Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Archives for 2007

A Montage! I’m All Sewn Up.

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Okay, before I can blog about anything else I need to address the pressing issue of a several-day backlog of interesting links.

Have at them.

I’m sure all of you savvy people have seen these already, but just in case you haven’t, via Debbie Millman: Dove has released two videos that play on the image of female beauty in media – first one that follows a supermodel from first call to final poster, and a second that’s a montage of images of feminine beauty. You could argue (as Kottke did) that Dove’s parent company Unilever is a major offender in the image war, but, regardless of whose on which side of the line, both shorts are fantastic.

Layer Tennis is a volley of increasing oneupmanship conducted in consecutive layers of a design file. Coincidental to my prior topic Debbie Millman explains in more detail. Ages ago Jett was the narrator of a round, but I’m not sure that old-skool layer tennis was organized by the same people as this newfangled one that’s drawing links from everyone and their mommyblogger – partially due to killer narrators like the above mentioned pair of Dovebloggers.


You know all those annoying distorted words you have to transcribe for highly discerning websites to prove you’re not a robot? They’re called captchas. However, you could also use the word “captcha” to describe a word or passage in a scanned book that is not definable by OCR software. Are you sensing some synergy? Well, a team at Carnegie Mellon University did – they’re farming out book captchas for websites to use as entrance captchas, logging all of the user generated solutions. The result? Recaptchas, which crowdsources its way to about 3,000 hours of captcha deciphering per day.


Everyday Goddess wants to break into episodic television directing, but she’s having trouble finding a foothold. The means of production for specific industries like this are all sewn up by the major players, and the entrance requirements are often paradoxical – she’s been told that she should direct an independent feature so that she gets noticed. But she doesn’t want to direct features, she wants to direct TELEVISION. So, if you know someone who knows someone, drop her a line.


DIY internet musician BradSucks is seeking volunteers to record themselves singing along with his new tune, “Out of It.” I’m going to try to find a moment to record myself this weekend.


Quicker hits:

The Rum Bar was nominated by several independent auditors as a location for our next upscale bar crawl.

Which of two famous Roger Fenton photos came first – one of a road without cannonballs, and one with? Errol Morris writes two fantastic NYT articles on the topic – one of journalistic inquiry via research and interviews, and a second featuring more direct investigative journalism. A final part pends. Via K.

I’m not a great fan of crying at work, but this article about a Pittsburgh professor with a limited time to live did the trick.

Three links from the unstoppable juggernaut of posts that is Mashable: WikiInvest is a wiki community for stock junkies. TIOTI is short for “Tape It Off the Internet.” YouTube + Bittorent = Virtual Tivo. Great for non-teevee owners who still enjoy a show or two (i.e. me) . For those trying to kickstart their blogging, 10 Free eBooks for Bloggers.

FriendFeed aids you in stalking your friends across multiple websites with social networking components, including FaceBook, Flickr, Amazon, Netflix, and more. Via Make You Go Hmm.

OCDblog: Meetimer tracks how long you surf each website, helping you manage your time (and decrease your procrastination).

How fantasy football is like business. A lot of people are probably going to use the former to inform the latter, but it’s the other way around for me.

Go behind the scenes building the Great River of China. From the same source: Animal Logic is a unique series of photos documenting the installation of animals into museum exhibits.

No more taking calls behind the wheel for PA drivers.

We know I love all things colorful and retro, so I love this set of color photos from World War II.

The Starburst Cluster in NGC 3603 is my favorite Astronomy photo of the day in weeks.

(fin)

Top Down

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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.

This Ain’t a Scene, It’s My Goddamned Home Town

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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.

Endlessly Avoiding Perfection

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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.

A more rabid month looms on the horizon. Oh, and vegetable percussion.

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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.