit all over her tremendously large chorus chords, guitar so nasty, ugly and terrible that you CANNOT HEAR how the bottom notes are clanging against themselves slightly out of tune because that’s how pianos get way down there when you play big chords hard.

She erased the charm from the most charming song i’ve heard in months. For reasons i cannot discern Fiona HERSELF, not SONY, not any other evil CONGLOMERATE of people, but FIONA threw out Jon Brion’s gorgeous arrangement in exchange for an exercise in utter banality. I listen to a beautiful song almost every day for four months and she wrecks it.

I’m not in love, because I can’t stop falling out. If this is what the other eleven tracks hold in store, I honestly hope Fiona’s re-recorded Extraordinary Machine tanks like a record has never tanked before. It would be her just reward; she looked the goddamned gift horse in the mouth. NO ONE gets two amazing versions of the same album. Look at Let It Be. Perfection is not meant to be fucked with. I will personally distribute Jon Brion versions to EVERY PERSON I KNOW if that’s what it takes. No one should have to pay money for her silly retool of a so tangible, so personal, so charmingly different original when they could have that instead.

Do you want one?

All We Owe, We Owe Her

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Work was as productive today as work can be with Ace of Base’s hit single “Don’t Turn Around” lodged in your brain for eight hours.

My title changed as of yesterday to better represent the incredibly intangible, incredibly invaluable project management service i continue to provide for our company. What’s funny is that i thought my job change would actually reduce the ridiculously large scope of my projects by honing my attention onto more specific, more completeable projects. In fact, I’ve actually tripled my scope just in the last day, and it looks like tomorrow will add some more scope to the pile.

In the wake of the change, i am left wondering if I love what I do. I loved what i did when I started this job, and i still love what my department does. But, do i really love being a project coordinator?

Regardless of the answer to that question, i definitely stopped loving what i was doing sometime between Autumn and Spring. Everything about my job and the people i did it for became twisted so that it was completely unrecognizable. Suddenly, work became the null-time that it is for too many of my co-workers – nothing remarkable or exciting or energizing. i liked what i was doing, but not the reasons i was being made to do it.

Now that’s all been resolved, and i’m doing project management for good, healthy reasons – and learning more about it every day. And, i do enjoy project management – it’s something i have a natural bent towards, to an extent. Yet, it’s so far removed from what i went to school for, and what i came here intending to do, that i am beginning to wonder if i’ll ever love it the way i want to love a job.

What am I interested in anyway?

I Don’t Know What I Hope

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We’ve experienced a bout of radio-silence here in July because I was preparing for a role in what turned out to be a sold out production of Kurt Vonnegut’s Happy Birthday, Wanda June. It amazed me on many levels. As it turns out, I still can act, and not so terribly, either. Also, who would have thought that the girl I threw peanuts at in the lunchroom nearly a dozen years ago would be producing and directing me in a play where she stars as my mother. Certainly not i. In a cool turn of events, we got advance coverage in City Paper without a sneak preview, even if they plagiarized some web sites for the blurb.

Work continues to be work. I moved to a new position as of today. Work was the same (work), only verifying what I had already guessed: life is not your title, it’s what you make of it.

I have come back around to Gawker, the snide NY Scene slash celeb gossip internet rag. I don’t know why I have come back around to it. I do know why i have come back around to it – they were covered in RS, which I fetishize, and their EIC Jessica Coen is sorta hot (not pictured in the web article) (wow, lends a lot of credibility to my opinion as a Journalism major, eh). Yes, this means I’m only about a year-and-a-half behind the prominent web-trends. I really need to work some good individual weblogs back into that. Time to hook up Thunderbird’s RSS feeds.

Not sure what else to say, really. I have now been doing this for 1822 days, which means in about half a year I’ll have been doing it for 2000. That’s a lot of days to do something. More on that later this week.