Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
It figures that I spend three days actually doing interesting stuff and by the time I drag myself home I’m too exhausted to try to explain any of it. That’s sort of the Blogger’s Paradox, isn’t it?
Apparently, being a bachelor involves a lot of drinking, staying out past last call, sleeping at other people’s houses, and being cheery and fully functional the next morning at eight.
In other news, riding around in a convertible does awesome things for my hair.
I could seriously maintain a blog just about Rolling Stone‘s declining credibility.
Despite occasional highlights, I usually have a hard time deciding on my least favorite element of each issue. Is the the bland new layout that completely eschews RS‘s quirky sense of design? Is it the complete lack of attention to cutting edge music or film, often in favor of a retrospective cover article that displaces a much better piece of writing? Is it the seemingly random array of irrelevant cover stars and the unimaginative photographs that document them?
Usually I go with “All of the Above,” but this issue was extra-special – RS’s annual Hot List (usually a summer issue, but I guess Guns & Roses was a more relevant cover topic at the time).
In general the Hot List was filled with boring stuff that I heard about three months ago, but one article especially made me laugh: Hot Scene – Philadelphia. (1MB JPG / 2MB PDF)
Riiiiight.
First of all, we’re certainly not the hottest scene in the country; I’d wager to say we’re not even in the top five. I could have maybe bought this designation if they focused on how World Cafe Live seems to have reinvigorated the city’s local concert scene over the past few years, but they seem to have chosen us based on the logic that our low rent allows musicians to craft their sound without having to hold down a day job.
Um, what? Maybe RS was mostly hanging out in the Great Northeast (thus the highlight of Johnny Brenda’s), but otherwise their low-rent thesis is pretty much an outright lie.
Also, though they ever-so-briefly mention AKA – a legitimate hot-pick – they prominently feature aphoto of The Last Drop coffee shop, which was already old and lame ten years ago when Gina stopped playing open mics there due to all of the creepy men that would flirt with her if she did a Neil Young cover.
Aside from the dozens of other shops they could have highlighted in Philadelphia proper, the obvious choice would seem to be Milkboy Coffee in Ardmore, which is as unavoidable at The Point was a few years ago, but with even more music.
In the 90s The Last Drop was full to the brim with pseudo-artistic posers and the trash (and high school students) who were desperately in love with them. As actual music fans we didn’t usually fit in.
Maybe that’s just the point; ten years later and that’s Rolling Stone’s target audience to a tee, isn’t it? I mean, we’re talking about a magazine with Kid Rock on its cover.
Heading East recently shared a theory that each artist has only a single great “story” inside of them waiting to be released. A particular quote really resonated:
Some artists escape by fashioning alternate versions of their story, never actually telling it perfectly, always leaving a bit of mystery in the center, always working their way around and around the one truth they know, but maybe these artists are doomed too as they will always fall short…
Though I don’t agree completely with the one-story-only theory, I do believe that each artist has a limited amount of ways to portray any single given archetype within their sphere of art, with each attempt a facet of a perfected portrayal. As alluded to in the quote, the artist has a choice (though not always a conscious one) of spending a lifetime drafting an incomplete version of their truth, or of crafting one version that is crystalline in its perfection.
I certainly feel that way about songwriting. I used to specialize in a particularly jilted sort of breakup song that I spent most of my time writing and re-writing. Suddenly, early in 2005 i wrote “Regrets,” and I was suddenly no longer bound to tap and retap that archetype for my material. Since then my songs have expressed a much wider array of emotions – I freed myself by closing a door on a particular story.
Penning that perfect story is a frightening concept; what if you finish it too soon? What if you don’t have any other important stories to tell? Yet, as daunting as those questions are, if you let them handicap your creativity you’ll never attain that perfect story. And that means you’ll never get to try your hand at its sequel.
In four weeks the second annual National Blog Posting Month will begin, wherein you pledge to post at least once a day for all of November for no reason at all.
This year participation is being managed through social network Ning, where I am curating a music bloggers group.
I also plan to offer some manner of prize since I won one last year, but I have not yet decided on anything suitably awesome.
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Ethicurean posted the truly brilliant Vegetable Orchestra, who perform music solely on instruments made of vegetables. Words escape me; please refer to moving pictures, below:
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When I saw Bettye Lavette @ Bonnaroo in 2006 I described her as a bloodthirsty Motown praying mantis whose goal it was to devour the entire audience before the end of her set. Yeah, Bonnaroo was weird, but it’s an apt description considering how long she was in industry exile; she came back hungry.
Read a great Stylus Magazine interview with Bettye about her new covers disc, wherein she is backed by Drive-By Truckers. Link via Largehearted Boy, who also offers a legal listen to some of the tracks from Scene of the Crime
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The Strand offers books by the foot, a service providing decorative book collections in any style and subject. Prices range from $10- to $400- per foot. A cool gift for your bibliophile friends, and a fantastic resource for set dressing; at $300/ft the Victorian era books are rather stunning. Via Kottke.
K-link part deux: Do you need 8 oz. of dehydrated strawberry powder? You can buy it, and other molecular gastronomy fixins, at L’Epicerie. After you’re done salivating, hit up this exhaustive blog post for info and resources.
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Then there were quick hits.
46 tax deductions for bloggers. Um, hells yeah. Via Akkams.
One time in college Elise did a whole photo project where she painted me with light. If she was here I could tell you the whole story about how her professor was friends with the originator of the technique. In any event, if you have a camera with long exposure time and a tripod you can do it yourself.
More photography: All panoramic pictures, all the time. Want to shoot your own? Read up on Gigapan, an automated robotic tripod. Latter two links from Contentious, former via Mashable; a great feed (if you can keep up with 20+ posts a day).
If your phone and internet errands are swallowing up your free time you should look into outsourcing to an offshore personal assistant; sounds like they’re worth the money if you have the right sort of tasks on your to-do list.
I don’t know that I realized New York City was quite so tall over a century ago.
Free iTunes Songs is a handy RSS feed that links you to all of iTunes free content, including the weekly free song downloads.
Second Rotation is an online pawn shop that pays you for your used consumer electronics up front, saving you the hassle of dealing with an actual buyer. As to where all the items go, the site is a bit cagey. I have one word for you: gnomes. Via recent daily fixation Unclutterer.
Finally, Torrez was very nearly my first favorite blogger (and, not only because he ran Power Bloggers). He’s back, and recently posted some simple advice on increasing blog traffic. After a month of following his own advice his Alexa rank is up ~200k. Probably advice worth taking.
(1) Elise bought me a gift certificate for a pickup replacement on my primary electric guitar as a birthday gift, which is perfect timing, as Gina and I were already plotting on evolving Arcati Crisis into the electric realm over the course of the next few months.
My guitar is an Epiphone copy of a Gibson 335, and after several years of playing it and digesting online reviews it would seem that the only non-esoteric detail separating my guitar from the equivalent Gibson is the style/tone of the pickups (and also the nut).
My original birthday gift plan was to outfit my guitar exactly like a brand-new 335 – with two Gibson 57 Classic humbuckers. However, at Arcati Crisis’s Tin Angel gig I got into a conversation with our friend Chris about the possibility of buying two different types of pickups so my neck tone is differentiated from bridge.
And, um, I am not quite rock enough to know anything else about this life-altering decision.
I spent a few days researching my various indie-rock heroes, but none of them has a distinct enough setup for me to emulate. Also, I can’t turn up anything on the guitar rig of Garbage ax-slinger Duke Erickson (he being ostensibly the reason I bought this particular guitar in the first place). However, I did locate the eminently informative Guitar Player Gear Guide blog.
Do any of you wonderful people know anything about this? I have to drop my guitar off at the store on Saturday if I have any hope of getting it back before the next Arcati Crisis gig.
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(2) I want a WordPress plugin that will insert illustrated initial letters into my posts, both automatically and on-demand. Bonus points if they are illuminated.
I know enough PHP to be a minor threat when it comes to WordPress, but this particular concept is out of my realm because it involves live rejiggering of text as its being called out of the ether of my database.
Anyone?
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(3a) After an inexplicable one week delay the new PJ Harvey disc, White Chalk, came out yesterday. It’s been billed as PJ’s piano album, but that only tells a fraction of the story. It’s really more like her indie, piano-based, acoustic, English-Appalachian folk record. Sort of. Full review forthcoming.
(3b) Also inexplicable: Bruce Springsteen‘s lead single (“Radio Nowhere“) is one of the catchiest songs I’ve heard in months, and the production is all tight and sparkly and curiously “Since U Been Gone” sounding.
A quick sample spin through the rest of his newly released Magic yields similar results on at least three others songs, leading me to (for the first time ever) want to buy a Bruce Springsteen CD in a bad way. But, then I’m like, dude, you so do not like Bruce in any way, shape, or form. In my youth he was relegated to my mother’s forbidden trinity of vocal idiosyncrasies – Bruce, Bob, and Neil.
Even having disposed of a few of those systematically programmed prejudices (e.g., I do not ridiculously eschew middle Beatles) I can’t seem to succumb to the Magic of Asbury Park’s favorite son. I even tried paying for a copy with Elise’s credit card to try to alleviate some of the hard-coded guilt, but I couldn’t bring myself to go through with it.
Maybe if i just buy it track by track from iTunes I can avoid any imperative towards self-immolation my mother may have embedded in my unconscious psyche in my infancy through a series of flash cards.
(3c) OMG, I forgot to mention the best part of last week’s happy (six) hour(s): Melon is going to go to the Kelly Clarkson concert with me. Oh yessss.
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(End Note) Not only does me + Gina = awesome rock stars, but as of a few minutes ago I completed the first draft of a standard notation transcription of one of our songs, complete with guitar tabs and harmony.
I cannot express to you the undue amount of excitement this is causing me, a major sheet music fetishist.
Sheet music! Of our song! Necessary because we forgot how to play it!
(Or, more accurately, because we recorded it in one night for SongFight, so it never really existed as a song that we could play together in a physical space (though I believe we once attempted it at a Lyndzapalooza).)
Alright, enough chatter.
